January 19, 1920: The American Civil Liberties Union Is Founded

January 19, 1920: The American Civil Liberties Union is founded, an offshoot of the Civil Liberties Bureau, founded in 1917 in response to abuses of civil liberties by the federal government during World War I.

One of the founders of the CLB, Crystal Eastman, resigned to focus on her health. Another of the founders, Roger Nash Baldwin, convinced the board of directors to change the group's focus from litigation to direct action and public education. (Eastman had the kidney disorder Bright's disease, and died in 1928. Baldwin lived until 1981.)

Among the other founders were Helen Keller, the blind-and-deaf activist; Norman Thomas, a minister who served as the Socialist Party's candidate for President in several elections; Jane Addams, the social worker whose Hull House attended to the needs of Chicago's immigrants, and earned her the Nobel Peace Prize; Felix Frankfurter, a crusading lawyer who later served on the U.S. Supreme Court; and Jeannette Rankin, the Montana Congresswoman who voted against entry into World War I, and would later do so against World War II.

In its 1st full decade, the ACLU defended the free speech rights of extremists on both sides, the left (the Communist Party USA) and the right (the Ku Klux Klan). It accepted the Klan's freedom of speech because it accepted everybody's freedom of speech. In spite of this, it worked with the NAACP and other civil rights organizations from its beginning.

In 1925, it opposed Tennessee's law against teaching evolution in public schools by supporting teacher John T. Scopes, hiring crusading lawyer Clarence Darrow as his defense attorney, and paying the $100 fine that was Scopes' sentence. They knew they couldn't win the case on the facts, so they used the case to show how ridiculous the law was. It wasn't overturned until 1967.

The ACLU played a significant role in passing the 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act, a federal law that prohibited employers from preventing employees from joining unions, and stopped the practice of outlawing strikes, marriages, and labor organizing activities with the use of injunctions.

It was successful in other labor rights cases in the 1930s, but less successful in fighting the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II in the early 1940s, and in fighting the House Un-American Activities Committee's smearing of real and perceived Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

During the 1988 Presidential election, the Republican nominee, Vice President George H.W. Bush, criticized the Democratic nominee, Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, for being a "card-carrying member" of the ACLU. The use of the term "card-carrying" was a throwback to the Cold War pursuit of alleged Communists, and helped turn the tide of the election: Dukakis left his Convention 17 points ahead of Bush in the polls, and lost by nearly 8 points.

This was reflected in the 1995 film The American President, with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. The leading contender for the Republican nomination, Bob Rumson (played by Richard Dreyfuss), attacked the Democratic incumbent, Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas), for being a member of the ACLU. And Shepherd's response, written by Sorkin, was epic, a greater defense of the ACLU than it has ever given anyone, including itself:

For the record: Yes, I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU. But the more important question is, "Why aren't you, Bob?"

Now, this is an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights. So, it naturally begs the question: "Why would a Senator, his Party's most powerful spokesman, and a candidate for President, choose to reject upholding the Constitution?" If you can answer that question, folks, then you're smarter than I am, because I didn't understand it until a few hours ago.

America isn't easy. America is advanced citizenship. You gotta want it bad, 'cause it's gonna put up a fight. It's gonna say, "You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage, and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest."

Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free."

*

January 19, 1920 was a Monday. Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, a longtime diplomat from Peru who served as his country's Prime Minister, and as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1982 to 1991, was born on this day. He lived to be 100 years old.

Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And no games were scheduled in the NHL. So there were no scores on this historic day.