In 1920, members of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which had defended conscientious objectors and other dissidents in World War I, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. For most of the 1920s, the ACLU was a small group of lawyers and other activists that fought primarily for freedom of political speech and occasionally for academic freedom, as in the famous Scopes trial of 1925. In 1929, the ACLU began contesting limits on other types of expression, such as censorship of books and movies.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the ACLU’s conception of civil liberties became even broader and went beyond first amendment rights. The organization became especially active in cases involving issues of race and minority rights. In 1932, it issued a report entitled “Black Justice,” which detailed the extent of institutional racism in America, and it took part in Powell v. Alabama, a U. S. Supreme Court case that arose out of the Scotts-boro Boys incident. In 1934, the ACLU lobbied for the Indian Reorganization Act. During World War II, it opposed the relocation of Japanese Americans on the basis of race and argued for the desegregation of the armed forces.
At the same time, the ACLU continued to defend political dissenters in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, it fought the loyalty oaths required of teachers by law in more than 20 states. The organization opposed the Alien Registration Act (known as the Smith Act) of 1940, which required all resident aliens to be fingerprinted and made it illegal to advocate violent overthrow of the U. S. government. It also defended American Nazi groups’ right to rally. Though it did not oppose the Selective Service system, it did fight for the rights of conscientious objectors in various court cases.
In other instances, the positions adopted by the ACLU sometimes seemed to contradict its professed ideals. In 1940, for example, the ACLU declared that persons belonging to “political organizations that support totalitarian governments” could no longer serve on any of its committees, a stipulation many considered analogous to the loyalty oaths previously denounced by the organization. And while ACLU lawyers represented Japanese Americans who claimed that internment during World War II was based on their race, and therefore illegal, they did not, as a group, challenge the constitutionality of Executive Order 9066.
Despite being criticized by some for being too radical and by others for being too timid, the ACLU was an important organization in the 1930s and 1940s. Most significant were its efforts to prevent a repeat of the widespread abuses of civil liberties that had occurred during World War I and its willingness to broach the subject of racial injustice at a time when few Americans would.
Further reading: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
—Pamela J. Lauer
World History
