ON ROGER BALDWIN

Baldwin was the founder of the ACLU and in the early part of his life, he was a socialist. This fact is sometimes used by the wingnuts to attack the ACLU as a subversive, anti-American group. To correct that misconception, here are some snippets from a biographical sketch of Baldwin:

The FBI's chief, J. Edgar Hoover, despite an apparently amicable relationship with Baldwin, ordered that an already existing file be maintained on the ACLU director. This occurred despite the fact that Baldwin's ideological stance underwent an alteration starting in the mid-thirties, the byproduct of personal and political developments.

This was the same period when Baldwin became increasingly disturbed by events in the Soviet Union, where purge trials were being undertaken, and by politically troublesome accusations leveled at the ACLU by the House Committee on un-American Activities.

Baldwin became less happy with the Popular Front approach and concerned about the very existence of the ACLU after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in August 1939. The following spring, in an effort to stave off criticisms of the organization and the cause he had devoted much of his adulthood to, Baldwin orchestrated a campaign to revise the ACLU charter. Henceforth, those affiliated with totalitarian organizations would not be allowed to serve on the ACLU board.

The immediate target was the former-Wobbly and present Communist Party member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. An organizational "trial" of Flynn ensued, resulting in her ouster and establishing a pattern for anti-communist policies and programs that flourished during the Cold War.

In 1947 General Douglas MacArthur arranged for Baldwin to serve as a civil liberties consultant in Japan; he also visited Korea during his Asian stay.

For the next several years, Baldwin sought to work for international human rights, producing a volume, A New Slavery, which condemned "the inhuman communist police state tyranny, forced labor."