# Roger Baldwin at 96: An LR Interview The founder of the ACLU reflects on his fascinating life as a free-speech and anti-war activist. **URL:** **By** Andrew L. Moore **Published:** January 1, 1981 --- “In point of fact, today’s robust civil liberties movement is largely the outgrowth of the early activity of one man, Roger Baldwin.” Those of us who care about civil liberties may sometimes take it for granted that our Constitution contains valuable restraints on government power. But it is only in the last 60 years, since the anti-war movement during World War I, that the Supreme Court has even been asked to rule on questions like freedom of speech and conscription — and its earliest rulings took for granted the supremacy of government power over individual rights. In point of fact, today’s robust civil liberties movement is largely the outgrowth of the early activity of one man, Roger Baldwin. During his lifetime, Baldwin has seen both the growth of government and the growth of an awareness of the importance of limiting government. The very term civil liberties was first used in this country in 1917, in naming the National Civil Liberties Bureau, founded by Baldwin and others to fight for freedom of speech and against the draft. Baldwin was vilified, his telephone was tapped, the offices of the National Civil Liberties Bureau were raided and searched at gun point by federal agents, and Baldwin himself went to jail— for a year as a conscientious objector—on the day the war ended. In 1920, the National Civil Liberties Bureau officially became the American Civil Liberties Union. When New York freelancer Peter Donald, who is working on a biography of Roger Baldwin, told us that Baldwin would be willing to be interviewed for _The Libertarian Review_ (“I didn’t think they’d be interested in me,” he said), we were delighted. It is not everyday that we get the chance to speak with someone who has changed society in the direction of freedom, and we were fascinated by the similarities and differences between our outlook and his. The only label that Baldwin will accept for himself is _pacifist_, for instance. So we asked Peter Donald to do the interview. LR: Could you talk about the various sources of your ideas? What were the main influences on you during your childhood in New England? Baldwin: I realized in my suburban town outside of Boston, in my early teens, that there were people in town who had views different from the majority. They were odd people who had certain distinctions, some of them nationally famous. I sought them out. I had an instinct for the odd, the unusual, the unconventional. And these were people who reflected old New England values, who were abolitionists, whose ancestors had been participants in the Revolution— these were people with public spirit and with an interest in public affairs. And they had what might be called libertarian views in the sense that they were committed to the basic principles of human liberty, of personal freedom, of democracy, and of resistance to authority. Their concept of the state was a free state that served people but did not oppress them. They were resistant to repression of any kind, most conspicuously, of course, to slavery. I don’t remember any incidents which aroused me when I was growing up in our community. There were no race riots; there were no political riots. It was a very orderly community. But the acceptance of these basic principles of personal freedom, and of the role of government as a protector of that freedom, impressed me when I was very young. And when I got to Harvard College after graduating from the local high school, I at once, or fairly quickly, anyhow, sought out the people in Phillips Brooks House, which was the religious center, the people who had ideas of political and social freedom. I got involved then in what you would call social work, with students and with institutions in Boston and Cambridge which were serving the interests of disadvantaged people. And that all seemed to me part of the same tradition. It was a tradition of help, of self help and helping others, which squared with the notion of independent personal action not assisted by the state in any way. I didn’t meet the state very often. I met the state very little, as a matter of fact. And I wasn’t aware of it as a force in life or the lives of people around me until it came to the larger questions of war and peace and the conflict between capital and labor. I heard about big strikes near our community, and of efforts by the government to discourage workers from organizing trade unions. But I don’t think I was particularly gripped by that, then. I was later. I had a very strong pro-labor, trade-union bias later, but not then. There was an atmosphere at Harvard, a general atmosphere of tolerance of diverse views, a tolerance of dissent—and some radical views about changes in the basis of society, but I didn’t take to them. I remained committed to the essential system under which we lived, capitalism, with a desire of course to change it and soften it and to diminish the impulses of selfishness and greed. The general principle of freedom for people to do what they wanted to do without interference by the authorities was accepted. It was the common assumption. LR: You graduated from Harvard in 1905 and went to St. Louis for the next ten years. Why did you go? How does that decision fit into the eventual course of your career? Baldwin: My philosophy and attitude when I took a job in social work and university teaching in St. Louis was not very different from what I’d always assumed to be the American way: the concept of freedom and of voluntary organization and private organization doing as much as it could to organize social relations without state help. I was always in private organizations in St. Louis, except in one case when I became a probation officer for the children’s court—the juvenile court—and remained in that post for three years. In that capacity, I exercised some of the functions of the state, myself. Except for that one experience, all of my contact was with social agencies of a private character. What I’m trying to indicate is that the atmosphere around me was non-governmental. The government was something that, at that time, anyhow, was not a protector of people’s interests. It was not the welfare state; that was a long time in coming. You know, when I taught sociology at Washington University, I don’t think the power of the state, of the social regulations which the state represented and enforced, was really evident to me. LR: So as time went on in St. Louis, you began to question the role that the state should play, how much power it should actually have, and began to question the legitimacy of the state? Baldwin: Right. But that was aside from the immediate issues around me. That was a personal search for some kind of vision of the future. I looked into socialism and the local people who espoused socialism, and I read some socialist literature, but I didn’t see much that was helpful in that direction because it seemed to indicate powerful force in government, with the government owning everything—industry as well as the armed forces, all the means of production and distribution. And I rejected it. I never voted the Socialist ticket. I felt friendly to the ideals of democratic socialism, but I didn’t see any way of bringing them about, especially by making government more powerful. And then I found, rather by accident—through Emma Goldman, who came to town to lecture—I found a whole literature of freedom and a network (I must call it that, because it wasn’t an organization) of historic and recurrent characters who represented in a different way from socialism —some of them called themselves anarchists and some called themselves libertarians, and they were very few, they were only a small number of voices—the aspirations of the past in various countries. They embraced Walt Whitman in the United States, and Thoreau. People of literary character, not politicians. LR: Isn’t it ironic that in your search for answers you were eventually brought back to people from your very background, from New England? You meet someone like Emma Goldman, a foreigner, and she steers you back to American thinkers like Thoreau and Emerson. This is something that Americans have had trouble understanding, viewing anarchism as an entirely foreign phenomenon, ignoring a strong libertarian tradition within our own borders that was related to anarchist thought. Baldwin: Emma Goldman, being a Russian and having come to the United States as an immigrant, had European roots. Most of the people from whom she had learned were Europeans, some of the great playwrights like Ibsen, and Russian writers like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy—Kropotkin especially. And I was introduced to their literature as well as to the literature in this country which she embraced. She accepted Thoreau and Emerson as exponents of a libertarian view of society, and the publication which she ran for a few years, _Mother Earth_, quoted them often. Emma Goldman herself was a very broad-minded woman, never a dogmatist, who would accept all evidence of principle leading to a freer society. Always she talked about freedom, freedom in a very practical sense, because she was a contemporary participant in struggles for freedom for the _I looked into socialism,_ _but it seemed to indicate_ _powerful force in government, and I rejected it._ working class, and she was regarded by the foreign working class here as a spokesman for a very influential section of the trade union movement which was more libertarian than it was socialist—although the dominant influences in the trade union movement were socialist. I knew her from the time she first arrived in St. Louis on a lecture tour until the time she died, many years later. I kept in touch with her. We corresponded, wherever she was — in Europe, Russia, and in the last years in Canada. We had different ideas, because I came around, at one point anyhow, to accepting the welfare state, and I thought the Communist state was, in its early origins, very hopeful for the emancipation of people from the evils of the capitalist system. But then, of course, I discovered—after Emma discovered it—that the state itself was by nature oppressive, and the Communist state became even more oppressive than the Western capitalist states or the feudal states. It could not realize its ideas because of its powers. Once it got power, it insisted on holding it, and power was exercised primarily by the same instruments that had exercised it before; namely, the police, the courts, the prisons. On purely political grounds, too. Any opposition was treated as if it were criminal. But Emma Goldman herself was not the rabble rouser she was supposed to be. She was a motherly, quiet, and very sensible woman, who got her bad reputation from her association in the early days with events which shocked people, like the assassination of McKinley by a man who said he was influenced by her lectures to do what he did. And her close friend Alexander Berkman tried to shoot Mr. \[Henry Clay\] Frick, the head of a big corporation. He missed, but he spent a long time in prison for it. And she stuck to him when he got out, just as he had beforehand. That gave her a very bad reputation. LR: Was she bitter about her reputation? Baldwin: I wouldn’t say she was bitter. She was defiant. People didn’t realize how compassionate and motherly she really was. When she was on the lecture platform she gave the impression of someone who was greatly concerned with what was going on and the direction things were taking. She was defiant of the existing system—she didn’t have a good word for it. Hardly a word. LR: You’ve told me that you became dissatisfied with social work as “do-gooding.” Was this because of Emma Goldman’s influence? Baldwin: Well I wouldn’t say that even Emma Goldman was above doing good, in the sense that she would serve people’s needs. She was a trained nurse, and as such of course she had to serve people’s needs. But the general social work system I think she regarded as a concession that people made to capitalism. In other words, they were trying to amend the evils of capitalism through social work. It’s not a correct description of what they actually were doing because they were doing what the welfare state has taken over now, on a much larger scale. But the attitude was “we fortunate people help you unfortunate people.” There was a condescension in it. And she rejected that and I finally came to reject it. LR: You left St. Louis and went to New York in 1917. This was because of the immediate threat of war. Can you describe your early activity in the anti-war movement? Baldwin: I went to help a movement of very prominent reformers against the war. It couldn’t be said that they had enough influence to stop anything, but they were a voice opposed to American entry into the war, and a voice for conciliation and for a war settlement, using the United States as a neutral influence among the belligerents. That was the hope. But we very soon found out, as soon as the war was declared, that we couldn’t work along that line. So we turned to the defense of people who were prosecuted or arrested or were conscientious objectors to war, and thus we became an organization that made defense of our American principles of freedom our primary objective, the First Amendment principles of the Constitution and the traditions of our colonial leaders. LR: You are speaking of the founding of the Civil Liberties Bureau, aren’t you? Could you tell us a little more about it? Baldwin: The National Civil Liberties Bureau in the First World War was the first organized effort to extend the protection of the Bill of Rights to everybody, indiscriminately; not to confine it to some particular cause or group of people. Before then, various movements organized for particular objectives had cropped up and died down—in defense of women’s rights, or trade-union rights, or to end slavery. But this was the first with a general objective and I was, I guess, the originator of the movement. Because it was necessary, not because I had any idea that it was novel at all. It became evident that people, not only pacifists in the First World War, but others, too—trade unionists, Socialists— needed defense lawyers. And the idea was to get lawyers to enlist for this defense, or any other defense—to put themselves on a list as volunteers. So the Bureau started. We were very fortunately located in Washington and New York. In Washington, we had close access to the government, even had a few friends in Congress who were opponents of the war. And in New York there was a very strong anti-war feeling, especially among the foreign population—the Irish and German population—and it had some friendly papers. In Washington, although the policies were tough and public opinion was adamant in its opposition to opponents of the war we nevertheless functioned, and we had enough money and members and activity to keep us encouraged. The philosophy behind it was not only the Bill of Rights and our appeal to the courts in terms of freedom of conscience and of religion for the conscientious objector—and freedom of speech and association and the press for the opponents of war—but it was also a philosophy of of individual liberty. Because the Bill of Rights was based upon the concept that in a democracy the people make the government, and therefore the government is the servant of the people. A lot of governments, our own included, have at 30 the libertarian Review times acted as if the government was the boss and the people its servants. We took the other view, not only the view of the Constitution, but the view of libertarians generally, that the role of government is to serve the people; the role of government is not to be oppressive. And therefore the Civil Liberties Bureau was dedicated to the underlying philosophy of the government as the servant of the people, with acceptance, of course, of the role of the courts as the interpreter. And that has been our role ever since: to appeal to the courts for an interpretation of where the government’s authority ends and the people’s authority begins. That is essentially the compromise that you have to make in order to keep society together. LR: So what you have done, through the ACLU and before that through the National Civil Liberties Bureau, is to apply principles as best you could, with as little compromise as possible, to correct very specific abuses of the individual by the state, pretty much on a case by case basis. Is that accurate? Baldwin: Yes. But there are always compromises. That’s what the courts are for. Take the advocacy of violence, for instance—the immediate advocacy of violence, where the threat of it is so acute as to be hardly separable from the violence itself. If you say, “Go and shoot that son of a bitch,” and someone starts doing it, you cannot excuse that on the grounds that it’s free speech. LR: But In World War I, you didn’t compromise. You became a conscientious objector. Baldwin: Well, I was one all along. But yes, when I was called for military service, I refused. I was opposed to any kind of conscription, and I still am. I don’t think the state as an institution should have the moral right to order its citizens to kill others. LR: Do you think that Americans owe anything to their country in terms of some kind of service? What about non-military duty? Baldwin: No, I don’t think we owe anything. LR: In your mind is conscription a form of slavery? Baldwin: Well, conscription is the power of the government to take a man out of his occupation and his home and send him abroad, in defense of the country, as they say. And not just in defense of his country, but to send him abroad in any war that the administration engages in, to risk his life for whatever cause the government tells him he must risk it for. And he has no choice. It’s the ultimate power that the government can exercise over your life. Of course, making war against another nation is the ultimate expression of state power, because there you are attacking a whole nation, a whole people. But in relation to your own people, conscription is the ultimate power. It takes you away from your home and your business. It makes you perform a service to which you might have very profound objections. Yes, it’s a form of slavery to be completely in the power of the government, and we’ve always objected to it on that ground. We tried to object in the very first month of the war and carried a case to the United States Supreme Court on the grounds that conscription was unconstitutional. We lost it. LR: The only contemporary political party that believes you should have won is the Libertarian Party. What do you think of it? Baldwin: From what I know of the Libertarian Party, its principles conform to the concepts that I’ve always associated with libertarianism, but it has elements in it, as I understand it, that have more dubious purposes. They have the desire to be relieved of a lot of government regulation, a desire to be free of government interference, and they therefore have some doctrines which for me have little practical reality, like no taxation. You have to have some kind of taxation in order to live in a community. But the Libertarians are a very refreshing innovation in our political life, because they’ve produced a new principle and a new attitude to government. LR: What you object to is their economic position? Baldwin: I’m not objecting. I only say that the practical program which they have adopted cannot work in a society like ours. They can’t abolish the tax system. You can’t abolish every kind of regulation to keep the peace. I’m not familiar with all of their platform, but I know the general direction. LR: Tell us what “civil liberties” means to you, and also “libertarianism.” Baldwin: “Civil liberties,” as expressed in the Constitution, is a reflection of natural rights, and natural rights are the rights that people are born with. The right of speech, and of association, and of conscience as a guide to what’s right and what’s wrong, a sense of justice. Those are civil liberties. And they have a basis in the nature of man and not in the nature of constitutions. and I think that, since that’s so, they will last forever. As long as there are people, there will be the same demands. Libertarianism? Well, that reflects the same origin. And I would think that that is the embodiment of an outlook on human institutions. But to have an influence in determining their character, there will have to be compromises. All social institutions are compromises. And libertarianism as a doctrine would have to compromise in order to meet the necessities of social life. It has always compromised. In all movements you have to have the prophets and the preachers who give you the doctrines, and then you have to have the leaders and the practical men who apply them. And when they apply them, you always compromise something or other in order to make it work. I can’t conceive of any libertarian society that could fully put into effect and practice the principles it espouses without some compromise. There is always some point beyond which you can’t go. LR: When you look at what’s happening in the world now, what kind of advice can you give a young person? Baldwin: Well, I can’t give any advice about what to do, because each person has to figure that out according to his talents and instincts and ambitions. The way you’re going to think is something else. I think you have a right, even in the face of the kind of a world we’ve got (which is a world of power and fear), you have a right to hope. There is simply no other way, except through peace, by which the nations and peoples of the world can get along, and I think it’s justified therefore to have faith in the ultimate triumph—and it’s not too far off either—of sense, the common sense of people. Peaceful relations are the only answer. And world order, a one-world order, is necessary to human survival. For instance, nations are the great obstacle to peace, and we’ve got to get rid of nations some day and have just peoples related to each other, and a world order in which they can be represented in various institutions. I think it’s possible that out of the present dangers and conflicts, within say fifty years, we will have to develop an alternative to the arms and fear of the present time—where order isn’t based on who has the most guns.