Remembering Roger Baldwin
ROCHE, JOHN P.
Perspectives REMEMBERING ROGER BALDWIN BY JOHN P. ROCHE Since he had over 97 years in this vale of tears behind him, it did not come as a shock last August 26 to learn that Roger Baldwin was...
...Throughout his life Roger had a talent for winning over people who should have hated him...
...Whatever its vicissitudes after he left the helm in the '50s, Roger Baldwin's ACLU was crucial in making the Bill of Rights a meaningful part of our national tradition...
...One of the things my wife and I loved about Roger was his total dedication to, in his words, "the angle...
...A number of his friends never understood the friendship that Roger developed with General Douglas Mac Arthur...
...Perspectives REMEMBERING ROGER BALDWIN BY JOHN P. ROCHE Since he had over 97 years in this vale of tears behind him, it did not come as a shock last August 26 to learn that Roger Baldwin was dead...
...You just go ahead...
...He always managed to be youthful without being juvenile...
...Baldwin is in New York celebrating his birthday and seeing a play...
...This was a complex interaction that could only be understood if you knew Roger's basic cost-benefit approach to matters of this kind...
...Baldwin, the jailer suddenly became extremely evasive: "He's not feeling well, may be infectious, no visitors...
...If the seesaw tipped the other way, however, as it did in the late '30s, he could ruthlessly cut all ties and kick them out...
...I'll get there somehow...
...Some innocent would speak up, saying he was going to the Bake Shop for Portuguese sourdough...
...mac-Arthur imposed them on the slightly baffled Japanese...
...He thanked them warmly and retired to his cell...
...As the endless rhetoric about his public benefactions flows on, I recall my wife's and my delight in watching him play an unsuspecting trout at the Vineyard...
...And I'm sure if he had taken up advertising, there would be a refrigerator in every Greenland igloo...
...Yes, Roger Baldwin was unique...
...Norman, who still had a lot to learn about Roger, became convinced Roger was in solitary confinement or worse, a victim of prison brutality...
...We Democratic Socialists had fought the racist act, and I recalled Norman Thomas complaining bitterly in 1952 that only the Northern California branch of the ACLU had opposed it, while the National Board had ducked the issue...
...A favorite trick of his was to offer to be the secretary of a committee and report its findings...
...These folks are no more Communists than you are, or I am...
...Consequently, when MacArthur asked Baldwin to come to Japan and establish civil liberties, Roger was delighted...
...He just suddenly realized their disloyalty to the basic principles of civil liberties...
...Stay and see for yourselves...
...He would visit a sheriff who was persecuting union organizers, and instead of denouncing him as an immoral oppressor of the proletariat would say something like: "My name is Roger Baldwin, and 1 don't understand how a decent man like you could treat people this way...
...Among us it was an affectionate, shared chuckle...
...Nothing personal...
...Roger was an accredited historical monument, existing outside conventional time and space...
...Fortunately for the Republic, he went to work inventing civil liberties...
...The warden, a decent fellow, suggested he help improve it...
...each was a totally committed democrat willing to let the masses have his way...
...His eyes twinkled and he allowed that it helped...
...He was planning to go at 2:30, and then head for the beach at 4. Then Roger would move in (with the net) clucking compassionately: "Now don't change your plans for me...
...But that is history-see my 1963 book, The Quest for the Dream...
...On Roger's birthday, a group of radical pacifists in New York led by Norman Thomas decided to pay him a visit in his cell and have a solidarity session...
...Both were geniuses who were never plagued by the slightest glimmer of self-doubt...
...Finally, as Norman was about to call the newspapers, the warden confessed: "Look, it's my hide if this gets out, but Mr...
...We also constantly encountered him in various liberal organizations, such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA...
...They did, and Roger eventually appeared in a tuxedo...
...All these unionists want is enough money to live on...
...He looked at me in sorrow and said, "As 1 was saying, our Northern California branch led by A.L...
...Roger had asked me to be on hand in case he should "have a memory problem" (ha...
...In fact, I can probably hitchhike without any problem at all...
...Roger was an "American Caesar," too, except that his writ was law in the dissenting sector...
...Thus, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact when Harry Ward, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Corliss Lamont, and other Stalinists on the ACLU Board tried, in his judgment, to take the group away from him, out they went...
...I remember an ADA session on foreign affairs where he raised a number of issues and lost-yet his report indicated his positions had carried...
...Roger had one fixed star-the implementation of civil liberties-and infinite tactical flexibility...
...Needless to say, within two months Roger was the de facto warden-and the place was winning prizes...
...He'll be back around midnight...
...I imagine you have a wife and three or four children, so you know what I mean...
...He will never rest in peace, bless him...
...One afternoon an unfledged historian came to interview him about his prewar relationship with the Communists...
...Indeed, until his daughter's tragic death in her 40s two years ago, some of us who were personally close to him thought he had the patent on joyous living...
...So if he wanted a ride down South Road to visit a friend, at lunch he would casually ask, "Anyone going to West Tisbury this afternoon...
...Guess who went to the Bake Shop at 5:30...
...To put it differently, he considered himself the ACLU incarnate...
...The victim would hesitate...
...from his essentially patrician eminence, he looked on the violation of human rights as indecent behavior unworthy of a society built around the principles of civility...
...Can we have lunch and talk about this whole misunderstanding...
...Once my wife innocently asked him, "Roger, wouldn't you say that anyone who wants to save the world should have a private income...
...In fact, the ACLU had refused to take a position against this outrage...
...Wirin stood almost alone against this terrible deed...
...As the latter packed up his tape and walked off, foxy Roger cackled happily, "What will he learn when he plays that back...
...He got out his erector-set, designed civil liberties, and—Zap...
...He unpacked, looked around, and sent for the warden, to whom he explained that the jail was very inefficiently managed...
...All of which led to a hilarious confrontation...
...I chided him for this, and he laughed, "Ha-ha, what's the point of being secretary if you can't see to it that the committee comes to the right conclusions...
...He put on a spectacular two-hour verbal ballet, overwhelming the young man in the process...
...The historian, armed with a tape recorder and thoroughly primed, began the interrogation...
...He first met her when she was in a baby carriage at a Sacco-Vanzetti protest meeting in the 1920s, and I got to know him in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) around 1940...
...Roger drove a jeep until the 1950s, when the island's traffic reached the point where the police could no longer provide convoy: His eyesight was such that he only felt secure squarely over the yellow line, and thenceforth he had to find a chauffeur...
...He was abrilliant, if scrutable, finagler, rather than a pious evangelist...
...What made our empathy interesting was that we knew his secret, the canny Yankee knew we knew it, and we knew he knew-namely, that Roger was the world's most talented con man...
...It was a dream assignment, because he didn't have to waste any time persuading committees or facing stubborn opposition...
...In World War 1 he was jailed for a year in a New Jersey prison as a draft register...
...Yet somehow it did seem improbable...
...It was actually a bond made in heaven...
...One evening on the Vineyard, talking about civil liberties in World War II, he claimed that the ACLU had fought against the evacuation and imprisonment of West Coast Japanese and Japanese-Americans...
...Partly this was because he was so patently nonideological...
...When the delegation appeared at the jail and asked the warden for permission to visit Mr...
...We renewed the acquaintance when I was active in the ACLU after the War, and became close friends at the family cooperative on Martha's Vineyard that he had helped organize in 1919-20...
...Roger had the same approach to history...
...Indeed, by now that free soul has probably either started a campaign for the equal rights of women saints, or a suit challenging the constitutionality of hell...
...I interrupted Roger to correct him...
...He and his colleagues began to accuse the warden, whose unease almost persuaded them that their friend was being boiled in oil...
...As long as he thought he (and the ACLU) could get more from the Communists than he was providing in return, he could be the prince of fellow travelers...
...My wife and I had a wonderful relationship with the old rascal...
...One hesitates to think what might have happened had he devoted his talent to crime...
...Roger would smile and set the hook: "You're going down around 5:30, I suppose...
Vol. 64 • September 1981 • No. 18
