Career
Baldwin was a member of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), which opposed American involvement in World War I. After the passage of the Selective Service Act of 1917, Baldwin called for the AUAM to create a legal division to protect the rights of conscientious objectors. On July 1, 1917, the AUAM created the Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB), headed by Baldwin. The CLB separated from the AUAM on October 1, 1917, renaming itself the National Civil Liberties Bureau, with Baldwin as director. In 1920, NCLB was renamed the American Civil Liberties Union, with Baldwin continuing as the ACLU's first executive director.
In the meantime, on 30 October 1918, as a conscientious objector himself, refusing even to register for the draft, undergo medical examination, or accept any alternative service such as farming, was sentenced at the Federal Court in New York City to a year in a penitentiary.
As director of ACLU, Baldwin was integral to the shape of the association's early character; it was under Baldwin's leadership that the ACLU undertook some of its most famous cases, including the Scopes Trial, the Sacco and Vanzetti murder trial, and its challenge to the ban on James Joyce's Ulysses. Baldwin retired from the ACLU leadership in 1950. He remained active in politics for the rest of his life; for example, he co-founded the International League for the Rights of Man, which is now known as the International League for Human Rights.
In St. Louis, Baldwin had been greatly influenced by the radical social movement of the anarchist Emma Goldman. He joined the Industrial Workers of the World. Roger Baldwin oversaw, documented and supplied funding for a large number of defense cases for I.W.W. members and investigations throughout the United States. A fully accessible archive of his correspondence with I.W.W branches, investigators and attorneys has been published by Princeton's Mudd Manuscript Library.
In 1924, Attorney General Harlan F. Stone had the newly-appointed Bureau of Investigation Director J. Edgar Hoover meet with Baldwin to reach an agreement regarding the limits of the Bureau's power. Baldwin wrote to Stone that Hoover "meets any suggestion which any of us could possibly make".
In 1927, he had visited the Soviet Union and wrote a book, Liberty Under the Soviets. Later, however, as more and more information came out about Joseph Stalin's regime in the Soviet Union, Baldwin became more and more disillusioned with communism and in 1953 called it "A NEW SLAVERY" (capitalized in the original). He condemned "the inhuman communist police state tyranny, forced labor." In the 1940s, Baldwin led the campaign to purge the ACLU of Communist Party members.
In 1947, General Douglas MacArthur invited him to Japan to foster the growth of civil liberties in that country. In Japan, he founded the Japan Civil Liberties Union, and the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun. In 1948, Germany and Austria invited him for similar purposes. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1951.
