American Civil Liberties Union

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), established in January 1920, is the largest nonpartisan, nonprofit legal organization in the United States. It is dedicated to upholding and preserving the civil liberties guaranteed to individuals by the Constitution, particularly those expressed in the Bill of Rights. The ACLU has championed all 1st Amendment rights; the right to equal treatment regardless of race, gender, religion, or nationality; the right to due process; and the right to privacy. From the aftermath of World War I through the war in Iraq and the war on terrorism, the ACLU has struggled to preserve civil liberties in wartime, when issues of military necessity and national security have prompted the federal government and the U.S. military to attempt to restrict or abolish certain freedoms.

The ACLU was first organized by pacifists and other social reformers who joined forces during World War I to form the American Union Against Militarism (1914–17) and its successor, the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB; 1917–20), which narrowed activists’ focus to protesting the federal government's wartime crackdown on antiwar and antigovernment speech. NCLB members also pressured the government to maintain the civil rights of nearly 4,000 conscientious objectors (COs).

After World War I, the NCLB urged activist Roger Baldwin to take the helm. Baldwin eventually agreed, but only if he could establish a new organization—to be known as the American Civil Liberties Union. In the early 1920s, ACLU leaders responded to the government's wartime decision to restrict free speech by educating the public about the 1st Amendment through pamphlets and other publications, lobbying, and picketing campaigns.

In 1939, with another world war on the horizon, the ACLU began to reeducate the public about its loss of free speech during World War I, in the hope that an informed populace would pressure the government to avoid restricting free speech during the next war. Perhaps because of the ACLU's renewed activity in the prewar years, Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration did not restrict antigovernment or antiwar speech during World War II.

By lobbying legislators, the ACLU leadership influenced the decision to include broader guidelines for COs in the Selective Services Act (1940), the bill instituting the draft. According to this law, men could become COs if their religious denomination prohibited military participation. Through the ACLU's National Committee for Conscientious Objectors, ACLU leaders developed legal strategies to assist [Page 30]the nation's 42,973 COs and ensure that their civil rights were not violated.

The ACLU's two best known legal cases during World War II were its defense of two Japanese Americans who violated Executive Order 9066, which mandated the internment of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans in detention camps. When President Roosevelt signed the order on February 19, 1942, the ACLU responded by publicly repudiating it and by taking on the legal defense of Japanese Americans who defied the order.

In both Hirabayashi v. United States and Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the defendants’ previous convictions in lower courts, ruling that military necessity and the nation's security demanded that the curfews and internment orders be enforced. In 1988, after 44 years of ACLU lobbying, Congress acknowledged the government's miscarriage of justice in its wartime treatment of Japanese Americans and offered $20,000 in reparations to each Japanese American who had been interned.

...