The (first) 'Red Scare' and the Founding of the ACLU

By Melissa Walsh
A hundred years ago the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was formed as an urgent response to a gross violation of the First Amendment rights of thousands by the US Department of Justice during the Palmer Raids of November 2019 and January 1920. Its first meeting was held on January 19.

​Detroit is part of that story.

When I was a graduate student at Wayne State University in the early 1990s, frequently, while walking around campus, a member of a leftist political organization would hand me a flyer or pamphlet. There were (and perhaps still are) two fairly popular communist/socialist organizations in Detroit active on the WSU campus then: the Workers World Party and the Revolutionary Workers League. Having recently returned from living in Yugoslavia and traveling in other communist countries in East Europe, I would launch an ideological discussion with the person offering me the literature.

“Have you ever been to a communist country?” I would ask.

The answer was always, “No.”

I would smugly pontificate about the negatives of living in the confines of a communist society — of one-party rule, of political corruption generating a black-market economy of corrupt haves and victimized have-nots, of the lack of free speech and free press, etc. I was young and arrogant and probably didn’t give the person much opportunity to express why they were dedicated to the dream of a communist utopia. I felt I already understood the theoretical merits of wanting a society of shared wealth and equality; I knew it was an unrealistic mission.

Before walking away, I’d say, “In theory, your intentions are noble. The problem is humans are greedy and always will be.”

Click on the screen shot above to see the short animation produced by Ford Motor Co. in 1919 - "Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki-I.W.W. Rat"

“(The detainees) slept on a bare stone floor at night, in the heavy heat that welled sickeningly up to the low roof, just over their heads; they were shoved and jostled by heavy-handed policemen; they were forbidden even the chance to perform a makeshift shave; they were compelled to stand in long lines for access to the solitary drinking fountain and one toilet; they were denied all food for 20 hours; and after they were fed what their families brought in and they were refused all communication with relatives or with attorneys.”
​— Frederick R. Barkley

America’s First Amendment guardians in 1920
What I loved then and now about The United States is exactly this — the healthy pluralism of such encounters as mine on the campus of WSU, the right to have these conversations openly, the rights of leftists, and all of us, to gather and hand out literature. The First Amendment protects these rights. And our First Amendment watchdog is the ACLU, the organization born of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which was organized in 1917 to defend Great War (World War I) protestors and conscientious objectors. Founding members rebranded the mission in 1920 in response to the Palmer raids, viewing the activities of the DoJ as countering founding principles of the United States and in direct violation of the US Constitution, specifically the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

The ACLU’s founding members, per its first meeting minutes January 19, 1920, included Roger Baldwin, Crystal Eastman, Helen Keller, Walter Nelles, Morris Ernst, Albert DeSilver, Arthur Garfield Hays, Jane Addams, Felix Frankfurter, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Rose Schneidman.

A hundred years later, the ACLU’s work has benefitted us all across the political spectrum. I can’t help but believe that if it weren’t for the ACLU, the Wayne States leftists I encountered 30 years ago would not have been permitted to discuss their views with me openly. Chances are I might have been persecuted for having studied and traveled in communist countries. Events in the United States — in Detroit — a hundred years ago illustrate how injustice strikes communities without the safeguarding of our First Amendment rights

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