Biography
Roger Nash Baldwin was the founder and, for thirty years, director of the American Civil Liberties Union. During World War I he ran the National Civil Liberties Bureau — the ACLU's predecessor — defending conscientious objectors and antiwar dissenters against the Espionage Act and military repression. Refusing to register for the draft, he was indicted under the Selective Service Act; at his sentencing on October 30, 1918 he delivered a celebrated statement of conscience, later published as "The Individual and the State," declaring his "uncompromising opposition to the principle of conscription of life by the state." Sentenced to one year, he served about nine to ten months — first in the Tombs and then the Essex County Jail in Newark, where he organized a prisoners' welfare league — and was released in the summer of 1919. He founded the ACLU the next year.
