ACLU Officials Roger Baldwin and Arthur Garfield Hays Invited to Advise U.S. Government on German Occupation
ACLU General Counsel Arthur Garfield Hays sailed for Europe on this day to advise the U.S. Government on restoring civil liberties in Germany, which was then governed by the U.S. and three other World War II allies. ACLU Executive Director Roger Baldwin was also invited and was expected to leave for Germany in a month.
Baldwin and Hays were invited by Gen. Lucius D. Clay, the American Military Governor for the American Zone in Occupied Germany.
Initially, Baldwin was very impressed with General Clay, finding him “approachable,keen” and “wholly lacking in vanity or pride of position,” and convinced that he was sincere about developing civil liberties in Germany. When he talked with Germans, however, he found that the American occupying forces were seriously violating individual rights: monitoring private communications, licensing the press, and using control over newsprint to suppress left-wing publications, censoring radio and the movies, and engaging in massive warrantless searches of private homes (45,000 such searches in Bavaria alone in 1948).
Baldwin recommended and help to launch German civil liberties unions in the different regions of Germany. Being led and funded by Americans, however, the project never gained much success. In part, this was due to the fact the Germans disagreed over the meaning of civil liberties and how they could be achieved.
Hays was co-counsel with Clarence Darrow in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, involving a Tennessee law outlawing the teaching of evolution in public schools. For some of Hays’ other civil liberties work, go to May 19, 1938, December 4, 1942, and April 8, 1943.
On March 17, 1947, General Douglas MacArthur invited Roger Baldwin to Japan to advise him on the new constitution for Japan.
Read about Baldwin’s visit to Japan and also his and Hays’ visit to Germany: R. W. Kostal, Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied German and Japan (2019)
Read Hays’s account of his early cases: Arthur Garfield Hays, Let Freedom Ring (1928)
Watch an interview with Hays: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOK6eu9s4Zk