BOOK REVIEW : ACLU: A Law Firm Unto Us All

IN DEFENSE OF AMERICAN LIBERTIES: A HISTORY OF THE ACLU by Samuel Walker Oxford University Press $24.95, 479 pages

Is the American Civil Liberties Union a “criminals’ lobby,” as former Atty. Gen. Ed Meese once called it?

Samuel Walker’s “In Defense of American Liberties,” an authoritative and exhaustive history of the ACLU, demonstrates that Meese was dead wrong: If the ACLU is a lobbyist, its only real client is the Bill of Rights. Indeed, the ACLU is more nearly a jurisprudential SWAT squad that rolls out whenever our liberties are threatened.

As Walker describes some of the ACLU’s most controversial crusades--on behalf of Nazis, PLO sympathizers, pornographers and the Ku Klux Klan--we are reminded that its vigilance and its willingness to advocate unpopular causes have been repugnant even to some of its most ardent supporters. But the fact remains that the rest of us enjoy the luxury of taking our freedom for granted precisely because the ACLU is so tenacious in protecting the rights of the friendless and the despised.

As early as 1917, we learn, the civil libertarians who later created the ACLU were dismissed as a “little group of malcontents” when they championed the dangerous idea of freedom of speech during wartime. (The New York Times warned: “Jails are waiting for them.”) Essentially the same slander was at work more than a half-century later when George Bush dismissed Michael Dukakis as “a card-carrying member of the ACLU” in the 1988 presidential elections.

But Walker makes it clear that the ACLU is not a militant organization that takes to the streets or the barricades, although its current membership exceeds 270,000. Rather, Walker depicts the ACLU as “the nation’s largest law firm,” a network of thousands of “cooperating attorneys” throughout the United States who are handling a thousand cases at any given moment. Some 80% of “the proverbial ‘landmark cases’ ” in American constitutional law, according to Walker, are the result of the ACLU’s quiet, sober and diligent work in the courts.

“With some justification, the ACLU can claim to have shaped contemporary values,” argues Walker. “When the ACLU was founded in 1920, the promises of the Bill of Rights had little practical meaning for ordinary people. Today, there is a substantial body of law in all the major areas of civil liberties. . . . The ACLU can legitimately claim much of the credit--or be assigned the blame, if you prefer--for the growth of modern constitutional law.”

“In Defense of American Liberties” is what I would call a semi-official history; Walker, as he is quick to point out, serves on the board of directors of both the ACLU and its Nebraska affiliate, and he was an active participant in some of the very cases and controversies that he describes. And, since Walker’s book is a work of legal and institutional history, the prose is densely packed with names, dates, acronyms, factional politics and the metaphysical nuances of law and politics.

At times, Walker appears to be too generous or too circumspect about his forebears and fellow activists in the ACLU. For example, he admits that “the ACLU’s greatest failure during the cold war was turning a blind eye on the FBI.” He even concedes that Morris Ernst, one of the ACLU’s most influential and even beloved leaders, was “the FBI’s advocate in the ACLU.” But he does not fully confront recently discovered evidence suggesting that Ernst was perfectly willing to sell out Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by joining their defense team and acting as an FBI informer. (William L. Shirer, whose memoirs were recently reviewed in these pages, makes similar charges against Ernst.)

Of course, it’s impossible to argue with Walker’s observation that “the revelations from the FBI files were a ghost from the past, a relic of an era and an ACLU that were long gone.” Walker concludes: “If anything, the ACLU’s attitude (toward cooperation with the FBI) had swung radically in the opposite direction.”

As I read “American Liberties,” I was reminded of Pastor Martin Niemoeller’s poignant warning against remaining silent when only the rights of others are at stake: “Then they came for me,” Niemoeller recalls of the day when he, too, fell victim to the Third Reich, “and by that time, there was no one left to speak up for anyone.”

Indeed, Walker’s book is especially instructive in a era when so many nations and peoples are struggling to build democracy on the ruins of a failed totalitarian empire. If America is a light unto the nations, it is only because of the courage of men and women of conscience, including the members of the ACLU, who are willing to speak up for even the least popular and least appealing among us.