No surprise.

The American Civil Liberties Union was actually named the National Civil Liberties Bureau until 1920. Why the name change? An investigation was launched into its defense of seditious individuals. The organization was accused of using its resources to assist socialist and communist efforts.

The current ACLU was founded in 1920 by Roger Baldwin, Walter Nelles, and Crystal Eastment.

Baldwin was a pacifist who opposed the United States’ involvement in World War I. He was also an admirer of anarchist Emma Goldman, who herself admired the Bolshevik revolution. He was also a member of the Industrial Workers of the World. Baldwin once said, “Communism, of course, is the goal.”

Walter Nelles was also a pacifist and opponent of American involvement in the war. Nelles once declared, “The world is rising upon one of the periodic waves which carry it onward towards civilized adjustment for human welfare. The propulsive force is the awakened working class. That class is organizing its power. It is formulating its purposes. It matters greatly to civilization that its purposes should be intelligent and its power sanely guided — that aspiration rather than resentment should be its motive — that its struggle should be towards a goal rather than against an enemy.”

Crystal Eastman was a socialist, once called the “most dangerous woman in America”. She also opposed the war and founded “peace” organizations. She co-edited the radical publication The Liberator, which favorably covered the Bolshevik revolution and actually became an organ publication of the Communist Party of America in 1922. It was finally merged with another publication to form The Worker’s Monthly, today known as Political Affairs Magazine.

So the fact that founders of the ACLU were admirers of Stalin comes as no surprise, though it’s nice to see being brought to the public’s attention:

Noted author Paul Kengor has unearthed declassified letters and other documents in the Soviet Comintern archives linking early leaders of the ACLU with the Communist Party.

Kengor found a May 23, 1931 letter in the archives signed by ACLU founder Roger Baldwin, written on ACLU stationery, to then American Communist Party Chairman William Z. Foster asking him to help ACLU Chairman Harry Ward with his then-upcoming trip to Stalin’s Russia.

The letter suggests Ward intended to visit the Soviet Union to find “evidence from Soviet Russia” that would undermine the capitalist profit motive.

To his credit, Baldwin eventually recognized the horrors of the Communist Russia. But before then he wrote a loving book about the Bolshevik revolution. Verum Serum quotes from the chapter on freedom of the press:

THE most important of the controls exercised by the dictatorship is that on all sources of information: the press and publications. It far outweighs in its effects the more dramatic police activities of the G.P.U., for it concerns not the minority of active opponents but the whole population of Russia.

The Soviet Constitution insures to the workers “effective liberty of opinion” by putting “an end to the dependence of the press upon capital; transferring to the working class and the peasants all the technical and material resources necessary for the publication of newspapers, books, pamphlets, and other printed matter.”

This is a guarantee, not for the freedom of the press, but for its control in the interests of the workers and
peasants.

A whole bunch of fun.