By the mid-1930s, Roger Nash Baldwin had carved out a well-established reputation as America's foremost civil libertarian. He was, at the same time, one of the nation's leading figures in left-of-center circles. Founder and long time director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Baldwin was a firm Popular Fronter who believed that forces on the left side of the political spectrum should unite to ward off the threat posed by right-wing aggressors and to advance progressive causes. Baldwin's expansive civil liberties perspective, coupled with his determined belief in the need for sweeping socioeconomic change, sometimes resulted in contradictory and controversial pronouncements. That made him something of a lightning rod for those who painted the ACLU with a red brush.
Raised in the Boston suburb of Wellesley Hills, Baldwin's ancestral roots were rich and comfortable. Relatives included Mayflower Pilgrims, a general in George Washington's army, and the founder of the Boston Young Men's Christian Union. Family friends ranged from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Oliver Wendell Holmes to Booker T. Washington. Reared in a patriarchal household, Baldwin had parents who considered themselves "agnostic Unitarians." Inevitably, as he later noted, Baldwin attended Harvard College during the period when the Progressive movement unfolded, with its calls for righting some of the wrongs resulting from the process of rapid modernization. After completing his M.A. degree, Baldwin heeded the advice of his father's attorney and confidant, Louis D. Brandeis, to head for the Midwest to seek his fortune. In St. Louis, Baldwin entered the field of social work, establishing a national reputation in the process. As the period of direct U.S. involvement in World War I approached, Baldwin ended up in New York where he became a leading figure in the American Union Against Militarism. Concerned about the plight of wartime dissidents, including the members of the Industrial Workers of the World, Baldwin eventually headed the National Civil Liberties Bureau. Determined to safeguard the political rights of the IWW members, the Wobblies, and conscientious objectors, Baldwin reasoned that well-intentioned individuals in a group like the NCLB could reach out to top government officials in Woodrow Wilson's administration. However, in a display of solidarity with wartime resisters, Baldwin deliberately violated the Selective Service Act, which resulted in a celebrated trial and his confinement in prison. In 1919 he briefly joined the IWW and took to the road as a laborer, before returning to New York and his new wife, the lawyer Madeleine Z. Doty. The following January Baldwin helped to set up the ACLU.
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