Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21 1884–August 26 1981) was a noted civil libertarian, pacifist, and left-wing social activist who held Communist views in his youth. He was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union, and its executive director until 1950; many of the ACLU's original landmark cases took place under his direction.

Biography

Roger Nash Baldwin was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts to Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy Cushing Nash. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Harvard University; afterwards, he moved to St. Louis, where he worked as a social worker and became chief probation officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court. He also co-wrote Juvenile Courts and Probation with Bernard Flexner at this time; this book became very influential in its era, and was, in part, the foundation of Baldwin's national reputation.

In St. Louis, Baldwin was also greatly influenced by the radical social movement of the anarchist Emma Goldman; he joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and developed a lasting sympathy for the Soviet Union and Communism that lasted until 1939, when he was disillusioned by the Nazi-Soviet pact and broke off all radical ties.

Baldwin was also a lifelong pacifist; he was a member of the American Union against Militarism, which opposed World War I, and spent a year in jail as a conscientious objector rather than submit to the draft. It was out of the American Union against Militarism (specifically, its legal arm, the National Civil Liberties Bureau) that the ACLU formed after the war, with Baldwin as its first executive director.

As director, Baldwin was integral to the shape of the association's early character; it was under Baldwin's leadership that the ACLU undertook some of its most famous cases, including the Scopes Monkey Trial, the Sacco-Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses. Baldwin retired from the ACLU leadership in 1950.

In 1947 General Douglas MacArthur invited him to Japan to foster the growth of civil liberties in that country, where he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union and was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japanese government. In 1948, he was invited to Germany and Austria for similar purposes.

Baldwin was awarded the Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter on January 16, 1981.

Quotes

• I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal.—Harvard Class Book of 1935, spotlighting Baldwin's class of 1905 on its thirtieth anniversary

• Do steer away from making it look like a Socialist enterprise...We want also to look like patriots in everything we do. We want to get a good lot of flags, talk a good deal about the Constitution and what our forefathers wanted to make of this country, and to show that we are really the folks that really stand for the spirit of our institutions.—Baldwin's advice in 1917 to Louis Lochner of the socialist People's Council in Minnesota

• So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.—quote on American Civil Liberties Union's webpage

• I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching. . . . I cannot consistently, with self respect, do other than I have, namely, to deliberately violate an act which seems to me to be a denial of everything which ideally and in practice I hold sacred.—statement at his draft trial.