One of its key founders was Roger Nash Baldwin, who was its first Executive Director from 1920 until 1950.
He was a communist and member of Industrial Workers of the World, an organization of socialists and radical anarchists. Its constitution preamble states currently:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth. ... Instead of the conservative motto, 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work', we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, 'Abolition of the wage system'.Marxists to the core.
Those damn subversive folk singers such as communist Pete Seeger and Woodie Guthrie were associated with the IWW's penchant for revolutionary and subversive songs.
But back to Baldwin. An ardent pacifist (a position which Orwell correctly describes as "objectively pro-fascist"), Baldwin in 1927
visited the Soviet Union and published a book, entitled Liberty Under the Soviets, which contained extensive praise for the country he later denounced.Denounced for technical reasons of the Nazi-Soviet pact, most likely; I doubt he gave up marxist, anti-American beliefs.
I mean come on, Liberty under the Soviets?
You'd have to be a lunatic to write something like that.
And this guy shaped the ACLU.
And populated it with like-minds.
So we're supposed to believe it is some benign, mainstream organization?
One critic writes,
From its inception, the ACLU has worked to create a new America. To do so, the ACLU found it necessary to achieve two main things: first, the abolishment of Constitutional barriers to governmental power and second, the enervation of man’s soul to make him weak and dependent on government. Both of which move America towards a progressive state and, according to Dr. Krannawitter, are advanced by “removing God from the American mind.”Their pro-atheist crusade, their anti-gun stance, their support of radical unionization and anti-capitalism, all are consistent with such an agenda.
In order for the ACLU to tear down constitutional barriers to governmental power, they must extinguish America’s fundamental belief in God, since such a belief is an essential denial of the supreme power of government. Rights come from God, not government.
...
In addition to the emphasis on the source of rights and governmental power, the ACLU has worked to make people needy and dependent on government. Alexis de Tocqueville warned of those like the ACLU who wished to exacerbate the malignant tendencies of democracy. He explained that the government, if people allow it to do so, will create an incessant dependency of the people on the government as it expands its power under the guise of utility, finally reducing “each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” The ACLU seeks not only to create a people that are dependent and needy, but also a government that “little by little extinguishes their spirits and enervates their souls” by giving them all they want, so that they will be naively content without hopes, dreams, or a will of their own. This is a sort of despotism unlike any other.
