Communist Dissonance: New at Reason

On Christmas Eve 1926, Roger Baldwin set sail for the Soviet Union, a man adrift.

Nearly seven years before, he had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). He had been a hands-on executive director for the upstart organization, which had had an immediate impact with its unapologetic First Amendment defenses of labor radicals. The early ACLU wasn’t in any way a neutral defender of the Bill of Rights. As ACLU counsel Walter Nelles put it, “We are frankly partisans of labor in the present struggle, and our place is in the fight.”

But in 1926, Baldwin took a leave of absence from the organization as personal crises mounted. He was battling depression. His marriage was on the rocks. A close friend had died of a drug overdose. Later in life, Baldwin would tell an interviewer that it was “a time of confusion in my values.”

Baldwin had always been a mess of contradictions. He was a Boston Brahmin pursuing a classless society, a pacifist who called for class war, a civil libertarian who enthusiastically supported the Soviet experiment despite reports of the Bolsheviks’ police-state tactics. Now he would finally get to see the workers’ paradise for himself, writes Matthew Harwood.