The History of the ACLU

In 1920, Crystal Eastman, a women’s rights activist from New York, and Roger Baldwin, an antiwar college professor from St. Louis, created an organization with the specific purpose of defending the civil liberties of the American people. This organization, originally named the Civil Liberties Bureau, eventually would become the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that would appear more times in front of the Supreme Court than any other organization besides the government itself. From the very beginning, its members would represent many cases pertaining to the basic constitutional rights of all Americans, the Bill of Rights.

Before the ACLU, no free speech case had ever been won in the Supreme Court. This fact changed quickly after the ACLU began to function as a protector of civil liberties. A main goal at its founding was to represent those people who refused to fight in World War I after being drafted. The ACLU gained more prominence when it successfully fought for the right to teach evolution in public schools in the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey case. During World War II, the ACLU defended Japanese Americans against their internment. Later, the ACLU would lose popularity in defending the American Nazis’ right to demonstrate and gather. Throughout their history, the Union’s lawyers have fought for some of the most unpopular and controversial civil liberties cases which has, at points, made them very unpopular among both liberals and conservatives. Though some conservative politicians have recently used ACLU membership as a political attack against a more liberal candidate, the truth is that its lawyers have defended all types of people against the encroachment of their rights by the government. Now the ACLU includes over a quarter of a million members who work with branch offices in forty-six states or at a national level. On a daily basis, the ACLU participates in over a thousand cases which may have gone unheard of without the organization that made the Bill of Rights more than a parchment of paper.