Description
Description
The Subject Files series contains articles, reports, court documents, and other materials collected by the ACLU during the course of their work. The main subjects are drugs, homelessness, and Supreme Court nominations, especially of Robert Bork. Other significant subjects in this series include campaign finance, discrimination, environmental equity and racism, school pension plans, state constitutions, and welfare.
Collection Creator
History
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is the pre-eminent civil liberties organization in the United States, utilizing litigation, lobbying, and public education to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Since its inception in 1920, the ACLU has played a part in nearly every significant American social or political issue in the 20th and 21st centuries. Its primary aims have been the defense of the freedoms of speech and press, the separation of church and state, the free exercise of religion, due process of law, equal protection of the law, and privacy rights of all citizens.
The ACLU was established in 1920 to protect the constitutional freedoms granted in the Bill of Rights. It grew out of the Civil Liberties Bureau of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), which defended the rights of conscientious objectors and the free speech rights of war protesters. In October 1917, this group became an independent organization, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), led by Roger Baldwin and Crystal Eastman. They formed the ACLU on January 19, 1920 to address postwar civil liberties violations and to secure amnesty for wartime dissidents, with Baldwin serving as executive director.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, labor and political speech issues predominated, along with resisting all forms of censorship and working for amnesty and the repeal of criminal syndicalism laws. Its highest-profile case during this time was to challenge the Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of evolution by defending John T. Scopes in the famous Dayton, Tennessee “Monkey Trial.” Following the outbreak of war in Europe in 1939, its focus returned to conscientious objection and freedom of speech during wartime, and to condemning the internment of Japanese aliens and Japanese-American citizens, and then to combating postwar attacks on civil liberties through the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Smith Act, state loyalty oaths, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) surveillance. The ACLU also established committees to address racial discrimination and discrimination against women during this period.
Beginning in 1950, the ACLU experienced significant growth and change. Roger Baldwin, who fostered a small, centrally-controlled unit, retired as executive director in 1950 to take a more ambassadorial role. His successor, Patrick Murphy Malin, oversaw a change in the ACLU's structure to a strengthened network of affiliates at the state and regional levels, which monitor for civil liberties infringements and initiate cases in their geographic areas. Largely due to the stronger affiliates, the ACLU grew significantly and reached over 60,000 members by 1962, when John de J. Pemberton became executive director. During this period, the ACLU was also continuously renegotiating the scope and nature of its work, reconciling the multitude of views from affiliates and members. Starting with the civil rights movement, those that favored a broad definition of what constituted civil liberties work won out, as the organization took on cases involving abortion rights, women's rights, affirmative action, and other areas far from the basic principle of protecting First Amendment rights on which the ACLU was founded.
During the 1950s, the ACLU came to the defense of Communists as it challenged the actions of McCarthy and HUAC on the tenet that only peoples' acts, not their beliefs, should be penalized; anything less infringed on First Amendment principles. A related battle was fought over censorship and freedom of speech, as national security concerns led to the desire to protect people from materials that promoted Communism or were perceived to erode community morals. The ACLU challenged any censorship attempts as a fundamental attack on free speech and accepted no infringement in any form. This absolutist stance resulted in one of its most controversial cases, defending the right of American Nazis to parade through Skokie, Illinois, home to many Holocaust survivors, in 1977. The ACLU won the court case but lost a large portion of its membership who resigned in protest. Executive director Aryeh Neier, who had assumed the post in 1970, stepped down and was replaced by Ira Glasser, who stabilized the organization through an emergency appeal to supporters that raised over $500,000.
Another significant, and sometimes controversial, area of work for the ACLU in the 1950s was its efforts to enforce the separation of church and state. Working to end state-sanctioned forms of religion, the ACLU sought to abolish school prayer, various government subsidies for religious education, teaching religious concepts such as creationism or intelligent design in public school science classes, and other connections between government and religious activity. By the late 1960s, changes in public attitude toward church/state issues cemented the organization's gains, although fundamentalist religions continue challenging the laws.
Most of the ACLU's work from the 1950s onward involves the more ambiguous and complex realm of civil rights, helping secure the rights or expanding the concept of those same rights for those who had been denied them in the past such as African-Americans, women, students, homosexuals, children, the mentally-ill, prisoners, and the accused. Projects were established to address each issue through changing the law, educating the public, and raising their own funds. The ACLU participated in all the major civil rights cases, arguing for freedom of speech and association rights that allowed the sit-ins, freedom rides, and other methods employed by the movement, and won many important cases before the Supreme Court.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the ACLU faced a shift in public sentiment against its views, to the point that ACLU membership was identified as out-of-the-mainstream, and it became more difficult to secure Supreme Court victories. The ACLU re-fought a number of battles over such issues as censorship, school prayer, creationism, and abortion rights. In 2001, Anthony D. Romero succeeded Glasser as executive director. As of 2012, the ACLU continues its program of litigation, lobbying, and public education to protect Americans' Constitutional rights, focusing on First Amendment rights, equal protection under the law, due process, and privacy, and working to extend rights to minorities that have traditionally been denied them. The ACLU handles close to 6,000 cases annually and appears before the United States Supreme Court more than any other organization except the U.S. Department of Justice.
The ACLU has been responsible for what historian Samuel Walker has called “a revolution of law and public attitudes toward individual liberty.” Walker estimates that modern constitutional law has been shaped in no small measure by the ACLU, with the organization involved in some 80% of the landmark cases in the twentieth century. The ACLU has fostered the growth of tolerance, fought to end racial discrimination, promoted a legal definition of privacy rights, and defended the rights of the unpopular, the powerless, and the despised.
Find More
Topics
Subject Terms
Genre Terms
Other Finding Aids
The American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subject Files Series forms part of Subgroup 3 of the American Civil Liberties Union Records (Call Number MC001). Due to the large volume of the ACLU records, multiple online finding aids have been created:
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 1, The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917-1947
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, 1947-1995 (bulk 1950-1980)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Organizational Matters Series, 1947-1995
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Project Files Series, 1964-1979
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Subject Files Series, 1921-1990
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Legal Case Files Series, 1933-1990
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Printed Materials Series, 1917-1995
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, Audiovisual Materials Series, circa 1920-1995
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, 1864-2006 (bulk 1970-1995)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Organizational Matters, 1919-2006 (bulk 1970-2000)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Project Files Series, 1877-2000 (bulk 1970-1995)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Subject Files Series, 1969-1996
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Legal Case Files Series, 1864-2001 (bulk 1965-1995)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Regional Offices Series, 1894-2005 (bulk 1970-1990)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 3, Printed and Audiovisual Materials Series, 1918-2006 (bulk 1978-2006)
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 4, 2011 Accessions, 1933-2002 (bulk 1970-2000)
Related Material
American Civil Liberties Union, Washington, D.C. Office Records
The Mudd Manuscript Library holds the papers of several ACLU officers:
Roger Nash Baldwin Papers
Peggy Lamson Collection on Roger Baldwin
Osmond K. Fraenkel Diaries
Jeffrey E. Fuller Papers
Arthur Garfield Hays Papers
Laura W. Murphy Papers
Carol Pitchersky Papers
Nadine Strossen Papers
The Mudd Library also holds the records of several organizations involved in civil rights, including:
American United for the Separation of Church and State Records
Fund for the Republic Records
Law Students Civil Rights Research Council Records
World Press Freedom Committee Records
The Manuscripts Division at Princeton University holds the P.E.N. American Center Records.
Alternative Form Available
American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 1, The Roger Baldwin Years is available on microfilm.
Public records of the ACLU from 1917 to 1989, from American Civil Liberties Union Records: Subgroup 2, have been microfilmed by the Microfilming Corporation of America (MCA) and University Microfilms International (UMI). These records include minutes of the board of directors, mailings to the board of directors, biennial conference papers, policy guides, the national legal docket, organization manuals, constitution and bylaws, legal briefs, and publications.
Princeton University Library Finding Aids 
View Entire Finding Aid
Download Finding Aid