In the early 20th century, a number of civil institutions emerged to help protect the rights of dissenters and minorities in the wake of the First World War. One of the leading groups, the National Civil Liberties Bureau came out in opposition to the Sedition Acts of 1918, and evolved into the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) to cover a broader array of causes.
The group’s founders include Hellen Keller, future Justice Felix Frankfurter and leading civil rights attorney Walter Nelles. Among the group’s earliest civil defenses cases, the ACLU defended a number of accused leftists politicians who were indicted in the Palmer Raids led by the former Attorney General Alexander Palmer. As a result, the ACLU became identified with the organized labor movement, although it explicitly maintained its independence over the coming decades.
Today, the group has developed a prominent stature in the eyes of the Supreme Court, leading a number of civil defense cases to advocate for various causes, including the separation of church and state, ending capital punishment, as well as arguing for reproductive, immigrant and minority rights. The group’s positions have placed them on a variety of sides in recent years, including their defense of Oliver North (on 5th Amendment grounds), as well as their vocal defense of the rights of the accused under the 6th Amendment. Famously the group headed up the defense of John Scopes, as member Clarence Darrow, argued the case against William Jennings Bryan in the Tennessee Supreme Court. More recently, the ACLU has filed a number of lawsuits against the NSA (National Security Administration) against its warrant-less wiretapping program. The group is involved in a wide variety of current legislative procedures, including a number of challenges to domestic surveillance policies as well as on-going litigation challenging Proposition 8 in California.
