==Views of the ACLU Founder==
In 1934, Roger Robert Baldwin, a co-founder of the ACLU and its first leader, was born and raised in Massachusetts. He later said that his “ . . . social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people.” In the 1920 and 1930s he was sympathetic to the social goals and aspirations of the emerging communist nations. In 1934, Balwin published his goals in Soviet Russia Today:<ref>The Volokh Conspiracy (blog entry), Eugene Volokh, September 7, 2005 [http://volokh.com/posts/1126138099.shtml]</ref>
:I believe in non-violent methods of struggle as most effective in the long run for building up successful working class power. Where they cannot be followed or where they are not even permitted by the ruling class, obviously only violent tactics remain. I champion civil liberty as the best of the non-violent means of building the power on which workers rule must be based. If I aid the reactionaries to get free speech now and then, if I go outside the class struggle to fight against censorship, it is only because those liberties help to create a more hospitable atmosphere for working class liberties. The class struggle is the central conflict of the world; all others are incidental.
:When that power of the working class is once achieved, as it has been only in the Soviet Union, I am for maintaining it by any means whatever. Dictatorship is the obvious means in a world of enemies at home and abroad. I dislike it in principle as dangerous to its own objects. But the Soviet Union has already created liberties far greater than exist elsewhere in the world. They are liberties that most closely affect the lives of the people — power in the trade unions, in peasant organizations, in the cultural life of nationalities, freedom of women in public and private life, and a tremendous development of education for adults and children. . . .
Baldwin and In 1940 he successfully fought to revise the ACLU purged any open communists charter to prohibit those affiliated with totalitarian organizations from its ranks serving on the ACLU board. The immediate target was the former-Wobbly and present Communist Party member, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. In 1947 General Douglas MacArthur arranged for Baldwin to serve as a civil liberties consultant in 1940Japan.
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