From Protest to Dissent: Wartime Activism and the Founding of the ACLU

2020 ◽  
pp. 163-192
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Critical Time ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Free Press ◽  
Global Democracy ◽  
Liberty Of Conscience ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union

In June 1917, Congress passed the Espionage Act, suspending basic civil liberties in the name of wartime national security. Suddenly, peace work seemed dangerously untenable, even to some in movement leadership. Nevertheless, the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) voted to test the new wartime laws, campaigning to prevent a draft and devising a new category of military exemption based on conscience. But continuing tensions threatened to rupture the AUAM from the inside. Lillian Wald and Paul Kellogg wanted to resign. Eastman proposed an eleventh-hour solution: create a single, separate legal bureau for the maintenance of fundamental rights in wartime—free press, free speech, freedom of assembly, and liberty of conscience. The new bureau became the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). However, Eastman’s hopes to shape and oversee that work, keeping it focused on internationalism and global democracy, were not to be. The birth of her child sidelined her while Roger Baldwin, arriving at a critical time for the country and the organization, took charge and made the bureau his own.

scholarly journals The Sex Side of Civil Liberties:United States v. Dennettand the Changing Face of Free Speech

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 325-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura M. Weinrib
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
The Body ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
Sexual Autonomy ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

It was the policy of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) during the 1920s to contest only those obscenity regulations that were “relied upon to punish persons for their political views.” So stated a 1928 ACLU bulletin, reiterating a position to which the organization had adhered since its formation in 1920. For the majority of the ACLU's executive board, “political views” encompassed the struggle for control of the government and the economy, but not of the body. The early ACLU was not interested in defending avant-garde culture, let alone sexual autonomy.

“The Injustice of Internment”

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, liberal Protestants leveraged their influence among officials in the War Relocation Authority to launch their most powerful attack to date on anti-Japanese racial discrimination. Through the Committee on National Security and Fair Play, they challenged the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066 and strategized methods to ensure the quick release of Japanese Americans held without trial. With the help of allies such as the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the American Council on Race Relations, and the Council on Civic Unity, liberal Protestants developed plans to ensure the long-term protection of Japanese American civil liberties in the decades following the war.

Street Fight and Media Fight

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-109
Author(s):  
Donald W. Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Federal Courts ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Police Powers ◽  
Legal Questions ◽  
The Media ◽  
Municipal Police ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

This chapter traces the political and media battle that unfolded 1937-38 over Jersey City’s denial of public speaking permits to the Committee for Industrial Organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, and supporters, including a few women. It shows how the media dominated popular understanding of the controversy by projecting rival discourses of democracy versus dictatorship and law and order versus subversive communism, temporarily obscuring legal questions about municipal police powers, labor law, and free speech that federal courts were on the verge of deciding. The chapter illustrates how the struggle intensified. Mayor Hague staged extravagant anticommunist “Americanism” rallies against the CIO with broad local support, while an outside pro-CIO left-labor coalition denounced Hague as a dictator in Popular Front language of antifascism and working-class Americanism.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
Primary Identification ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union ◽  
Compensation Law ◽  
International League

Crystal Eastman drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yet today, her legacy is ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. Why? Eastman was an intersectional thinker and activist, who bridged social movements, linking shared experiences of inequality under one emancipatory rubric. Yet politics and interpersonal alliances kept asking her to choose: one issue, one organization, one primary identification. Expansive, straddling, disquieting to dominant perspectives and institutional rank, Eastman fell through the main planks of historical memory.

Crystal Eastman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Aronson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Equal Rights Amendment ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Family Balance ◽  
The Social ◽  
National Woman's Party ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
American Union

Crystal Eastman was a central figure in many of the defining social movements of the twentieth century—labor, feminism, internationalism, free speech, peace. She drafted America’s first serious workers’ compensation law. She helped found the National Woman’s Party and is credited as coauthor of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). She helped found the Woman’s Peace Party—today, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)—and the American Union against Militarism. She copublished the Liberator magazine. And she engineered the founding the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Eastman worked side by side with national and international suffrage leaders, renowned Progressive reformers and legislators, birth control advocates, civil rights champions, and revolutionary writers and artists. She traveled with a transatlantic crowd of boundary breakers and innovators. And in virtually every arena she entered, she was one of the most memorable women known to her allies and adversaries alike. Yet today, her legacy is oddly ambiguous. She is commemorated, paradoxically, as one of the most neglected feminist leaders in American history. This first full-length biography recovers the revealing story of a woman who attained rare political influence and left a thought-provoking legacy in ongoing struggles. The social justice issues she cared about—gender equality and human rights, nationalism and globalization, political censorship and media control, worker benefits and family balance, and the monumental questions of war, sovereignty, force, and freedom—remain some of the most consequential questions of our own time.

Free Speech

Contexts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-9
Author(s):  
Alisha Kirchoff ◽  
Fabio Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Free Speech ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union

In this article, Alisha Kirchoff and Fabio Rojas interview Nadeen Strossen, former President of the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Civil Liberties Lobby: a Comparative Analysis

1975 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 415-443 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Benewick
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
National Council ◽  
Research Activities ◽  
Due Process Of Law ◽  
American Civil Liberties Union ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Rights Issues

A DISTINCTIVE CHARACTERISTIC OF BOTH THE AMERICAN CIVIL Liberties Union and the National Council for Civil Liberties (hereafter ACLU and NCCL) is their attempt to be comprehensive in coverage. Both organizations are concerned with spectrums of civil liberties questions and civil rights issues at different levels of discourse and practice. These may range from the promotion and protection of freedom of speech and assembly as fundamental rights to their particularist application in regard to demonstrators and demonstrations, from insuring due process of law to seeking equality before the law, from advocating citizens' rights for more information from government to protecting their rights to privacy. They may also be involved in issues that are not concerned with civil liberties, a priori, but have implications for civil liberties. On any given question, there may be other civil liberties spokesmen with whom they may cooperate, compete or confront. In carrying out their brief both the ACLU and the NCCL engage in public campaigns, litigation, lobbying, case work, direct representations, educational and research activities.

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