Roger Baldwin and the ACLU

Franklyn S. Haiman

Robert Cottrell. Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. xiv + 608 pages. $34.50.

As one who knew Roger Baldwin and was interviewed by Professor Cottrell in his preparation of this book I opened its pages with eager anticipation but some anxiety as to how he would deal with this great man. When I had turned its final page my satisfaction and pleasure were immeasurable. Robert Cottrell, a professor of History and American Studies at California State University at Chico, has captured the essence of Roger Baldwin and his enormous impact on 20th century America with scholarly care and thoroughness. Despite the author’s sympathy with the basic values for which Baldwin fought, he has managed to describe the virtues and shortcomings of this enormously complex and contradictory figure with remarkable objectivity and balance. He pulls no punches about either Baldwin’s flaws or the occasional lapses from principle of the ACLU while at the same time acknowledging his strong admiration for both.

I had the privilege of knowing Roger only during the last sixteen years of his long life. He was already 81 when I first met him, but except for the wrinkles, he was still very much the same person Cottrell describes as a youth and through his adult years. He still wore the nondescript old clothes and inevitable hat, and never wore an overcoat, even on the coldest New York City winter days. He was still the wiry outdoorsman he had always been. Indeed, when at the age of 90 he left my house in Evanston, Illinois, after receiving an honorary degree at Northwestern, he was heading for a vacation in the Ozarks to go canoeing.

He was still in possession of the booming voice that was a part of his eloquence as a ubiquitous public speaker, and still the tightwad who pinched his pennies on clothing, and on meals and lodging while traveling, and who paid meager salaries to ACLU staffers. Yet, in many of the contradictions described by Cottrell, he enjoyed the benefits of his Boston Brahmin background and the advantages of having a second wife who was a millionaire, owning properties in New Jersey and on Martha’s Vineyard plus a home in Greenwich Village. He was still a militant small "d" democrat in his beliefs but a stubborn autocrat in his interpersonal relationships, including his family.

Baldwin was also still obsessed with control—control he had exercised over the ACLU and its activities from its founding in 1920 until his retirement as executive director in 1950, control over his children, and even over what would be said at the memorial service that would be held after his death. Although he visited ACLU national board meetings relatively rarely after 1950, he did show up when something vitally important to him was on the agenda and constantly, from 1950 until his death, peppered the executive director and board president with phone calls and notes urging one thing or another. My first conversation with him, as a new board member in 1965, occurred when he asked me to go out to lunch with him during the noon meeting break, ostensibly as a friendly gesture just to get acquainted (which it was), but with the clear hidden agenda of sounding me out on the positions I would be taking on the board.

Beyond the contrast between his elite background and his entire life’s devotion to working on behalf of those who were poor or the targets of discrimination there was also the contradiction between the radical left beliefs and actions he espoused and vigorously engaged in until the late 1930s while at the same time having a naïve trust in J. Edgar Hoover and later being an admirer of General Douglas MacArthur. Prone to flattery perhaps more than most of us, he basked in the fact that the MacArthur had invited him to post-war Japan to serve as an advisor on civil liberties to that occupying commanding general. On the other hand he never hesitated to accept the scorn of society for his extremist politics or for his refusal to cooperate with the draft in World War I, serving a prison sentence for it.

There was one thing that did change dramatically, however. By the time I knew him he had long abandoned the flirtation with Communism and the Soviet Union in which he engaged until Stalin signed the non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939. After that he, like his friend and colleague Norman Thomas, had become the vehement anti-Communist of his later years. By 1940 he was already in support of the expulsion of Communist Party member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the ACLU national board in contradiction to the fundamental civil liberties opposition to guilt by association. Cottrell does credit Baldwin, even during his pro-Soviet Union days, of speaking out against the suppressions of freedom practiced by the Communist regime there, though at the same time Roger regarded those violations of civil liberties as of less importance than the socialist goal of economic justice to which the Soviets supposedly subscribed.

Liberated as Roger Baldwin was from the conservatism of his patrician heritage, to the point of having a free love marriage with his first wife and swimming nude on Martha’s Vineyard beaches, he was still infected with some of the subtle prejudices of the class and era in which he grew up. He was proud of his access to and relationships with prominent establishment figures and was concerned that the top leadership of the ACLU be perceived as in the hands of respectable WASPs. One small oversight in Cottrell’s book is in his account of Baldwin’s concern about the possible hiring of Ira Glasser as executive director in 1978 because of Glasser’s "New York Jewishness." That is an accurate account, although as chair of the search committee that recommended the selection of Ira to the board I never heard it directly from Roger. What Cottrell fails to note, when he writes that Baldwin and some others "wondered whether a Jew could lead an already unpopular organization and communicate forcefully and effectively with different groups" (381), is that Ira’s immediate predecessor for a decade, Aryeh Neier, was also Jewish, as was Norman Dorsen, who had succeeded Edward Ennis as board president in 1976. Yet Baldwin thought highly of both of them and never showed any discomfort with them. Neier and Dorsen, however, were more polished in their styles than the "New York street kid persona" of Glasser, which was probably a greater worry to Baldwin than his being Jewish. Nor did his misgivings cause Roger to be anything but positive with and about Ira after Ira took office as executive director, as it had not in any way affected his warm relationships over many years with old friends and colleagues like Emma Goldman, Felix Frankfurter, Morris Ernst, and many others of Jewish heritage.

Baldwin’s life, from the age of 33 until his death at the age of 97, was so intimately involved with the ACLU and its predecessor organizations that Cottrell’s biography, as its title indicates, is a story of the ACLU as well. Together with Samuel Walker’s In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the American Civil Liberties Union, we now have a rich and definitive tale of that remarkable institution’s contribution to the preservation and advancement of democracy in the United States and of the heroic role played in that adventure by Roger Nash Baldwin.