Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union / Robert C. Cottrell.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Baldwin's thirty-year tenure as director of the ACLU marked the period when the modern understanding of the Bill of Rights came into being. Recapturing the accomplishments and contradictions of America's greatest civil libertarian--a staunch defender of Communist Russia who openly admired J. Edgar Hoover and Douglas MacArthur--this riveting biography is an eye-opening view of the development of the American left.

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Chapter One Growing Up in Wellesley Hills Roger Nash Baldwin was born in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1884, into the comfort and affluence of an old-stock New England family. He was the first of seven children of Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy Cushing Nash; his family lineage dated to the time of William the Conqueror, and his ancestors arrived in the Americas on "the inescapable Mayflower ." More than five centuries before the Pilgrims, "Baldwins of rank" had appeared in England. One Loammi Baldwin was credited with producing the Baldwin apple. Roger's maternal side boasted Chaffees, Cushings, and Nashes--long considered among the most prominent names in Massachusetts society--as well as a Revolutionary War general.     By the antebellum period the Baldwins exuded the kind of social conscience often exhibited by leading families in the American Northeast. Roger Baldwin's paternal grandfather, William Henry Baldwin, was in his early forties when he gave up his successful dry goods business to found the Boston Young Men's Christian Union in 1851. The union offered adult education in addition to recreation and social services. William, attracted to abolitionism, was a kind of Unitarian lay preacher who befriended "non-conformist Brahmins" like Phillips Brooks, the renowned Episcopal minister who would write the words to "O Little Town of Bethlehem," and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the early abolitionist who would lead the first regiment of black troops in the Civil War. William Baldwin corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, and he knew Henry Ward Beecher, who headed the nation's largest Protestant congregation at Brooklyn's Plymouth Church.     When Roger Baldwin was a young child, his paternal grandparents lived at 63 Pinckney Street, where he visited them often. Grandfather Baldwin spoke frequently of the operations of the Young Men's Christian Union, which held Christmas parties for poor children, sent emissaries to their homes, ran an athletic program for young men, and offered library services, among other functions. While walking with his grandfather around the streets of Boston, Roger was impressed with how respectfully members of the organization greeted the elderly gentleman. And he came to consider his grandfather's famous pen pals, especially Brooks and Holmes, as family friends.     Roger also often visited his uncle, William Henry Baldwin Jr., who eventually served as president of the Long Island Railroad. Like his father, William Henry Jr. was something of a reformer and held a seat on the Southern Education Board, which contested the exploitation of minors in the workforce. He became director of the National Child Labor Committee, which brought together northerners and southerners who considered learning the key to racial understanding, and chaired the Committee of Fifteen, which spearheaded a campaign against prostitution in New York City. He also was a trustee of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. William Henry Jr. would insist to his somewhat disbelieving nephew that only a few individuals worked hard, saved their earnings, and became rich.     William Henry Jr. had married Ruth Standish Bowles, the daughter of newspaper editor Samuel Bowles. She helped found the National Urban League, served as a trustee of Smith College, and joined the Socialist Party. Her acquaintances included social reformers and critics like Lillian Wald, Paul U. Kellogg, and Jacob Riis. She and Roger became particularly close, especially after William Henry Jr. died in 1905.     Roger's father, Frank Fenno Baldwin, was a successful leather merchant who ran several factories. When Roger was a teenager, his father was a partner in the Boston Counter Co. and traveled widely to great shoe centers. Later he served as a vice president of the American Hide Leather Co. and still later became an officer of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad. Frank was considered "a charming and fascinating person, flinging himself into any thing [ sic ] which claimed his interest or appealed to his sympathies with ardor and abandon--a man, too, of driving force and ardent emotions." He married his neighbor in the affluent Union Park area of Boston, Lucy Cushing Nash, who was "a lovely, quiet, gentlewoman." The daughter of Israel Nash, a successful importer, Lucy was taken with music, order, and thoroughness.     Frank would leave home for his office at seven in the morning and return at five or six. He exuded authority--certain of his relatives called him the Grand Duke. Articulate and possessed of a disciplined mind, Frank was, in Roger's estimation, "very positive, very decisive. He felt in command of things. He was the head of the works." He commanded a good salary, and the servants viewed him as "the Boss," Roger remembered. Frank was generally upbeat but could become angry or irritated, in a manner foreign to his wife. Although he was a devoted father, his children "were a bit fearful of crossing him." Indeed, the family made frequent references to Frank's acting as a semi-tyrannical patriarch, in the fashion of the protagonist of Clarence Day Jr.'s Life with Father . Nevertheless, Roger considered him "a very loving father and very companionable." While his father was determined to keep up appearances despite the turmoil in the household, Roger "saw right through him." His father allowed Roger to have everything he wanted and rarely disciplined or reprimanded him. Still, Roger acknowledged, "I think among all of us children there was a little sense of restraint, not through direct action but you didn't contradict or question. Fear is too strong a word. All of us, all six of us, were not fearful, but we wouldn't cross him."     The Baldwin household did not use corporal punishment. Instead, when one of the six surviving children (one died in infancy)--three girls and three boys--became unruly, Lucy would lead that child by the hand to the closet and lock the door. The angry and frightened seven- or eight-year-old Roger "used to kick the door, yell, finally I would give in and say I'll be good. I may have fought with my brothers and/or sisters or disobeyed my mother to have earned that punishment."     Small, slight, and soft-spoken, Lucy Baldwin possessed certain unconventional beliefs, albeit in a "quieter, self-effacing way," in contrast to her husband's more brusque and grandiose manner. She was appreciative of "good music, good solid books--no trash around our house--and good talk about things that mattered," Roger recalled. A friend related that Roger acquired from his mother his love of music and "his orderliness and thoroughness." Equally significant, Lucy seemed to believe in change, which Frank merely accepted. She was something of a supporter of women's suffrage. In contrast, their other children never expressed the same concerns about social issues that Roger did.     For the first seventeen years of his life Roger Baldwin lived in the family home on Maugus Avenue in Wellesley that Lucy had received as a gift from her father. The spacious Victorian was perched high on a hill, surrounded by about fifteen acres of open land, woods, and streams. The house, which a friend called indescribable, underwent many additions as the Baldwin family expanded. Above the house were five acres of pasture, and Frank took to farming as a kind of gentleman's hobby. The estate was home to pigs, sheep, cows, and horses. When Roger was about twelve, his father purchased a four-hundred-acre farm about twenty-five miles outside of Wellesley in Hopkinton. The Baldwins' existence was privileged and sheltered, attended to by a number of servants, including a nurse and a laundress. The maids and cooks were Irish, the gardeners Italian, and the coachman English.     Wellesley was a suburb of Boston, which included the eastern sector of Wellesley Hills, where the Baldwins resided. The suburbs of Wellesley, Brookline, Chestnut Hill, Milton, Needham, Dedham, and Dover were home to proper Bostonians. The townsfolk were generally comfortably middle class, with wealthier individuals serving as community leaders. Both proper and Unitarian, the Baldwins considered their religion superior to others, particularly the Catholicism practiced by those of Irish stock and domestic help. "Class distinctions were remote," Roger later insisted, but they clearly were present in Wellesley and in the circles to which the Baldwins gravitated. They also had an enduring influence on Roger. In the public schools he attended, Roger became acquainted with the children of immigrants. However, such schoolmates were not invited to Baldwin family parties. He was one of "the better people," young Roger understood, whose family did not associate with certain sorts. While in high school, he was attracted to a young Irish Catholic girl, Anastasia Kilmain. One of his parents pointedly insisted, "Now Roger, I wouldn't ask a girl like that to come to the house to your birthday party." Roger never considered questioning the admonition.     Not surprisingly, the lone extant correspondence from Roger Baldwin's adolescence reflects various prejudices, as well as stark class consciousness. He corresponded regularly with Charlotte M. Ryman of Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, whom he met in the summer of 1897 at the Hotel Humarock in Sea View Station, Massachusetts. The Baldwins and Rymans were vacationing there, and the trip marked the start of a three-decade friendship with Charlotte Ryman, whose husband owned a coal mine. She had two daughters and became greatly fond of the thirteen-year-old Roger. He returned the affection of the forty-nine-year-old woman he came to call Ma Ryman or Grossmutter; she referred to him as "Ritterino." Ryman became the kind of second mother he often sought out, and he visited her home on several occasions. Her family was well off, "genteel middle-class," and he "fell right into its social circle in Wilkes-Barre," he recalled. There he became enamored of a niece of Ryman's, Marjorie Rose, to whom he later drew even closer. Around 1898 the Rymans invited him along on a trip to Washington, D.C., his first visit to the nation's capital. They also took him to New York City, where they stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria, which became his social center when he visited Manhattan during his college days."     In a letter to Ryman dated April 18, 1898, he referred to the city of Norfolk, which he was visiting with his family, as "the worst and dirtiest" he had seen, "most full of lounging niggers that I ever saw." Departing from an electric car, the fourteen-year-old found himself "accosted by about five niggers," all of whom sought to carry his bag to the boat his family was boarding. Roger informed Charlotte Ryman that he refused their offers, choosing to carry the luggage himself.     In another letter, written on February n, 1899, he spoke of a masquerade ball held at his school that resulted in "a corking time." He wore "a `killing costume' which undoubtedly would have shocked the leading angel in Heaven." Sporting a great fan, he attended the ball as "a negro dude, with a face of immense proportions." He was attired in an old stovepipe hat, his father's dress suit, gaiters, a loud necktie, white gloves, and a diamond ring the size of a "chicken's egg." His flippant attitude about racial matters, every bit as much as the language itself, was all too characteristic of many Americans of his era. This was true even of well-educated people, including some of those who were viewed as reformers in their day. It remains startling, nevertheless.     Such transparent biases notwithstanding, his racial attitudes remained malleable, undoubtedly because of an already well-developed sense of noblesse oblige. On April 30 he sent a brief letter to Booker T. Washington--whom he had recently met at his uncle's home in Brooklyn--and enclosed a $20 contribution from the Baldwins to the Tuskegee Institute. This was in keeping with his family's friendship with Washington and its support for various reform efforts. Roger admitted he was "only a school boy" but suggested that made him "feel more for fellow school boys and girls of the South." William Henry Baldwin Jr.'s service as a Tuskeegee trustee also fed Roger's interest, as did Washington's status as arguably the nation's leading black spokesperson.     Shortly afterward Roger again wrote disparagingly to Charlotte Ryman, this time about people he met at the coast. "They aren't the very best," but there was "a little Jewish girl from New York, who is `perfectly killing.'" Her father was a German Jew, but to Roger she was "only German percent !"     In addition to prejudices of various types, his letters to Charlotte Ryman reflect the class consciousness that would always mark his life. He had taken up croquet and golf and planned to write "a grammar of the Golf Language," without synonyms, he told her. He had seen a performance of Cyrano de Bergerac , with a lead actor who was " très excellent ." He was writing in French, he clarified, "not to `show up'--honestly now--but because English can't express it." He also told Ryman how he and his friend Lawrence Grose had visited Faneuil Hall markets and the docks in Boston, then ventured over to La Touraine for crackers and milk in the coffee room. The hotel was every bit as grand as many in New York City while exuding a comfortable air of homeyness.     Late in the summer of 1899, having tired of playing cards, croquet, or pool, Roger shared intimate thoughts with his friend. He enjoyed lying in the sand, a solitary enterprise that enabled him to "think my little thinks all to myself," he wrote her. He had matured in the past six months. Now, it seemed, he could "see much further into things." In fact, "it seems that I can't think enough." Already highly ambitious, he had long wondered "what good it was to have this life unless one were going to become a President or Prince or other noted `big.'" Things seemed clearer now, thanks to sermons of the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, the renowned pastor of Roger's maternal grandmother. Still, Roger acknowledged, "I don't want to get `grown-up' yet." He asked Ryman, "Don't you think it best that I should keep `kiddish' as long as I can?" He was not, he assured her, aspiring to become "a dignified person," and he believed that "the true way to fun is to let oneself go, and be free." Others, including several teenage girls, had tossed out "some unfavorable remarks" regarding his immaturity in "playing with little children." Roger dismissed such comments as coming from a generally "shallow lot."     Roger now displayed symptoms of depression, to which he was sometimes prone--despite a belief held by others and nurtured by him that he was perpetually optimistic. One night he had cried, wondering what "I was ever made for, and how far `space' went, and such things." In a letter to Ryman in February 1900 he expressed concerns that "I can't keep at any one thing." What this augured, he prophesied, was "certain failure if I keep on." Maybe he should become an editor of a publication engaged in yellow journalism, he mused. But "perhaps I'm too young to judge myself." He acknowledged, "My opinions and beliefs are all in a very muddy stage, and I am lost in a depth of uncomfortable `slum' of confusion" No matter, he was "happy and quite satisfied with school and everything." His parents "have been so good to me in everything I have wanted." Frank and Lucy Baldwin were not regular churchgoers and gave their eldest to understand that they were "agnostic Unitarians." Nevertheless, the local Unitarian church served as Roger's "social center"; he even taught Sunday school there. Little concerned about questions of immortality, he developed an "unquestioning belief in man, if not God." While still a youngster, he rejected atheism, reasoning that some ethereal force held the universe together. Such a force also suggested the possibility that striving for a common good was a worthwhile endeavor. As a teenager Roger was attracted to the works of Jesus, whom he revered "not as a divine figure but for what he said." Roger participated in the social service efforts of the Unitarian church, including its "Lend-a-Hand Society," founded by Edward Everett Hale. The nonsectarian organization was identified with the mottoes "Look up and not down," "Look forward and not back," "Look out and not in," and "Lend a Hand." Roger helped raise money for the Boston Floating Hospital and joined with other children to collect wildflowers for patients in Boston hospitals. The Floating Hospital gave free medical care to infirm children younger than six, and it did not discriminate on the basis of race or creed, although it refused to treat those with contagious diseases. Roger believed that "lend a hand meant helping people that couldn't help themselves." As he later acknowledged, "I took it all quite seriously." This was not surprising, for "there was always lots of talk in our family about social problems."     Both Frank and Lucy Baldwin were intellectually and artistically curious individuals, and Wellesley residents included several experts in their respective fields. Many were willing to cultivate a young boy's curiosity. He was befriended by Marshall L. Perrin, superintendent of Wellesley public schools, who invited him in for readings in German, which he "dimly understood and hugely enjoyed." Most of his teachers were principled New England puritans, devoted to learning.     Wellesley was only a half-hour train ride from Boston, and Roger frequently went into the city, taking the trip alone from the time he was twelve. Usually, he stopped off at the Young Men's Christian Union, headed by Grandfather Baldwin. There Roger attended Christmas parties orchestrated by his grandfather. On one occasion he accompanied his grandfather to Harvard and met its president, Charles William Eliot, a good friend of the family.     As his brothers recalled, Roger "was one of the most unathletic boys by nature," but he loved the outdoors. At one point he drove off with a horse and carriage, but the animal soon nibbled shrubbery beside the road while its erstwhile driver looked at birds. His interests ranged widely, from the arts to languages.     He was drawn to nature studies because of his father's interest in the outdoors, an interest shared by acquaintances of the Baldwins, including a renowned naturalist who lived in Wellesley, Bradford Torrey, who also was Henry David Thoreau's literary executor. Recognizing that his son thoroughly enjoyed the Hopkinton countryside, Frank Baldwin constructed a shingled cabin, in the pine woods, encircled by a stone wall and with a shingled privy. Throughout high school and afterward Roger and his friends made use of the "camp" during vacations and on weekends. There they rode farm horses over unpaved roads, swam in ponds, and cooked "the most monstrous dishes over the camp stove," Roger recalled. On various occasions his father and Nathaniel P. Kidder, president of the Massachusetts Botanical Society, took Roger along on fishing excursions.     Around the age of twelve or thirteen, he became attracted to the study of birds, following the lead of his friend and classmate Lawrence Grose. The son of a Baptist minister and editor, Lawrence lived next door to Roger. Lawrence, multitalented in the arts and literature, invariably chased after birds with a pair of binoculars in hand. At first Roger was reluctant to join in but "soon caught the infection." This proved to be "a good game, so full of speculation and chance, taking me far afield into places I would never have gone otherwise, and furnishing surprise and adventure, often excitement," he later wrote. Like Lawrence, Roger began tracking his bird studies, which he compared with those of other friends.     Roger avidly read Torrey's weekly column, "Clerk of the Woods," in the Boston Transcript . Torrey was a shy bachelor who became a kind of mentor for Roger. The teenager would meet Torrey at his boardinghouse or in the field. Torrey often helped Roger to identify particular birds while telling him about Thoreau. Torrey and another naturalist, a Mr. Purdy, dissuaded Roger from removing bird eggs from nests, which he would gather in a box filled with cotton wool. Purdy exclaimed, "You should know that taking bird eggs from birds' nests is against the law in Massachusetts, and I am not going to identify any unlawful eggs for you."     Botany also appealed to Roger and here again a well-regarded individual, the author Isaac Sprague, along with his wife, helped with identifications. Roger became knowledgeable about most of the flowering plants in Wellesley. He dabbled in watercolors and took to painting flowers. He also helped to cultivate a wildflower preserve around the family home.     His other hobbies and interests ranged from sketching to music. His brother Bob, who was eleven years younger, believed that Roger had innate music ability and was jealous of Roger's ability to draw. Lawrence played the guitar and the mandolin; Roger was ten when he began piano lessons, so mutual musical interests undoubtedly cemented their friendship at this stage. Roger performed duets with his mother and was drawn to classical music. During his teen years he frequented the Friday afternoon concerts of the Boston Symphony and attended the Metropolitan Opera when it performed in the city. He saw such performers as Caruso, and Fritzi Scheft, who became a star at the Metropolitan Opera, on Broadway, and in silent films. Roger began playing classical music, eagerly studying and practicing scores and enjoying Wagner most of all.     He also was thrilled by Revolutionary sites such as Lexington and Concord, visited the historical shrines, and read works that examined colonial and Revolutionary New England. As he later recalled, "We were proud of the fact that we were right near where all these things had happened. That Boston was a part of it. I got that feeling that Bostonians get. That they are kind of the center of history, the hub of the universe."     Roger also was drawn to the icons of the region, particularly Thoreau--whose cabin beside Walden Pond he visited--as attractive sorts, "independent, odd, nature-loving." A great uncle who lived in Lexington was prone to make light of Thoreau, to whom he referred as "that loafer," and to criticize Emerson for having left the ministry. Nevertheless, as Baldwin later wrote, "the unconventional, the dissenters, the `different'" appeared to flourish in the Boston area. And in Boston they were viewed respectfully and appreciatively. Indeed, the notion prevailed--which Roger subscribed to--that freethinkers were the "best people." Roger referred to Frank Baldwin, a man of enormous energies and decidedly strong opinions, as "understanding of heresy." As Roger acknowledged, "In our family it was hardly respectable not to be a little queer." Consequently, "John Brown ... was the family hero, Robert G. Ingersoll the family prophet, and Unitarianism the family religion, probably because it was the closest thing to free thought." Frank admired Ingersoll, the politician and orator known as "the great agnostic," attended his public addresses, and sifted through his writings.     Consequently, Roger developed an early affinity for the rebel, the heretic, the radical. He later referred to this as "the dualism in my life conformity and radicalism ... in the Boston pattern.... I consciously identified myself with these people ... gentlemen radicals, aristocratic radicals" like Thoreau. Inherently contradictory, this pattern characterized Baldwin from his youth onward. It fostered inconsistencies and paradoxes, which often proved more troubling to others than to Baldwin himself. Roger graduated from the local public high school, finishing third in a class of twenty-five. His education was somewhat in the classical mode, involving the study of Greek, French, geometry, algebra, and American history. Although Greek proved difficult, his French course, as he stated in a letter to his friend Charlotte Ryman, was a particular favorite. An avid reader, he delved into the classics, historical studies, biographies, and the Boston Transcript and was quite fond of Youth's Home Companion ; however, his friend Lawrence was a far more serious student of the classics. In the Grose family library Roger encountered Gibbon, John Fiske's The Nature of God , Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward , and Ingersoll's lectures. When Roger was fourteen, he attended a lecture by Fiske, the American philosopher who did much to popularize the theory of evolution.     Despite his lack of athleticism, Roger nevertheless was persuaded to try out for the high school football team. During the initial scrimmage he ended up at the bottom of a stack of players. "Please get up," he implored his teammates. "You're hurting me." Several of his good friends were also intellectually inclined lads, drawn to nature, the arts, and music. And he gained an early reputation as something of a social butterfly.     In Wellesley Hills, Roger, Lawrence, and two other boys became close friends who "were able to talk about anything and everything," Lawrence recalled. They were, he said, "kind of renaissance boys reaching out in all directions, art, nature, literature, music." Lawrence's father, the minister, edited a Baptist weekly in Boston and was viewed by his southern brethren as an atheist; the boys saw themselves as pagans. They possessed no conception of God but were concerned about religious and ethical dealings. In the Grose family library they discovered books by Charles Darwin, the British physicist John Tyndall, and Thomas H. Huxley. "I caught on to them," Lawrence recalled. "They were my meat." Influenced by his friend, Roger read Huxley and Darwin and found The Voyage of the Beetle to be "quite an exciting book." The Groses were not as well off as Roger's family, but they, like the parents of most of Roger's friends, seemingly attended to their children's every desire. Roger and Lawrence would visit New York City for exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking the Boston & Albany Railroad. Roger would buy the tickets.     In Lawrence's eyes something was "kind of picturesque about Roger. He was always well-dressed, not dudeish--but his clothes had the quality of old Boston. He was a sort of Prince Charming, his manners always pleasant and affable. He was a great smiler, a smiling prince. He was never grim, the reverse of grim, and he was always very sharp in the sense of being keen.... [He] was full of humor and bright wit, a terribly likable person." At the same time Roger walked down the street, Lawrence reflected, "with an air and had an air in everything that he did." Although some friends later referred to Roger as a sissy, Lawrence thought that "he was a good deal of a conqueror of girls--how could he help not being so! He was a kind of personality; he had a way with them." In his brother Bob's estimation Roger "had a streak of femininity in him that came from his relationship to Mother."     Years later Lawrence noted that the Baldwin home life could not have been untroubled. He saw Lucy Baldwin as "refined, a little bit retiring, not a colorful person at all. She didn't seem to me as the kind of woman who would satisfy a vigorous, hearty man like Mr. Baldwin was." Lawrence remembered going with Roger to a farm in Ashland, where Frank Baldwin--who "had a fire in him"--kept a young woman. It is not clear when Roger became aware of his father's philandering, and Lawrence later recalled that Roger seemed little fazed by the events at the farm; however, Lawrence believed "it must have had an influence." Bob noted that their sister, Margaret, who was two years Roger's junior and the oldest girl, also was affected by their father's wanderings, of which she too was aware. "She remained a spinster all her life," Bob said.     Roger and close friends like Lawrence undoubtedly discussed sex a good deal, including masturbation, which was "our own problem. It was considered a terrible thing," Lawrence said. However, nobody considered seducing "nice girls." Apparently, none of the boys at his high school was sexually involved with female classmates, which "would have been quite a scandal." When Roger was twelve or thirteen he began an affair with an Irish maid in his parents' home. "She seduced me," he later asserted. "I knew everything that was to be known, even how to prevent getting her pregnant." This affair continued for two or three years, "right under the noses of my parents," whose bedroom was adjacent to Roger's. The woman eventually returned to Ireland to raise a family. For Roger this relationship involved "no emotion, a purely physical thing. She knew I was ready for business. She had seen me taking a bath and was aware I was prepared for an experience."     Perhaps Roger's sexual precocity was furthered by his father's antics. Unquestionably, the hold that Frank and Lucy had on their son was considerable. His father's liaisons clearly troubled him while providing a model of sexual behavior outside the mainstream. Frank's authoritarianism also notably affected Roger, offering as it did yet another example of adult behavior that he would later duplicate. His parents' class, racial, and ethnic prejudices, no matter how frequently Roger denied their existence, affected him in other ways. Class biases were never far removed from Roger's dealings with various individuals, while the racial and ethnic stereotypes imprinted early in his life proved impossible for him to discard altogether.     At the same time Roger was equally influenced by the liberal atmosphere that permeated the Baldwin household and that of other close relatives, such as his paternal grandfather and Uncle William. He was attracted to the rebel heritage that was held up for public acclaim in Boston and surrounding communities. Likewise, he took to heart the tradition of service and support for reform campaigns, a trait that would become even more evident while he was at Harvard. Copyright (c) 2000 Robert C. Cottrell. All rights reserved.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

ACLU founder and longtime director Roger Nash Baldwin (1884-1981) has dimmed on the radar screen of popular reference, but his legacy has not. Cottrell's straightforward biography of this complex figure focuses on the various forces at work, and sometimes in conflict, in Baldwin's life: his privileged heritage, his egalitarian impulses (awakened by the progressive movement's growing strength and stature, bolstered by Teddy Roosevelt's presidency), his unconventional marriage, his philandering and his single-minded drive to establish the fledgling civil liberties movement. From his blue-blooded upbringing in Massachusetts and his Harvard education, to an unexpected social work career in St. Louis and imprisonment for conscientious objection during WWI, to the founding and running of the ACLU, Baldwin's life makes for a naturally compelling narrative. Baldwin oversaw early incarnations of the ACLU and helped lead them through their evolution into a mainstream progressive stronghold. Cottrell's discussion of the radical influences pulling Baldwin away from the practices of early 20th-century progressivism elucidates the popularization of radical politics that occurred in the first half of the century. Cottrell (Izzy: A Biography of I.F. Stone), an American history professor at California State University, is an empathic but not overly sympathetic chronicler. The first biographer to draw on material that surfaced after Baldwin's death, he adheres to chronology and clear, unembellished prose. Cottrell fills the pages with Baldwin's mentors, allies and foes, including Emma Goldman, Jane Addams, Norman Thomas, A.J. Muste, Douglas MacArthur and J. Edgar Hoover, providing a detailed and comprehensive understanding of 80 years of progressive activity. 37 photos not seen by PW. (Feb.) Forecast: Devotees of civil liberties and progressive causes will be drawn to this, assuring solid, though not startling, sales. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

As Cottrell (history, California State Univ., Chico) notes, "a full-scale biography" of Baldwin, a towering figure in the development of modern American civil liberties as the founder, longtime driving force, and director (1920-49) of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), has been "clearly overdue." Cottrell's outstanding effort, the only book on Baldwin aside from Peggy Lamson's Roger Baldwin: Founder of the ACLU (CH, Feb'77)--which was essentially a lengthy annotated interview--amply fills this lacuna, finely complementing Samuel Walker's In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (CH, Sep'90). Cottrell's primary focus is on Baldwin the man, and he paints a rich, textured portrait highlighting Baldwin's numerous contradictions. Blessed with an outstanding intellect, extraordinary energy, and enormous personal charm, Baldwin devoted his life to fighting for democracy and the personal liberties and dignity of the deprived, yet was an elitist patrician who loved to hobnob with the wealthy and powerful, ran the ACLU and his staff in an authoritarian manner, and all too often compromised his fundamental principles, thus long downplaying Russian repression and allowing his desire for good relations with the FBI to blind him to that agency's transgressions. Highly recommended at all levels. R. J. Goldstein Oakland University

Booklist Review

It's a surprisingly modern story: an advocacy group pushed to national prominence by a single individual's persistence (in recent decades, think Nader, Chavez, and Brower, for example). But the man most identified with the civil liberties crusade was a Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin who began his career at a St. Louis settlement house in 1906. Baldwin was a puzzle; he was sympathetic to the most radical voices (Emma Goldman, the Wobblies, and, later, communists), yet, in his personal and public life, he was certain of his position among "the better sort" of people. He supported unionization of working people but was himself a highly tyrannical boss. From the 1920s through the 1950s, Baldwin headed the ACLU, insisting on an expansive definition of civil liberties that often annoyed even the group's strongest supporters. He remained a grand old man of the movement and worked on international civil liberties until his death at 97 in 1981. Cottrell, a California State University at Chico historian, provides an involving portrait of this often frustrating, ultimately fascinating American activist. Mary Carroll

Kirkus Book Review

A rather dreary life of one of the lions of the American left. Cottrell (History/California State Univ.; Izzy, 1992) specializes in the radical and reform movements that proliferated in America during the first two-thirds of the 20th century. His subject here, Roger Nash Baldwin (founder and longtime head of the ACLU), came into contact with almost all such movements at one time or another. A Boston Brahmin and Harvard graduate, Baldwin moved to St. Louis and began his career as a Progressive and a social worker. During WWI his work with conscientious objectors drew him to civil liberties and gave birth to the ACLU. The next 30 years saw Baldwin, like many on the left, flirt with communism and then swing fervently back to anticommunist liberalism. He lived out his very long life as a public intellectual, working at the UN and advising on ACLU policies until he reached his mid-90s. The author points out—over and over again—that Baldwin’s life and career were marked by a fundamental contradiction between his aristocratic (often autocratic) ways and the liberal (often radical) causes that he supported. Baldwin fervently believed both that the ACLU’s membership should be elite and that all problems could be settled by a face-to-face chat between well-educated men—a view that made him look horribly naïve in his dealings with J. Edgar Hoover, among others. Cottrell also convincingly points out that Baldwin was disingenuous at best about the extent of his involvement with the Communist Party. But Cottrell never really gets down to any kind of insightful analysis; instead there are pages upon pages of alphabet soup, where the attendees of countless meetings held by acronymed leftist organizations are listed. Most glaringly, the author completely sidesteps the issue of Baldwin’s possible homosexuality—while noting the “rumors,” the two “unconventional” marriages he entered into, and the suicides of two of the young men that Baldwin habitually “adopted.” More an annals than a biography.