Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21, 1884–August 26, 1981) was a noted civil libertarian, pacifist, and social activist who held Communist views in his youth. He was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union and his thirty-year tenure as director of the ACLU marked the period when the modern understanding of the Bill of Rights came into being.
"So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy."
Roger Baldwin (awarded the Medal of Freedom by the President on January 16, 1981, the highest honor that can be given a civilan)
"Roger Baldwin was, in a way, one of America’s founders. The original founders invented the Bill of Rights in the eighteenth century; 130 years later, Baldwin invented a way to enforce it. This is his story and it is told in rich and fascinating detail. A must read for those interested in how rights are acquired and kept."
—Ira Glasser, Former Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Nash_Baldwin<snip>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. In 1927 he visited the Soviet Union and published a book, entitled Liberty Under the Soviets, which contained extensive praise for the country he later denounced.
Baldwin was 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 and Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses. Baldwin retired from the ACLU leadership in 1950, but remained active in politics for the rest of his life.
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.<snip>
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