The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union
Donohue, William A.
Minnesota, was an American. Two worked at the Japanese National Cancer Center Research Institute and one at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Efron reports that as the reviews came in they combined...
...Efron reports that as the reviews came in they combined extravagant praise with demands for anonymity...
...and the special political and bureaucratic interests that dominate the fiscal process...
...They can be stingy almost beyond belief toward the "developing" countries, and if it comes to that, to the rest of the world outside the democratic West...
...And he makes a per-suasive case that the Founding Fathers in no way wished to erect the ACLU's iron curtain between Church and State but were seeking assurance through the "establishment clause" that a national religion would not be countenanced...
...The ACLU is ever anxious to claim for itself the politically neutral high ground...
...Yet the book almost went unpublished...
...Then-fellow traveler Roger Baldwin made two friendly visits to the USSR and published two laudatory books, Liberty Under the Soviets (1928) and Soviet Russia Today (1934...
...One ex-pert in carcinogenesis and animal testing declared my book a `scientific work of art.' When asked for a writ-ten assessment, he agreed but insisted that his name be kept secret...
...The ACLU has no problem supporting big government when big government can further what it sees as social reforms...
...Im dluable to our deficit-reduction efforts'', —J...
...14.95 paper Robert Stuart Cohen SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB C~AN1.= CHA"TA,Nv000A, TENNETsEE KTVN...
...Donohue the social scientist and historian strives for an artful, objective reconstruction of the ACLU's 65-year history and in the process offers an analysis of the broader history of American liberalism in the twentieth century, as well as an intelligent commentary on important issues of constitutional law...
...Whelan's own experiences with Toxic Terror illuminate the way in which the gatekeepers in publishing bar unWilliam A. Donohue has written one of those rare books that successfully combines a no-holds-barred polemic with serious scholarship of the highest order...
...The affliction is a metaphysical pica, a morbid compulsion to gobble up blame...
...In Donohue's view, there is an ACLU "mind-set" operating here: It is the decisions that the ACLU renders that make it a politically partisan organization...
...To be fair, though, they may not be able to help this, suffering as they do from a bizarre ailment, especially virulent among the liberal sub-species that inhabits the United States...
...And wherever the ACLU considers moral behavior self-regarding (e.g., prostitution, drugs) the acts are outside the purview of the state...
...paper, $14.95 cloth, $34.95 FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH Available at bookstores 177 Post St., San Francisco, CA 94108 T*X& 1-' ' DE 1 AL FORMATION I THE UNITED STATES AFRICA: THE PEOPLE AND POLITICS OF AN EMERGING CONTINENT Sanford J. Ungar/Simon and Schuster/$19.95 Herb Greer and the like, usually without specific sources for the estimate, the feeling, or the vision...
...The key to understanding the ACLU lies in the realization that the Union has never been concerned primarily with civil liberties in the purest sense...
...This is the other major thrust of Donohue's critique...
...He is upset because, as he sees it, so few in the West have been doing the same thing, and he has written this guide to fill the gap in our consciousness...
...its purpose is the defense of the Bill of Rights for every American irrespective of class, race, sex, or ideological predilection: "The Bill of Rights is the ACLU's only client...
...It was only after the shock of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact and in the face of an imminent congressional investigation into its loyalty that the ACLU came to its senses, expelled Communist party member Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the board of directors, and passed the well-known 1940 resolution which barred from its governing boards members of any political organization which supports "totalitarian dictator-ship in any country" or individuals who publicly do so...
...The Union's shabby performance in the case of Walter Polovchak, the young emigre who elected to remain in the United States rather than return to the Soviet Union with hisparents, is but one example...
...C .ANNE 2, NO, NER DA WITS 92 FM BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WGTC...
...FORT WAYNE, INDIANA CORPORATE OFFICE, BOX 62...
...Ideally," he writes, "an organization dedicated to the Bill of Rights should never be put on the defensive...
...Apparently the liberal intellectual establishment in the publishing and media worlds remains hunkered down Robert Stuart Cohen is a writer living in New York City...
...In Dewey's words, "the justification for the various civil liberties is the contribution they make to the welfare ofthe community...
...What is not generally known is that shortly after the Polovchak case emerged, the New Jersey CLU sought to defend a Chilean child in almost identical circumstances to Walter's...
...Just as the ACLU has adopted key elements of "collectivistic liberalism" on matters concerning social equality, Donohue argues they have taken over currents of the nineteenth-century "autonomistic liberalism" which pre-ceded it on the questions of free speech liberalism...
...ACLU leaders have at times in their writings and public remarks openly acknowledged their real political commitment...
...There have been more detailed studies on the subjects of some of the specific chapters...
...Donohue reminds today's autonomistic liberals that the Founding Fathers prized the virtues of moderation, sobriety, and self-discipline in public affairs...
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...The ACLU, of course, intervened on the side of Walter's parents...
...With the radicalization of liberalism in the 1960s and 70s, the ACLU's views on free expression and morality took on an extremist cast...
...BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WADI...
...Donohue sharply distinguishes the...
...Donohue documents the Union's reluctance to defend capitalists, its lack of interest in First Amendment freedomof-religion cases, and even its willingness to launch a libel suit and engage in the censorship of adverse political discourse...
...PACIFIC INSTITUTE 530 pages...
...everything from its lobbying efforts to its policy decisions is reflective of its value priorities...
...But Toxic Terror is the first book to expose the gap between the scientific consensus and the "media" consensus on the entire range of environmental issues, and to present those issues in a concise yet thorough manner, easily accessible to the layman...
...Much of the good will of ACLU, as well as the Union' and strength, rests on th perception of its commitment to principle...
...Rock singer Ozzy Osbourne, who had urinated on the Alamo shrine and bitten off the head of a bat while per-forming, was defended in the name of free expression...
...One is constantly reminded of Shakespeare's Duke in the Forest of Arden, praising the toad which is venomous and ugly, but "wears yet a precious jewel in his head...
...The author says he has been paying a lot of attention to this part of Africa for about twenty years...
...Roger Baldwin, who founded the ACLU and for three decades was almost synonymous with his organizat yn,w.,te 'n 1933 that "civil liberties, cy, are useful only as tools ange...
...Donohue concludes by strongly affirming the American republican tradiWestern liberals are supposed to be kind to the Third World, but they are not, really...
...The book does contain a fair tourist's selection of facts, but the way they are presented is shifty, occasionally to the point of dishonesty, and question-begging...
...This last episode, which involved the preparation of legal action against the conservative journal American Mercury and an attempt to muzzle H.L...
...He even drags out the old wheeze about Helen Bannerman's Lit- ' playwright living in England...
...He is comically priggish about the portrayal of "Africans" in the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers...
...In Donohue's view, Mill's philosophy led to anarchism with regard to free expression and a concomitant laissez-faire posture on issues of morality...
...I asked him why...
...The Constitution guarantees individuals equal protection of the laws—the ACLU's drive for "equal results" is a "political exercise" with no constitutional foundation...
...Jameson Books, a small publisher in Ottawa, Illinois, is to be congratulated for its good sense, for Whelan's book fills an important gap...
...He seems unaware, or prefers not to mention, that these relationships were not forged in the depths of Western industrial civilization, but in the rather different ambiance of the Kalahari Desert...
...There is also the incredible spectacle of a "civil liberties" organization intervening against Allan Bakke, a victim of blatant "reverse discrimination," with a friend-of-the-court brief defending a state medical school's quota and charging that those backing Bakke were exhibiting racism...
...Your book will come out before I retire.' " If distinguished scientists display such pusillanimity, is it any wonder that the quacks triumph...
...two years later the Union rescinded the decision that ousted Flynn and praised her as a great champion of labor rights...
...It was rejected as "too controversial" by other publishers before former ACLUer Aaron Wildaysky, who contributes a foreword to the book, recommended it to Transaction...
...he cites Madison's remark in The Federalist that "liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power...
...Nuclear power, for example, has been masterfully discussed in Samuel McCracken's The War Against the Atom...
...Rather, the ACLU has generally viewed civil liberties as mere instruments of more fundamental political purposes and goals, embracing important aspects of what Donohue, following John Dewey, calls "collectivistic liberalism...
...Even the sexual exploitation of children for commercial purposes—child pornography—is alleged to be wholly protected by the First Amendment...
...In the event, Africa is routine hack work, riddled with formulae like "it is estimated," "it is felt," "many see," Herb Greer is an American writer and tion...
...the deleterious impact of welfare programs, Social Security, and military spending on capital formation...
...tle Black Sambo being racist, and adds 46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986...
...It gave strong support to the New Deal-Fair Deal-Great Society social welfare legislative programs...
...Here he refers to the enormous influence of John Stuart Mill on the ACLU...
...He offers undergraduate approval of the exemplary San or Bushmen, because their "unusually rich and significant human relationships" may have spared them our stress-related ailments...
...It is precisely because its behavior is so closely patterned on its values that the ACLU can be regarded as the quintessential embodiment of American liberalism...
...popular perspectives...
...Wedded to liberalism, the ACLU can-not help but expose its values whenever it takes a stand on a civil liberties issue...
...ACLU's Millian positions on these matters from the republican philosophy of America's Founding Fathers...
...But by the mid-sixties, the ACLU was already apologizing for the 1940 resolution...
...Despite her track record as an author (one of her books has sold over a million copies), even her agent refused to touch this book and none of the familiar houses were willing to bring it out...
...The short introduction and early chapters do not inspire much confidence...
...Proposals for reform include stringent constraints on the fiscal process, economic deregulation, tax reduction and simplification, and reductions in both transfer payments and military spending...
...Even on the day when Walter turned eighteen and became' a free man, ACLU lawyer Harvey M. Grossman was whining that in the Soviet Union Walter's parents "are perceived as people who suffered harm at the hands of the United States Government...
...Mencken, is documented with new and quite revealing material...
...BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1986 45 Perhaps most damning of all is the ACLU's shameful record on the issue of civil liberties in the Soviet Union...
...And it would be easy to dismiss Donohue's main charge—that the ACLU is a highly partisan, ideologically driven organization-as attacking a straw man...
...THE POLITICS OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION William A. Donohue/Transaction Books/$29.95...
...As Nicholas von Hoffman has aptly put it, "The ACLU has so stretched and distorted the definition of our `rights' that they are beginning to look to many people like wrongs...
...That the ACLU has is largely its own fault...
...As Donohue poin?s out, the ACLU today holds thebroadest, most radical position on free speech ever posited by serious students of the Constitution...
...More recently, in 1976, Aryeh Neier, the executive director of the ACLU, declared that the Union was "the legal branch of the women's movement...
...This backsliding has already had its consequences...
...in a kind of mutual protection society...
...GGThe most comprehensive analysis available anywhere...
...This spiritual coprophagia is evident throughout Africa, Sanford J. Ungar's journalistic survey of sub-Saharan countries...
...and, in 1982, Lillian Hellman, perhaps America's leading apologist for Stalinism, was elected to the National Advisory Council of the ACLU...
...And, beginning in the mid-sixties, the ACLU played a central role in the black, women's, and gay "liberation" movements and took the lead in the egalitarian "equal results" affirmative action fight to try to impose social equality from above...
...Thus, in the 1920s and 1930s, when many of the high-ranking members of the ACLU were either Communist party members, collaborators, or sympathizers, the Union served as the legal arm of militant labor...
...The goal is honorable, worthy of the most formidable historian or (given the factors of racism and political violence) the most profound moral philosopher...
...In the late sixties, the ACLU removed it from its constitution and substituted a watered-down version...
...And a year later: "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...
...PETER GRACE TAXATION AND THE DEFICIT ECONOMY Fiscal Policy and Capital Formation in the United States Edited by DWIGHT R. LEE Foreword by MICHAEL J. BOSKIN Tenty-two distinguished economists examine the harmful effects of taxation on personal and corporate income...
...That would be a mistake...
...Then, in 1974, the strictures of the 1940 resolution were done away with altogether...
...The author as combatant is out to debunk the myth of the ACLU's nonpartisanship, to score the Union as America's quintessential liberal organization, to call into question the ACLU's Weltanschauung, and to engage the Union in the trenches on such sharp issues as affirmative action, poverty as a denial of civil liberty, abortion, church-state relations, the competing rights of criminals and victims, and child pornography...
...Ungar labors under the impression that "few Europeans and Americans recognize the African origin of much music and dance that they en-joy...
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...This has led in practice to grotesque contradictions at worst and at best a selective approach to civil liberties...
...In short, the social reform agenda shifts but the instrumentalist approach remains constant...
...Those values—egalitarianism, rationalism, secularism, optimism, and antitraditionalism—are what motivates the ACLU...
...Wherever the ACLU perceives an issue of equality or social justice, the liberties of the individual must be restrained or give way to the "common good" or the rights of all...
Vol. 19 • February 1986 • No. 2
