Biography
Roger 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. (Recorded as Roger Nash Baldwin)
The September 1924 account traces the League for Mutual Aid to plans Baldwin formed while imprisoned during the war and to its establishment in January 1920 with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Charles W. Ervin and others. It describes loans, job placements, medical help and a Mohegan colony camp. This adds post-prison organizing context without changing the independently recorded custody chronology. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1924/v02a-n147-sep-10-1924-DW-LOC.pdf#page=5
The May 14,1928 Trenton dispatch reports a separate Passaic unlawful-assembly prosecution arising from a strike meeting on October 6,1924. Baldwin and textile workers John Butterworth, George Cabrizza, Basil Effsa and Davis Nitkin were arrested; the Common Pleas Court imposed six months on Baldwin and $50 fines on the workers, and the New Jersey Supreme Court upheld the convictions before the Court of Errors and Appeals reversed them on May 14,1928. The account establishes the distinct political arrest but does not establish actual six-month service or physical release on the appellate decision day. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1928/1928-ny/v05-n114-NY-may-15-1928-DW-LOC.pdf#page=1
The September 1919 Liberator published Roger Baldwin’s poem To a Sycamore, which addresses a tree seen through a prison window. The poem provides a contemporary literary expression of prison experience. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/1919/09/v2n09-w19-sep-1919-liberator.pdf#page=26
The September 1919 Liberator published Roger Baldwin’s poem To a Sycamore, which addresses a tree seen through a prison window. The poem provides a contemporary literary expression of prison experience.
