Related Research Articles
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is an American nonprofit human rights organization founded in 1920. The organization strives "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States". The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying and has over 1,800,000 members as of July 2018, with an annual budget of over $300 million. Affiliates of the ACLU are active in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases where it considers civil liberties at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
Crystal Catherine Eastman was an American lawyer, antimilitarist, feminist, socialist, and journalist. She was a leader in the fight for women's suffrage, a co-founder and co-editor with her brother Max Eastman of the radical arts and politics magazine The Liberator, co-founder of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, and co-founder in 1920 of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 2000, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.
A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" on the grounds of freedom of thought, conscience, or religion. The term has also been extended to objecting to working for the military–industrial complex due to a crisis of conscience. In some countries, conscientious objectors are assigned to an alternative civilian service as a substitute for conscription or military service.
Norman Mattoon Thomas was an American Presbyterian minister who achieved fame as a socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.
Roger Nash Baldwin was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He served as executive director of the ACLU until 1950.
Albert DeSilver was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) was an American pacifist organization established in response to World War I. The organization attempted to keep the United States out of the European conflict through mass demonstrations, public lectures, and the printed word. Failing in that effort with American entry into the war in April 1917, the Union battled against conscription, action which subjected it to state repression, and military intervention. The organization was eventually dissolved after the war in 1922.
The Medical Cadet Corp (MCC) is a program of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It started in the 1930s in the United States with the intention of preparing young men of draft age for military service in noncombatant roles. The training included drill, first aid, military courtesies, organization of medical corps, defense against chemical warfare, principles of anatomy and physiology, physical exercises and character development. The program was temporarily suspended at the end of World War II. It was reactivated in 1950 then a few years after was adapted internationally. The program was deactivated by the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists in early 1972 but continued independently in a few locations with an emphasis on rescue and disaster response.
Walter Nelles was an American lawyer and law professor. Nelles is best remembered as the co-founder and first chief legal counsel of the National Civil Liberties Bureau and its successor, the American Civil Liberties Union. In this connection, Nelles achieved public notice for his legal work on behalf of pacifists charged with violating the Espionage Act during World War I and in other politically charged civil rights and constitutional law cases in later years.
The American Fund for Public Service, commonly known as the Garland Fund, was a philanthropic organization established in 1922 by Charles Garland. The fund, administered by a group of trustees headed by Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, ultimately disbursed some $2 Million to a variety of radical and left wing institutions, including the Federated Press labor news service, the Vanguard Press publishing house, The New Masses magazine, The World Tomorrow magazine, and to the legal defense fund associated with the 1926 Passaic Textile Strike, as well as a host of similar projects. The fund was terminated in 1941.
Clyde Wilson Summers was an American lawyer and educator who advocated for more democratic procedures in labor unions. He helped write the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act of 1959 and was highly influential in the field of labor law, authoring more than 150 publications on the issue of union democracy alone. He was considered the nation's leading expert on union democracy. "What Louis Brandeis was to the field of privacy law, Clyde Summers is to the field of union democracy," wrote Widener University School of Law professor Michael J. Goldberg in the summer of 2010. "Summers, like Brandeis, provided the theoretical foundation for an important new field of law."
In re Summers, 325 U.S. 561 (1945), is a 5-to-4 ruling by the United States Supreme Court which held that the First and Fourteenth amendment freedoms of a conscientious objector were not infringed when a state bar association declined to admit him to the practice of law. The Illinois Constitution required citizens to serve in the state militia in time of war, and all lawyers admitted to the bar were required to uphold the state constitution. Petitioner Clyde Summers could not uphold that constitutional requirement due to his religious beliefs, and the Supreme Court upheld the denial of his license of practice.
The People's Freedom Union was a left wing American political group which existed from 1919 to 1920. Established as a federation of liberal and radical organizations in New York City, the People's Freedom Union conducted marches in support of political prisoners detained under the Espionage Act during World War I, campaigned for a restoration of American civil rights suspended under the war, and agitated against American intervention in Mexico and Soviet Russia.
Archibald E. Stevenson was an American attorney and legislative researcher. Stevenson is best remembered for his work as Assistant Counsel of the Lusk Committee of the New York State Senate from 1919 to 1920, the activities of which led to a series of sensational raids and trials of self-professed revolutionary socialists. Stevenson was also the de facto author and editor of the committee's four-volume report, which anticipated congressional investigations of communism conducted in subsequent years.
The Tulsa Outrage was an act of vigilante violence perpetrated by the Knights of Liberty — a group understood at the time to be a contemporaneous incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan — against members of the Industrial Workers of the World on November 9, 1917 in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Workers Defense Union (WDU) was a legal defense organization in the United States, established in New York City in November 1918 to lend aid in cases involving trade union and radical political activists. The group was organized by Industrial Workers of the World organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, working closely with radical trade unionist Fred Biedenkapp. Both would subsequently become active members of the Workers (Communist) Party of America. The WDU became a local affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, with Flynn joining the National Committee of that organization, before finally dissolving as an independent entity in 1923.
Eleanor Bontecou was an American lawyer, civil rights advocate, law professor and government official. Bontecou served as an attorney and investigator for both the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. War Department. She also worked as a professor at two universities. During her career, Bontecou achieved national fame for her work in the civil liberties and women's rights movements.
The International Labor Defense (ILD) (1925–1947) was a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 in the United States as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network. The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. Its work contributed to the appeal of the Communist Party among African Americans in the South. In addition to fundraising for defense and assisting in defense strategies, from January 1926 it published Labor Defender, a monthly illustrated magazine that achieved wide circulation. In 1946 the ILD was merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress, which served as the new legal defense organization of the Communist Party USA. It intended to expand its appeal, especially to African Americans in the South. In several prominent cases in which blacks had been sentenced to death in the South, the CRC campaigned on behalf of black defendants. It had some conflict with former allies, such as the NAACP, and became increasingly isolated. Because of federal government pressure against organizations it considered subversive, such as the CRC, it became less useful in representing defendants in criminal justice cases. The CRC was dissolved in 1956. At the same time, in this period, black leaders were expanding the activities and reach of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954, in a case managed by the NAACP, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
Joseph and Michael Hofer were brothers who died from mistreatment at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth in 1918. The pair, who were Hutterites from South Dakota, were among four conscientious objectors from their Christian colony who had been court-martialed and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for refusing to be drafted in to the United States Army during World War I. After initially being sent to Fort Alcatraz for refusal to comply with military orders and discipline, Joseph and Michael were transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where they both died within two weeks of their arrival. Their bodies were returned to their families in military uniforms that they had refused to wear.
The European Bureau for Conscientious Objection (EBCO) is a European umbrella organisation for national peace organisations supporting conscientious objectors. Its seat is in Brussels and it was founded in 1979. It aims to organise solidarity campaigns for conscientious objectors facing legal charges in European countries and to lobby for such rights in European institutions. Together with War Resisters' International, which is also one of its members, it is considered one of the leading international NGOs working on conscientious objection.
References
- ↑ "FOR – Who We Are"
- ↑ New York State Archives: "The Lusk Committee"
- ↑ Walker, p. 20.
- ↑ Princeton University Library: "American Civil Liberties Union Records, The Roger Baldwin Years, 1917–1950: Finding Aid" Archived 2006-02-16 at the Wayback Machine
- Walker, Samuel (1990). In Defense of American Liberties . Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-504539-0.