1938 May 19

ACLU Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays Evicted From Jersey City

 

Arthur Garfield Hays, ACLU co-general counsel, was evicted by the police from Jersey City, New Jersey, on this day.

Hays was in Jersey City to help with the struggle of labor unions to organize workers in the face of attacks by Mayor Frank (“Boss”) Hague, who denied them basic First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and assembly. Because of these repressive tactics, critics began comparing Hague to Adolph Hitler.

The Jersey City struggle culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision Hague v. CIO, on June 5, 1939, which established a constitutional right of freedom of assembly.

As co-General Counsel of the ACLU from the mid-1920s through the early 1950s, Hays had a long, active and colorful career as a civil liberties advocate. Most notably, along with the famed Clarence Darrow he served as co-counsel for John T. Scopes in the historic Scopes case trial that began on July 10, 1925. On April 8, 1943 he quit the American Bar Association because it refused to admit African-Americans. On August 21, 1948 he and ACLU Director Roger Baldwin were invited by U.S. occupation leaders to visit Germany and advise them on civil liberties.

The Arthur Garfield Hays Civil Liberties Program and New York University Law School was created to honor Hays.

Learn more about “Boss” Hague: Steven Hart, American Dictators: Frank Hague, Nucky Johnson, and the Perfection of the Urban Political Machine (2013)

Read: Richard J. Connors, A Cycle of Power: The Career of Jersey City Mayor Rank Hague (1971)

Learn more about freedom of assembly from the Library of Congress

Read about Arthur Garfield Hays and the NYU Program in his honor here

Read about the history of the ACLU: Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberty: A History of the ACLU (1990)

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