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

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.

“Marriage under Two Roofs”: Feminism and Family Life

Crystal Eastman ardently pursued equalitarian feminism but also asserted that feminism must have three parts: politics and public policy; wages and the workplace; and—the distinctive final portion—the private domain of love, marriage, and the family. She believed millions of women like herself experienced acute feminist concerns not merely in the battle for economic opportunity in the workforce, or political representation and voice, but also from conflicts between their desire for the rewards of life beyond the home and for the rewards of family as well. She pursued this missing policy analysis for the rest of her life, advocating birth control in the feminist program, the endowment of motherhood, and feminist child-rearing and education. In unpublished articles, she also explored wages for wives and single motherhood by choice. All the while, Eastman was experimenting with a variety of novel approaches to integrating her feminism in own her marriage and family life.

Introduction

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.

Passages: Feminism, Journalism, and the Transatlantic Twenties

After the vote was won, Crystal Eastman hoped to transform successful but single-issue suffragism into a class- and race-conscious, transnationally minded feminism. She ran afoul of Alice Paul, unquestioned leader of the National Woman’s Party, who wanted another targeted single-issue campaign. By 1923, Eastman, Paul, and the organization agreed on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) as their new “great demand.” In its all-encompassing simplicity, the ERA solved the problem of how a single-issue campaign could seek redress for the huge and complicated problem of gender inequality. Unfortunately, the idea splintered coalitions in the wider women’s movement, alienating the party from a whole network of once-compatible Progressive groups. Eastman, now living in her husband’s native London with their children, worked as a journalist, covering this debate. By 1926, little progress had been made, and she welcomed a fresh tack. She began working with Paul to campaign for equal rights provisions in international treaties.

The Federal Case for Women’s Suffrage

In 1911, following the loss of her mother, Crystal Eastman married Wallace “Bennie” Benedict and moved to his home state of Wisconsin. Unable to find work as a lawyer, she accepted a job as campaign manager for the state’s suffrage drive. After a vicious battle, including opposition from the powerful brewing industry and elected officials, the measure lost two to one. Eastman returned to the Village in 1913, with Bennie in tow. He would soon initiate an affair, inciting a divorce that was finalized in 1916. Meanwhile, Eastman had united with Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, organizing the younger, more confrontational suffrage women to found the militant wing of the suffrage movement that became the National Woman’s Party. The group’s actions inside and outside the US Congress, including spectacular demonstrations and White House picketing to target the “party in power”—Woodrow Wilson and the Democrats—would finally leverage votes for women.

Embarking: The Pittsburgh Survey, Workers’ Compensation, and the First Blush of Fame

In 1907, Crystal Eastman began a temporary job investigating industrial accidents with the Pittsburgh Survey, a comprehensive study of urban industrial life organized by Paul Kellogg and Edward Devine, financed by the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation. The project involved established leaders, such as Florence Kelley and John R. Commons, as well as young visual artists, including Lewis Hine and Joseph Stella, and brought a new generation of educated women into professional work in social welfare. Eastman’s study, later published as Work Accidents and the Law (1910), resulted in her appointment by Governor Charles Evans Hughes to chair New York’s new commission on employer liability in 1909. There, she proposed to overhaul common law standards, shifting to a no-fault distribution of risk and loss shared by workers, businesses, and consumers. The resulting legislation failed a constitutional challenge in 1911 but laid the groundwork for successful workers’ compensation laws in New York State and elsewhere.

Epilogue

In 1929, Jeffrey and Annis Fuller were adopted by Crystal’s longtime colleague Agnes Brown Leach and her husband. Leach had been a principal benefactor of the Woman’s Peace Party and American Union Against Militarism and a member of the National Woman’s Party executive committee. Her husband, Henry Goddard Leach, was an editor of ...

Radical Pacifist

As World War I began in Europe in 1914, Crystal Eastman helped lead two major peace organizations. She facilitated the founding of the Woman’s Peace Party, today the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), initiating the recruitment of a reluctant Jane Addams to head the national organization while she formed and led the more audacious New York branch. And she served as executive secretary of the American Union Against Militarism, the only American antiwar organization ever to demonstrate that citizen diplomacy could avert war. She joined an impressive group of Progressive reformers—Addams; Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement and the Visiting Nurse Service; Oswald Garrison Villard, National Association for the Advancement of Color People financier and publisher of the Nation; and Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress. With others, they created the “new peace movement,” which allied world peacekeeping with global democracy, human rights, and economic justice.

Coming Home

By 1927, Crystal Eastman had been living as the freelance journalist she never wanted to be, pitching article after article to conservative or capricious editors. She had recently covered the momentous International Woman Suffrage Alliance congress in Paris, but was generally exhausted from childcare and homemaking, frustrated by declining health, and almost always behind in her bills. She longed to return to home. Paul Kellogg advised patient planning and supplied a prescient idea for new line of work, but she returned to New York quite hastily, with only a short speaking engagement planned. Three weeks later, Walter died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Deep in mourning, Eastman began a temporary job organizing a celebration for The Nation. Her colleagues noticed she was fighting a tremendous battle. In fact, she was mortally ill. Her kidneys, damaged long ago by scarlet fever, were now giving out. Ten months later, she passed away.

Regrouping: The Liberator Years

On Lincoln’s Birthday, 1918, Crystal and Max Eastman launched the Liberator: The Journal of Revolutionary Progress. The magazine plainly supported Bolshevism, and also served as watchdog for propaganda and misinformation concerning revolutionary revolts. Eastman’s most important writing was her reporting from inside Communist Hungary in August 1919. However, the lived human experiences of revolution she witnessed put her at odds with the Liberator’s star radical, John Reed, and her brother Max. A pacifist and feminist, as well as a radical, she praised the abolition of private property but deplored the bloodshed and repression under the revolutionary government. The experience brought her to a political impasse. Two elemental goals, once aligned, now appeared to be competing claims: justice or peace? In an era of revolutionary victory, how could she make sense of violence perpetrated to achieve the equality and justice she had long believed was the only recipe for world peace?