December 12, 2006
Private: LaMarche on What Progressives Can Learn From the ACLU
Writing in Democracy, Gara LaMarche tells some of the ACLU's more tumultuous history as an organization plagued by class divides:
When the Hollywood 10 declined to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) about their political affiliations, anti-communist ACLU board members delayed and diluted the group's response so successfully-forcing a time- consuming referendum on whether to file an amicus brief-that, according to Kutulas, the ACLU "squandered its influence." And when, after the war, Communist Party leaders were tried under the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of government, the ACLU at first did nothing, despite the fact that it had testified against the law in 1940. While the board eventually took a close vote to ask the attorney general not to bring additional prosecutions, it also instructed the staff "not to issue any statements" that might imply an actual position on this grave violation of civil liberties. The ACLU board and national committee also supported the right of unions to bar communists as officers, the exclusion of communists as permanent immigrants, and the denial of naturalization to Communist Party members.
But, if the ACLU has such a checkered history, how did it earn its reputation as a staunch defender of the Bill of Rights? In large part it derives from the organization's idealistic, radical roots. . . .
Take the issue of Japanese-American internment during World War II, one of the country's most infamous incursions on civil liberties. The national ACLU board, dominated by liberals eager to support FDR and the war effort, preferred to work an inside track, limiting its protests to violations of due process. But Ernie Besig of the Northern California ACLU took a different tack. It was Besig and his affiliate that took Fred Korematsu's case to the Supreme Court, not Baldwin and the national office. Indeed, Baldwin did his best to undermine Besig. In one particularly rich but appalling anecdote, Kutulas describes Baldwin lazing on the beach in Martha's Vineyard with his family while on the other coast Besig, whose own secretary had been interned, used scarce gasoline rations to drive hundreds of miles to the Tule Lake internment camp. While Besig conducted interviews with detainees, the camp director called Baldwin, who authorized Besig's expulsion. Officials then escorted him to the car he had parked in a guarded lot, were Besig found his gas tank filled with salt.
And it was the affiliates, particularly the California branches, communist-influenced or not, who never wavered during the McCarthy era, even as ACLU leaders tried to work the inside track with then-Representative Richard Nixon and others on the HUAC. The tension wasn't borne of simple geography: Kutulas suggests that the class backgrounds of national and affiliate leaders played a key part. Baldwin, described by Anthony Lewis as a "patrician heretic," took no salary, thanks to a wealthy wife, and had homes in Greenwich Village, Martha's Vineyard, and the tonier northern reaches of New Jersey. In contrast, three leaders of the Southern California branches in the 1930s included a former Catholic seminarian, a Russian-born labor lawyer, and a social worker in a settlement house for Mexican immigrants, all without family money or connections.
By the 1950s, the ACLU was a "fairly staid organization," yet it now thrives as as one of the largest and best known organizations on the left. LaMarche credits this rise to a grassroots revolution within the organization:
The answer, which lies in the history Kutulas draws out for us but which came to fruition after the period covered by her book, is that the ACLU affiliates won their fight with the center establishment. In the 1960s, Aryeh Neier, then the field director, greatly expanded the number of ACLU affiliates and chapters [full disclosure: Neier is now the president of the Open Society Institute, where I work.]. In 1965, he took over the New York affiliate, and, along with his deputy, Ira Glasser, reinvented the ACLU as an ally of protest movements and the disenfranchised. With Neier's narrow victory in the board vote for executive director in 1970, a virtual coup of the affiliates took place, and the activist approach they represented was once again the organization's dominant stance. When Glasser succeeded him as national director in 1978, he continued the revolution, steadily shifting resources to strengthen the affiliates. While there remained echoes of the left-right ACLU split well into the last decades of the twentieth century, and even faint reverberations today, on every key issue of civil liberties policy-from protection for hate speech to defense of terrorist suspects-the ACLU is, to borrow a term from the old struggles, a united front.
LaMarche concludes that this grassroots revolution, which has built the ACLU into the force it is today, should inspire other progressives to similar action:
What should today's progressives, or for that matter, today's ACLU activists, take from the saga Kutulas recounts? First, that attention to the grassroots is essential to the vibrancy and health of any progressive organization. Far too many advocacy groups, in contrast with the ACLU, lack any real base beyond a handful of big foundation funders, and as a result they shrink from boldness for fear of offending their patrons. Second, that organizational structure matters, and tending to it, while rarely glamorous, is essential to both the capacity to act and the ability to remain relevant. And finally, that principle-or, to use a recently touted term, values-matters above all. When an organization drifts from it, even for seemingly pressing tactical reasons, it loses not just its soul, but the very essence of what ultimately makes it effective.
LaMarche's article reviewed The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930-60, by Judy Kutulas.