Roger Nash Baldwin

Roger Nash Baldwin (1884-1981), American social reformer and pacifist, and a founder and director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin was born in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard University in 1904. From 1906 to 1909 he was an instructor in sociology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and during that period he became interested in social welfare work. Baldwin then became chief probation officer for the Juvenile Court of St. Louis from 1907 to 1910, secretary of the National Probation Association from 1908 to 1910, and secretary of the St. Louis Civic League from 1910 to 1917. Baldwin moved to New York City in 1917 to become director of the American Union Against Militarism, which became the ACLU three years later.

On October 30, 1918, Baldwin was sentenced to one year in prison for being a conscientious objector (one who refuses to participate in armed combat out of a moral objection). The judge imposed the full penalty on Baldwin on the grounds that the laws of a democratic society cannot be broken, regardless of the possible moral justification on the part of the individual. After his release, Baldwin organized the American Fund for Public Service in 1922, and in 1925 he became chairman for the International Committee for Political Prisoners. He was also chairman of the board of the International League for the Rights of Man. Baldwin's interest in civil liberties took him to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Italy in 1927, and from 1938 to 1942 he was an instructor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Baldwin’s activities in various radical, labor, and peace movements were dictated by his conviction that the source of social progress lies in procuring freedom for minorities. In 1950 he retired as director of the ACLU in New York City.

In addition to numerous pamphlets and articles on civil liberties, Baldwin published Juvenile Courts and Probation (with Bernard Flexner, 1914), Liberty Under the Soviets (1928), Civil Liberties and Industrial Conflict (with Clarence B. Randall, 1938), and A New Slavery, Forced Labor (1953). Baldwin also published a collection of revolutionary pamphlets written by Russian anarchist theorist Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin (edited, 1927).