ACLU and Mother Jane

Jane Addams had a vision of free people living in a free country. Again and
again, she said that what America needed was more democracy -- more
opportunities for people to speak out and make decisions. To advance these
ideas, she played a key role in the formation of a host of organizations.
Included: NAACP, National Women's Suffrage Association, League of Women
Voters, PTA, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

Events in 1919 and 1920 prompted her to play a key role in forming another group -- the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In November 1919, federal agents all over the arrested over 10,000 people. Those detained were targeted solely because of their leftists or anarchist political views. Most were never charged with any crime. Many were held in jail for months. About 250 of those arrested, including Emma Goldman, were deported.

Addams spoke out against this injustice in a November 1919 speech in Chicago:

"Hundreds of poor laboring men and women are being thrown into jails and
police stations because of their political beliefs. In fact, an attempt is being made to deport an entire political party.

"These men and women, who in some respects are more American in ideals than the agents of the government who are tracking them down, are thrust into cells so crowded they cannot lie down.

"And what is it these radicals seek? It is the right of free speech and free thought; nothing more than is guaranteed to them under the constitution of the United States...

"We are trying to suppress something upon which our very country is founded -- liberty." (For more about this speech visit Teaching History Online:
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uj/USAaddams.htm.)

Initially, the protests of Addams and others were ignored by US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, his special assistant. In fact, the two federal officials ordered the arrest of an additional 6,000 people in January 1920. Again, few of these were ever charged with a crime and many were held for months.

That prompted Addams and others to meet and talk about forming a group to respond to this threat to civil liberties. That must have been some meeting.

Addams, founder of Hull House, was there. So, too, was her friend John Dewey, a leading voice for progressive education. (His book, Democracy and Education, is a powerful and eloquent argument for experiential learning rather than learning based on tests and lectures.)

Upton Sinclair, author and journalist, was there. He was one of the writers referred to as Realists, along with Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis and others. His book, The Jungle, tells the story of the horrors of working in a meatpacking plant and inspired the first federal meat
inspections.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a labor organizer and leader in the IWW, was there, too. Her autobiography, Rebel Girl, takes its title from a song Wobblie
troubadour Joe Hill wrote for her in 1915 while he was in jail awaiting his
execution in Utah. The story of Hill's life and the Wobblie movement is movingly told in the play Salt Lake City Skyline.

Others there for the meeting were some of the best-known people in America including: Helen Keller, Jeannette Rankin and James Weldon Johnson.

The group decided to form a new organization dedicated to protecting the rights of individuals and political groups. They chose the name
American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU is still around today and still doing the work it started out to do more than 80 years ago. It is the ACLU, for example, which has been pointing out excesses of the Patriot Act and the lack of basic legal protections for the individuals detained by the US government at Guantanamo.