Dec 14, 2006
Gara LaMarche: Review of Judy Kutulas's The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
When Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) since 2001, has a bad day, he ought to pull down from the shelf this remarkable history of his organizational ancestors. It might perk him up.
Romero has been having more than a few bad days lately. Taking office just four days before the September 11 attacks, he was plunged into the greatest civil liberties crisis since the Palmer Raids and other World War I—era abuses spawned the ACLU’s founding in 1920. For five years, he’s had to work overtime, forging alliances on the right and left while fighting the Bush Administration and its allies on everything from torture to domestic surveillance. But Romero’s bad days haven’t been caused totally by his adversaries in government, though. It’s his friends he has to worry about, too. While not taking issue with the organization’s ardor and effectiveness, a few ACLU board members have complained publicly about what they see as serious lapses of principle and transparency on several internal matters, using no less than the New York Times (which has run a half-dozen articles on the conflict) as their platform. The longtime ACLU director whom Romero succeeded, Ira Glasser, has called for his removal, along with board President Nadine Strossen, and joined the renegade (now former) board members in forming a committee to "Save the ACLU." (To Romero’s relief, Glasser’s and Strossen’s immediate predecessors, along with numerous other former officials, have been outspoken in support of the current management.)
There are few activist organizations, liberal or conservative, that could stand up to the spotlight recently shone on the ACLU. But as Judy Kutulas–a professor of history and American studies at St. Olaf’s College–exhaustively demonstrates in The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930—60, where the ACLU is concerned, there was never a golden age. In her account of three of the organization’s early decades, Kutulas doesn’t pull any punches in exposing how far short of its mission the ACLU has fallen on numerous occasions. A few egregious examples: Roger Baldwin, an ACLU founder who lived long enough (he died at 97) to be treated as a Mandela-like figure, covered up declines in ACLU membership; cozied up to congressional investigators and the FBI; and abused his staff and involved them in his personal work. When the vote of the ACLU affiliates went against the leadership’s position in a referendum in the 1950s, Baldwin’s successor, Patrick Murphy Malin–in a move that would have done the late Mayor Richard Daley proud–pushed the Chicago branch to conduct a phone ballot of members, reversing the outcome. And later, when anticommunist board members, following what was clearly already a long-standing ACLU tradition, leaked board discussions to the press, Malin threatened "possible removal" of any officer "who may be guilty."...
Romero has been having more than a few bad days lately. Taking office just four days before the September 11 attacks, he was plunged into the greatest civil liberties crisis since the Palmer Raids and other World War I—era abuses spawned the ACLU’s founding in 1920. For five years, he’s had to work overtime, forging alliances on the right and left while fighting the Bush Administration and its allies on everything from torture to domestic surveillance. But Romero’s bad days haven’t been caused totally by his adversaries in government, though. It’s his friends he has to worry about, too. While not taking issue with the organization’s ardor and effectiveness, a few ACLU board members have complained publicly about what they see as serious lapses of principle and transparency on several internal matters, using no less than the New York Times (which has run a half-dozen articles on the conflict) as their platform. The longtime ACLU director whom Romero succeeded, Ira Glasser, has called for his removal, along with board President Nadine Strossen, and joined the renegade (now former) board members in forming a committee to "Save the ACLU." (To Romero’s relief, Glasser’s and Strossen’s immediate predecessors, along with numerous other former officials, have been outspoken in support of the current management.)
There are few activist organizations, liberal or conservative, that could stand up to the spotlight recently shone on the ACLU. But as Judy Kutulas–a professor of history and American studies at St. Olaf’s College–exhaustively demonstrates in The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930—60, where the ACLU is concerned, there was never a golden age. In her account of three of the organization’s early decades, Kutulas doesn’t pull any punches in exposing how far short of its mission the ACLU has fallen on numerous occasions. A few egregious examples: Roger Baldwin, an ACLU founder who lived long enough (he died at 97) to be treated as a Mandela-like figure, covered up declines in ACLU membership; cozied up to congressional investigators and the FBI; and abused his staff and involved them in his personal work. When the vote of the ACLU affiliates went against the leadership’s position in a referendum in the 1950s, Baldwin’s successor, Patrick Murphy Malin–in a move that would have done the late Mayor Richard Daley proud–pushed the Chicago branch to conduct a phone ballot of members, reversing the outcome. And later, when anticommunist board members, following what was clearly already a long-standing ACLU tradition, leaked board discussions to the press, Malin threatened "possible removal" of any officer "who may be guilty."...