On Sun, 25 Sep 2005 19:40:44 GMT, "-=jd=-"
wrote:



"I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied
class and sole control of those who produce wealth. Communism is the goal!"
{Roger Baldwin - Founder of the ACLU}

-=jd=-
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.