The ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union was born from a crackdown. During and after the First World War, the government jailed war protesters under the Espionage Act and rounded up radicals in the Red Scare of 1919 and 1920, trampling free speech in the name of security. In 1920 Roger Baldwin and a group of allies founded the ACLU to defend the civil liberties the Constitution guaranteed but the state was ignoring — taking the Bill of Rights, in effect, as its permanent client.

The organization announced itself to the country in a Tennessee courtroom. In the 1925 Scopes trial it backed a teacher prosecuted for teaching evolution, staging a national debate over science, religion, and free speech. From the start the ACLU took cases others would not, defending the right to speak regardless of what was said, and challenging the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War even as the policy enjoyed wide support.

That principle — that civil liberties must be defended for everyone or they protect no one — has made the ACLU perennially controversial. It has represented clients across the political spectrum, and its willingness to defend the speech rights of groups it finds repugnant has drawn fire from left and right alike. Over the decades its docket expanded from free speech to religious liberty, privacy, due process, and the rights of the accused.

Today the ACLU is one of the most powerful legal-advocacy organizations in the country, a litigation machine that fights its battles in the courts and the court of public opinion. Whether its critics see a guardian of freedom or a defender of the indefensible often depends on whose rights are at stake in a given case — which is, in a sense, exactly the point the organization was founded to make.