http://everything2.com/title/American+Civil+Liberties+UnionWhen the Espionage Act came up for review in the Supreme Court, "free speech" claims lost every time. The Espionage Act made it a crime to interfere with military recruiting efforts. In the first case the Court reviewed, Schenck, a Socialist, made an anti-war pamphlet which compared the draft to slavery and advocated resistance to conscription. The Supreme Court affirmed the conviction of Schenck and his associates under the Espionage Act. "When a nation is at war," Justice Holmes wrote for the Court, "many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right." Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). This opinion is the one in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote: "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic." . . .
Then Holmes himself began to have doubts. He and Louis Brandeis dissented in Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919). On August 23, 1918, six (6) Russian-Jewish anarchists based in New York were arrested, and charged under the Espionage Act for publishing anti-war literature. Only five (5) were tried; the sixth was so badly beaten by the police in the course of his arrest that he died. Justices Holmes and Brandeis dissented because they did not think that pamphleteering by five unknown anarchists constituted a "clear and present danger" to recruiting efforts, or the national security of the United States. . . .
During the Red Scare of 1919-20, A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general and his special assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, used the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act to launch a campaign against radicals and left-wing organizations. Thousands were arrested and hundreds were given long prison sentences. Among those arrested and imprisoned was a former social worker, Roger Baldwin. When the United States entered World War I, Baldwin joined the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM). Baldwin was involved specifically in a branch of the AUAM known as the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), which defended conscientious objectors. In 1918 Baldwin himself was called up for military service, but refused to serve. He was sentenced to a year in jail. After his release in 1919 Baldwin joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Baldwin then resolved to organize a legal response to the Palmer Raids.
In January 1920, Baldwin joined with Norman Thomas, Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, Clarence Darrow, John Dewey, Abraham Muste, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Upton Sinclair to form the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Baldwin was appointed as the first executive director of the ACLU and over the next thirty five (35) years was involved in its campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the Union's first major campaign was fighting Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.