THE PAPERS OF ROGER NASH BALDWIN (1885-1981)
from the Seeley G Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University

The American Civil Liberties Union and International Affairs

The Roger Nash Baldwin Papers document the life and career of Roger Baldwin,a prominent and active American civil libertarian for almost all of hisprodigiously long life. Baldwin is remembered first and foremost as a founder ofthe American Civil Liberties Union. Many of the papers in this collection document his involvement with the conscientious objection movement that served as the fore runner to the ACLU and with the Union itself. He served as both its executive director from its foundation in 1920 to his retirement in 1950 and as an advisor from that date until his death in 1981. However, Baldwin cast his net much wider than just the ACLU. During the 1920s and 1930s, he was involved with various left-wing political organisations, including the Industrial Workers of the World. Following the end of World War II, he served as an advisor to the U.S. Army and the United Nations in Germany, Austria, Japan, and Korea, guiding the establishment of democracy in those countries, and he was for many years chair of the International League for the Rights of Man. He spoke and wrote widely, most often on issues of civil liberties and human rights, and also taught periodically throughout his life. The papers, which include correspondence, subject files, memoranda, writings, speeches, notes and photographs, document all aspects of his public life, as well as some portion ofhis personal life.

In particular, there is strong material in this collection on:

The American Civil Liberties Union, 1920-1981
Baldwin's travels to the Soviet Union, Japan, Korea and Germany
Civil Rights issues in the United States, Japan, Germany and in Puerto Rico
Communist and Radical political organisations in the United States, 1918-1939
International affairs, US foreign policy and foreign relations
The Scopes Trial
The Sacco-Vanzetti Case
Correspondence with Emma Goldman
the Soviet Union
Puerto Rico
the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
the First World War, 1914-1918
Conscientious Objectors in the United States
his year in prison as a Conscientious Objector, 1918-1919
Communism and Baldwin's break with Communism and other Radicals in 1939
the League against War and Fascism
the Robert Marshall Civil Liberties Trust Fund
the National Civil Liberties Bureau
the Japan Civil Liberties Union
the International League against Imperialism
Human Rights issues
the International League for the Rights of Man

Roger Nash Baldwin was born in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, on January 21, 1884 into a prominent Boston family. His parents were Frank Fenno Baldwin and Lucy Cushing (Nash) Baldwin, and he was the first of six children, three boysand three girls. His parents were Unitarians with strong liberal connections; W.E. B. Dubois was a Baldwin family friend and a frequent guest at the house. Baldwin's upbringing in this atmosphere in Wellesley, where he attended public school, instilled in him a life-long sympathy for the underdog. He attended Harvard, graduating in 1905 with an A.B. and an A.M. (received after a summercourse in sociology).

On the advice of his father's friend and lawyer, Louis D. Brandeis, he decided to become a social worker. From 1906 to 1917 he lived and worked in St. Louis, determined to make his own way rather than depend on the family connections that would have helped him in Boston. While there he worked in the neighbourhood settlements, served as chief officer of the St. Louis Juvenile Court and voluntary secretary of the National Probation Association, and founded the sociology department at Washington University, where he taught from 1906 to 1910. While in St. Louis he wrote (with Bernard Flexner) Juvenile Courts and Probation, which remained a standard in the field for many years. Ironically, in the 1960s the ACLU challenged the standards promulgated in the book, citing the need to guarantee juveniles due process.

In St. Louis Baldwin became attracted to the radical political and social movements that greatly affected his politics until the 1930s. He was a close friend of the anarchist Emma Goldman and he moved in left-wing circles. During the 1920s he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.), and in 1927 he visited the Soviet Union, producing from his trip a book entitled LibertyUnder the Soviets, published in 1928. He broke with the Communists and other radicals only in 1939, after having been horrified by the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

Baldwin left St. Louis in 1917, when the United States entered World War I, in order to become involved with the pacifist movement. He was a member of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), an organization which lobbied firstagainst U.S. entrance into the war and later for a negotiated peace. He also worked with the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), an arm of the AUAM founded to defend conscientious objectors but which quickly broadened its scopeto include in its mission defence of the freedoms of speech, press, and conscience. In 1918 Baldwin was called up for military service, but as aconscientious objector he refused to go. His arrest, trial, and conviction made headlines, and he spent a year in jail, calling it "my vacation on the government."

After his release, Baldwin spent four months in the Midwest working as an industrial labourer in several factories, but he was soon persuaded by his war-time NCLB colleagues to return to New York. The end of the war had not meant an end to civil liberties violations, which were being fanned by the post-war "Red Scare," and in 1920 the NCLB was transformed into the American Civil Liberties Union. Baldwin became its executive director.

Baldwin remained in this position until 1950. As executive director, he was intimately associated with two of the biggest cases with which the ACLU was involved in these years, the Scopes trial and the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In 1950 Baldwin resigned as executive director to become the ACLU's international adviser and to devote himself more fully to his work with the International League for the Rights of Man, where he served as chair for fifteen years. In that position he travelled extensively; his ports of call included the Middle East, Cuba, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Peru, Nigeria, many Western European countries, Poland, and the Soviet Union.

Baldwin became involved with international affairs in 1947, when the War Department invited him to go to Japan and South Korea to assist in developing civil liberties agencies in the infant democracies. He founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union, and the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun in recognition of his service to Japanese democracy. In 1948 General Lucius Clay invited Baldwin to Germany and Austria to perform a similar service in those two countries; he returned to Germany several times in subsequent years.

Baldwin was also extremely active in the study and protection of civilliberties in Puerto Rico, setting up a commission to deal with the issue in the1960s. A close friend of Puerto Rico's Governor Lui Muñoz Marín, Baldwin travelled to Puerto Rico frequently in his later years. He often taught aseminar on constitutional rights at the University of Puerto Rico law school.

Baldwin was connected to various educational institutions throughout his life. In addition to his stint at Washington University and his recurrent seminar course at the University of Puerto Rico, he taught several courses at the New School for Social Research in New York. He served for many years on the Overseers' Visiting Committee to the Harvard Economics Department. He also received numerous honorary degrees, including ones from Brandeis, Columbia, Haverford, Washington University, and Yale. His other honours included the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded in 1981.

Baldwin remained active right until the end of his long life; in a series of memoranda on old age, he attributed his long evity to his constant activity. He was an avid outdoors man who loved canoeing and bird-watching. He was a director and vice-president of the National Audubon Society and donated some of his land in New Jersey to the Audubon Society as a bird sanctuary.

While in St. Louis, Baldwin adopted two boys who had come to the attention of the Juvenile Court, Oral James and Otto Stolz. James followed his adoptive father to prison as a conscientious objector during World War I, while Stolz served in the army in France.

After being released from prison in 1919, Baldwin married Madeleine Zabriskie Doty, a journalist and feminist who never took Baldwin's name. They divorced in 1936, although they had not lived together for over a decade, and in 1936 Baldwin married Evelyn Preston. Evie had been married before and had two small boys, Carl and Roger, who chose to take Baldwin's name long before their mother, a feminist, did. Roger and Evie had one daughter, Helen. Evie died in 1962 at the age of 64 from cancer. Helen died in 1979 at the age of 41 from cancer. Baldwin himself died of heart failure on August 26, 1981, at theage of 97.

Arrangement of the Material in the Collection
The Baldwin Papers are divided into six series as follows:
- Series 1, Correspondence (1897-1981)
- Series 2, Subject Files (1911-1981)
- Series 3, Writings and Speeches (1912-1978)
- Series 4, Miscellaneous (1922-1981)
- Series 5, Photographs, (1885?-1981)
- Series 6, Tribute Album (1950)

Series 1, 2, and 3 are arranged alphabetically by subject. Series 4 and 5 arearranged by subject.
Series 6 consists of a two-volume album presented to Baldwin at the Thirtieth Anniversary of the ACLU.

Series Descriptions

The Baldwin Papers consist mainly of typescript and manuscript documents,including personal correspondence, business correspondence, memoranda, published and typescript articles, manuscripts and notes for speeches, notes from travels, and printed material. There are also a considerable number of photographs and an album presented to Baldwin at the Thirtieth Anniversary of the ACLU, on February 22, 1950. The vast majority of the documents are in English, but there is also material in Spanish, German, and French, much but not all of which is translated. While there are materials relating to all eras of Baldwin's life, from his childhood in Wellesley, Massachusetts to his death in 1981, some eras are more fully documented than others. The collection contains no documents from his undergraduate years at Harvard. Much of the material relating to Baldwin's term as executive director of the ACLU (1920-1950) is located in the ACLU Archives. The papers in this collection relating directly to the ACLU date almost exclusively from 1950. The only exceptions are papers relating to the Scopes trial, which Baldwin managed, and the Sacco-Vanzetti case, which are relatively well represented here. There are also surprisingly few documents relating to Baldwin's involvement with the International League for the Rights of Man.

On the other hand, the materials relating to Baldwin's year in prison, his travels to the Soviet Union, Japan, Korea, and Germany, his interest in Puerto Rico, and his years in St. Louis are relatively rich. Baldwin's FBI file, although censored, sheds light on his involvement in radical politics. Also of interest are the memoranda Baldwin wrote throughout his later years about people he had known, experiences he had, and beliefs he had held. The photographs include many formal portraits of Baldwin, from his first baby picture to several taken while he was in his nineties, snapshots of dinners held in his honour, a few family pictures, pictures taken during his trips to Japan, Korea, andGermany, and various other photographs of his public life.

An unusual feature of this collection is that Baldwin himself has includedspecifically for the researcher occasional explanations of who people were, whathis connection with them was, or why he saved something. Baldwin also wrote a series of memoranda about his life, people he knew, and his opinions and attitudes. These autobiographical add end to the collection infuse the collection with an unusually immediate sense of Baldwin's presence.

Series 1, Correspondence (1897-1981) consists mainly of personal and business correspondence. Some of the documents are not letters per se, but they relate to correspondence Baldwin had and for this reason have been included in the correspondence series rather than with the subject files. This series gives a fairly complete picture of the diversity of Baldwin's interests, for his correspondence touched on all areas of his life. However, Baldwin had few long-term correspondents, perhaps detracting somewhat from the richness of thematerials in this series.

One of the long-term correspondences Baldwin did maintain was with Charlotte Ryman, a woman who acted as a godmother figure for him during his teenage years and beyond. His first letters to her represent the earliest written papers of the collection, dating from 1897. Also from this era are letters from Baldwin's mother, Lucy Cushing Nash Baldwin. Baldwin corresponded relatively frequently throughout the 'teens and early twenties with Emma Goldman, the anarchist who greatly affected his political thinking. Other notable correspondences, though not as substantive, were with Eleanor Roosevelt, Upton Sinclair, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Margaret Sanger. Other important names are also included in this series -- Mahatma Gandhi, Edward R. Murrow, John Kenneth Galbraith,Felix Frankfurter, Douglas MacArthur, John F. Kennedy - but Baldwin'scorrespondence with these people was slight. Unfortunately, many of the more important people in Baldwin's life, including Norman Thomas, John Haynes Holmes, Ernest Angell, and Baldwin's family, are under represented in this series.

More substantial are official and subject-related correspondence. Documents relating to Baldwin's time in St. Louis, many of which deal with his years at the Juvenile Court and the book he wrote with Bernard Flexner about Juvenile Court procedures, are located in this series. All the materials from his year inprison are also included here. Other significant correspondences include papers relating to the debate over civil rights in Okinawa and the Ryukus Islands, to Puerto Rico, to the ACLU after Baldwin's retirement as executive director, to Baldwin's term as an Overseer of the Harvard Economics Department, and to the Robert Marshall Civil Liberties Trust, of which Baldwin was a trustee.Correspondence also exists from many of the organisations with which Baldwin hadsome sort of involvement, such as the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Inter-American Association for Democracy and Freedom, the American League for Peace and Democracy, Americans for Democratic Action, the National Conference of Social Welfare, and various organisations relating to Spanish democracy and refugees.

There is an interesting booklet entitled Middle East Journey (56pp) in the file on the American Christian Palestine Committee, 1952-1955. A lot of material on Puerto Rico can be found in Boxes 12 and 13; on Juvenile Court Matters in Boxes 8 and 9; on India in Box 7; material on the ACLU in Box 2; andfiles on Baldwin?s year in prison as a Conscientious Objector, 1918-1919, in Boxes 11 and 12. Files of the St. Louis Correspondence are in Box 14 along withthree folders of correspondence with Charlotte M. Ryman, 1896-1918, material on the Sacco-Vanzetti Case, and two folders on the Roger Nash Baldwin Civil Liberties Foundation, 1967-1970.

Of unexpected interest may be the "Academic Requests" files, which include Baldwin's responses to queries from academics about a wide range of topics, including the Scopes trial, pacifism, and the ACLU. These, like the "Miscellaneous" and "ACLU" files, are organised chronologically by year, although in general no attempt has been made to organise the papers strictly in chronological order. Correspondence illuminating various views which Baldwin held are filed under the various subject headings, including "Gay Rights," "America," and "Israel-Palestine," to name a few. Occasionally, folders are grouped into subseries, which have then been filed alphabetically according to the subseries heading. The subseries in this series are Baldwin, Roger N; Birds; Communism; Harvard; India; Juvenile Court Matters; Political Prisoners; Prison; Puerto Rico; and St Louis Correspondence.

Series 2, Subject Files (1911-1981) contains a wide variety of materials relating to Baldwin's public life. The bulk of the documents in this series are notes, memoranda, printed matter, occasional articles, and other unpublished non-correspondence material. This series does not treat as broad a range of subjects as does the Correspondence Series, but the subjects to which the material relates are treated in much greater depth.

Of special interest are the subseries containing notes, documents, and printed matter from Baldwin's various trips abroad, including to Germany and Austria, Japan and Korea, and the Soviet Union. These contain many of the documents with which Baldwin worked, as well as form letters he wrote to friends at home about his experiences and his own notes and reflections. Correspondence relating to these trips is located in the Correspondence Series. The materials from his first trip to the Soviet Union are especially comprehensive, treatingmany aspects of life in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, including religion, national minorities issues, and youth. Particularly impressive is Baldwin's account of his visit to the Soviet Union in August 1967 (see Box 19, Folder 24) which includes comparisons with his trip 40 years earlier. It is full of vivid impressions covering life style, customs and the general feel of the place.

Boxes 17 and 18 contain the material on Japan and Korea. Box 18, Folder 4 contains Baldwin's excellent bound volume of notes (220pp) made during his visit to Japan and Korea in 1947. There is some very significant material on occupation policies in Japan. Pasted at the front of this volume is an explanatory note written by Roger Baldwin in 1968. It reads as follows:

"This volume contains some of the notes I made in Japan and Koreain the spring of 1947 when I was invited to help set up organizations of citizens to defend their rights. I also was asked to review occupation policies related to civil rights and to make recommendations. These notes deal with both efforts. They were bound after my return. I kept additional notes which were not typed and are long since destroyed. The ACLU files doubt less contain more, both of notes and correspondence. The circular letter reports I sent back to a list of friends and colleagues are here. I did not write up my observations because I am not a writer or reporter, and because they were material intended only for action. It was a great adventure, entirely novel for me, and if I had had the confidence I could write it up for publication I would have done so. It still stays with me as one of the most vivid and impressive few months of my life."

There is also a subseries called "Radicalism," which contains documents from various Communist and radical political organisations active inthe United States during the inter-war years, among them Cooperative Farms, Inc., the Industrial Division of the National Conference of Social Work, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Kuzbas Autonomous Industrial Colony, the League for Industrial Democracy, and the League for Mutual Aid Plan. Other subseries of interest are "African-Americans in St. Louis," with materials relating to issues of segregation in St. Louis during the years Baldwin worked there, "The National Conference of Charities and Corrections," with which Baldwin was involved in the 'teens, and "The ACLU."

Various other smaller subject files comprise the remainder of this collection. There is printed matter from a variety of war-time organisations, information relating to the Rosenberg Case, the Point Four Program, human rights, the Middle East, Micronesia, Baldwin's 1959 World Tour, and acontroversial profile about Baldwin published in the New Yorker.

Series 3, Writings and Speeches (1912-1978): Baldwin was a prolific writer and speaker, although his only books were Juvenile Courts and Probation, written while he was in St. Louis, Liberty Under the Soviets, written in 1928, and Civil Liberties and Industrial Conflict, a book of speeches Baldwin gave at Harvard University with industrialist Clarence B.Randall, which was published in 1938. Baldwin was working on an autobiography sporadically during the 1950s and 1960s, but it was never published. This autobiography was an off shoot of his contribution to Columbia University's Oral History Project and represented an expansion of his first series ofreminiscences recorded at Columbia in 1953. In 1963 Baldwin recorded his memories of the intervening ten years for the Oral History Project, but he never attempted to turn this second part into a book. Manuscript material for his Autobiography can be found in Boxes 20 and 21.

Series 3 is divided into two subseries, "Writings" and "Speeches." Within each subseries the writings and speeches are organised according to subject matter. The bulk of Baldwin's articles were written while he was Director of the ACLU and Chairman of the International League for the Rights of Man. While many of them obviously touch on civil liberties and human rights issues, he also wrote about foreign affairs, race relations, radicalism, St. Louis, and social work. His articles include various short biographical sketches, and he wrote many book reviews. While he was in prison he also tried his hand at some poetry, although this was his only experimentation with this genre. His speeches deal with many of the same topics as his articles. Some of his speeches are in the form of full-text transcriptions, while some are merely notes.

Box 22 comprises a particularly solid cluster of folders covering Baldwin's writings and articles on Civil Liberties, Education, Foreign Issues (Africa, Canada, Europe, Germany and Austria, India, Japan and Korea, Latin America, the Middle East and the Soviet Union), Human Rights, International Organization, Prison, Race Relations, and reaction to two of Baldwin's books:Liberty Under the Soviets, written in 1928, and Civil Liberties and Industrial Conflict, published in 1938.Box 22, Folder 4 contains an interesting article (written post Suez) entitled The Prospects for our Liberties, 1956?

Series 4, Miscellaneous (1922-1981) contains a variety of material relating to Baldwin directly. The crown jewel of this series is the collection of memoranda Baldwin wrote about himself and others that he knew. These memoranda cover topics ranging from the Scopes trial to Baldwin's attitude towards money. These memoranda not only help to clear up confusion about Baldwin's biography, but they also offer an unusually direct glimpse into his mind, for he wrote freely about his attitudes and even relatively personal aspects of his life.

Besides Baldwin's musings on himself, this series also contains various pieces of writing about Baldwin by others: an extensive collection of articles, a Harvard senior thesis, an interview conducted by a high school student, and a manuscript chapter of an autobiographical book by Madeleine Doty.
Baldwin's FBI files are included here as well.

Series 5, Photographs, (1885?-1981) includes photographs from almost all periods of Baldwin's life. This series is divided into four subseries: Events (1950-1981), Personal (ca. 1885-1979), Political Activity (1919-1979), and Portraits (ca. 1906-ca. 1975). The photographs in "Events" are mainly of dinners and other events held in Baldwin's honour. Many prominent people attended these occasions, including Josephine Baker, Edward Kennedy, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Marietta Tree. The "Personal" subseries includes baby pictures of Baldwin, photos of him outdoors, pictures of Baldwin's siblings and mother, as well as of both his wives and of his children. Also in this series is the family album of the Chaplin family (Ralph, Edith, and Ivan), some of Baldwin's close friends in the radical movement (Ralph was the editor of an I.W.W. publication). The "Political Activity" subseries contains photographs of various political events in which Baldwin participated, as well as photographs from Baldwin's trips to Japan, Korea, and Germany. The "Portraits" subseries includes formal and informal photographs of Baldwin, as well as some pictures taken of him for a New York Times pieceon cookery.

Series 6, Tribute Album (1950) comprises one two-volume engraved album of correspondence from Baldwin's friends on the Thirtieth Anniversary of the ACLU on February 22, 1950. This occasion also marked Baldwin's retirement from his position of executive director at the ACLU.