American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)

Significance: This group, the most important civil liberties organization in the United States, uses the courts to protect the rights of controversial and ordinary individuals.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), founded January 18, 1920, has its origins in the movement to protect the right of pacifists to protest American entrance into World War I. The basic objective of the organization is to monitor and protect the constitutional rights of all American citizens and groups. Although the ACLU has earned notoriety by defending unpopular organizations and being involved in controversial court cases, it has over the decades taken thousands of routine cases as well, from the firing of a public librarian for refusing to remove a book from her shelves to the right of employees to join a labor union.

Methods

The ACLU uses the courts to achieve its objectives. Although it often petitions state courts, its main course of action takes place in the federal courts. Almost all its cases bear on constitutional issues, and some have led to landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Its critics accuse the ACLU of having a specific political agenda, but the organization claims to be neutral in politics and, in fact, has championed individuals and organizations from both extremes of the political spectrum. It has worked to overturn laws banning the Communist Party and defended the right of Nazis to march in Jewish neighborhoods. It has forced local communities to dismantle religious displays and defended the right of police officers to join the Ku Klux Klan and the ultraconservative John Birch Society. The organization has thus been strongly chastised by both the Left and Right. In general, however, the organization clearly has been part of left-of-center politics in the United States.

The ACLU’s single purpose is an uncompromisingly rigid protection of civil liberties for all, no matter how unpopular, outrageous, or despicable the cause or individual. Its most controversial cases are the standard by which it measures its success. For the ACLU, opposition to all censorship means defending the rights of pornographers. Opposition to illegal searches means opposition to unannounced police sweeps of public housing to root out drug traffickers. Strict separation of church and state means absolute opposition to the display of any religious symbol on public grounds or documents.

Structure

The ACLU is a private organization of volunteers whose membership in 2015 numbered about 500,000. The organization relies on more than four thousand volunteer lawyers for its litigation; they are the heart of the organization. Its paid staff consists of fewer than two hundred people. Besides its two national offices in New York and Washington, D.C., it has affiliates in all fifty states and Puerto Rico.

History

The positions of the ACLU have evolved over the decades of its existence. It has not always opposed censorship or the separation of church and state so rigidly. Some of its issues, such as the right of women to have abortions, have reflected changes in society rather than initiated them.

The ACLU was born out of the United States’ entry into World War I. Wartime hysteria and widespread popular support for American participation led to the censorship of opposition to the war and harassment or imprisonment for individuals opposing American entry. To protect the right of free speech, members of the pacifist American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) formed the Civil Liberties Board (CLB). Because the AUAM and its branch CLB publicly embraced the radical left, a number of members resigned and formed the nonpartisan National Civil Liberties Board (NCLB).

The NCLB was unable to fight successfully the curtailment of civil liberties during the war or during the postwar Red Scare when the government harassed and prosecuted thousands of citizens suspected of harboring Marxist and other left-wing ideas. In 1920, its members created the restructured ACLU under the leadership of Roger Baldwin, a Boston attorney, who had been the guiding spirit of the NCLB. The broad base of the organization and its commitment to consider all violations of civil liberties distinguished it from other existing civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Anti-Defamation League, founded by B’nai B’rith.

Over the next seven decades the ACLU was involved in some of the most renowned cases in American jurisprudence and issues in American society—the Scopes “monkey” trial, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the rights of conscientious objectors, the Smith and McCarran Anti-Communist Acts, the Scottsboro case, abortion rights, antiwar protests, and many others.

The Skokie March Case

The organization’s most unpopular cause among its membership was the defense of the 1976 proposed march by the American Nazi Party in Skokie, Illinois, a largely Jewish suburb of Chicago. The party planned the march after the city of Chicago refused them a permit for a rally there. Skokie also denied a parade permit on the grounds that it would cause a public nuisance. The ACLU took up the Nazis’ petition, and although the controversy was resolved without a march through the suburb, the championing of the Nazis’ cause split the organization almost to the point of extinction. This was not the first time the organization took on a case on behalf of the Nazis, but the reaction of its membership, the overwhelming majority of whom are leftists and many of whom are Jews, was unprecedented. The union suffered a 15 percent drop in membership renewal and found itself with a half-million-dollar deficit. The ACLU reorganized and cut its staff, and new leadership moved into position. In the years following Skokie, a new conservative era in the United States, the organization faced the issues of the day: abortion rights, gay rights, the rights of sufferers of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and the war on drugs. It became a favorite whipping boy of the Republican Party, but its function as the protector of the individual against the conforming impulse of society revitalized it as the country’s leading civil rights organization.

Bibliography

Donohue, William. The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union. New Brunswick: Transaction, 1985. Print.

Gibson, James L. and Richard D. Bingham. Civil Liberties and Nazis: The Skokie Free-Speech Controversy. New York: Praeger, 1985. Print.

Hamlin, David. The Nazi/Skokie Conflict. Boston: Beacon, 1980. Print.

Irons, Peter. The Courage of Their Convictions. New York: Free P, 1988. Print.

Kutulas, Judy. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. Print.

Murphy, Paul L. World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States. New York: Norton, 1975. Print.

Neier, Aryeh. Defending My Enemy. New York: Dutton, 1979. Print.

Neier, Aryeh. The International Human Rights Movement: A History. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.

Reitman, Alan, ed. The Pulse of Freedom: American Liberties, 1920-1970’s. New York: Norton, 1975. Print.

Walker, Samuel. In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.

Walker, Samuel. Presidents and Civil Liberties from Wilson and Obama: A Story of Poor Custodians. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.

Wheeler, Leigh Ann. How Sex Became a Civil Liberty. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.