Today, we begin a series of blog entries in a new category American Civil Liberties Union History covering the ALCU’s early history. Written by Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the author of the only comprehensive history of the ACLU, each entry contains many digitized documents along with Walker’s commentary. These documents are part of 20 reels of microfilm that we digitized recently with Walker’s generous support and can be accessed here.
A note on the citations to the ACLU Records: The location of each document is indicated by the microfilm reel number, the original Volume number in the ACLU Records, and the page number(s) within each volume. Locating particular documents should be fairly easy, although it will often require moving back and forth between reels and volumes.
Documents on particular topics are often scattered among different microfilm reels and volume numbers. This is believed to be a result of the disorganization of the records that occurred when the U.S. Justice Department raided the offices of the National Civil Liberties Bureau on August 30, 1918.
Despite the disorganization of the documents, however, most are grouped together in a logical fashion. As a result, readers who access a document related to the founding of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), for example, will find related documents on that subject nearby, and these documents may be of interest to readers.
A disclaimer: the text is Professor Walker’s interpretation of ACLU history and some will not agree with it. This is the nature of historical scholarship, but we encourage you to comment and, where possible, cite other ACLU documents that you find online.
This is the first part in a series that was introduced earlier.
World War I ended on November 11, 1918, but the repression of civil liberties continued unabated. The most well-known event was the so-called “Palmer Raids,” which actually involved two sets of federal mass arrests of alleged radicals, in November 1919 and early January 1920. The leaders of the NCLB began thinking about transforming the organization into a permanent one devoted to the defense of civil liberties. The key person was Roger Baldwin, who was convicted of violating the Selective Service Act in October 1918 and sent to prison. After his release in the summer of 1919, he made a cross country trip to work as an industrial laborer. Upon his return to New York in late 1919 he began the planning for the new organization, which was established as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in January 1920.
Reel16/Vol.120/p.19–20
This undated and unsigned memorandum, Suggestions for Reorganization of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, was probably written by Roger Baldwin (see his initials in the upper right hand corner), probably in late 1919. It represent his thoughts on reorganizing the National Civil Liberties Bureau into a permanent civil liberties organization. Note that in the first paragraph the primary focus is on working people (“the cause we serve is labor”). No name for a permanent organization is suggested at this time. When the ACLU is officially constituted, it is evident that discussions about the agenda for a national organization had expanded to include a broader range of civil liberties issues.
Reel14/Vol.108/p.188
Reel14/Vol.108/p.189
Reel14/Vol.108/p.190
This undated memorandum by Roger Baldwin was probably written in early January 1920 and summarizes the work of the NCLB from October 1917 to January 1920. It was undoubtedly written as part of the discussions to reconstitute the NCLB into a permanent civil liberties organization.
Reel16/Vol.120/p.7
The decision to create the American Civil Liberties Union is recorded in these Minutes of the Conference to Reorganize the National Civil Liberties Bureau, January 12, 1920. Note the concern (Item #3) about including the names of Roger Baldwin and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn because they had been prosecuted and convicted of federal crimes during the war. The objections were rejected, and their names were included. The first action by the new ACLU was to protest the proposed peacetime sedition law being considered by the House of Representatives (Item #7). The 1918 sedition law had expired with the end of the war, but the proposed peacetime law did not pass.
The 1912 U.S. presidential election was a turning point for progressivism, both for the nation and for Woodrow Wilson. An exhibition now open at the Princeton University Library illustrates this remarkable election and the life of the man who won it.
Drawn from the University Archives and the Public Policy Collection at the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, the exhibition follows Wilson’s career as scholar, university president, governor of New Jersey, and newly elected president of the United States to tell the story of how his ideas were formed and changed in service of the nation. In addition, the exhibition features rare Wilson memorabilia loaned by Anthony W. Atkiss, a member of Princeton’s class of 1961.
“The Election for Woodrow Wilson’s America” is free and open to the public, and is on display in Firestone Library’s Milberg Gallery now through the end of December 2012.
The 1912 election was a four-way race between a conservative incumbent, William Howard Taft, a socialist, Eugene Debs, and two progressives, former president Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson. Growing concern about the concentration of wealth and influence among the power elite and pressing questions about taxation, the welfare of farmers, banking regulation, and labor rights made it almost inevitable that a progressive candidate would take the White House.
“The exhibition is filled with some exceptional items, including love letters Wilson wrote to his first wife, the complete text of Wilson’s first inaugural address, the top hat he wore while campaigning for the presidency, a good number of original political cartoons from the era, and a tremendous variety of pins, buttons, pennants, and other campaign memorabilia, generously loaned to us by Mr. Atkiss,” said Dan Linke, the head of Mudd Library, who co-curated the exhibition with Maureen Callahan, a project archivist at Mudd.
According to Callahan, Wilson represented the model citizen-scholar that Princeton strove to produce throughout the 20th century. Cosmopolitan, serious, and reformist, he had studied the structures that make political change happen and was willing to leverage his influence to affect them. As Princeton’s president from 1902 to 1910, Wilson transformed the university into a far more scholarly place than it had been when he was a student. Motivated by ambition and a sincere desire to serve, Wilson took on the political party system and local monopolies as governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913, and this work helped catapult him to the presidency.
“The Election for Woodrow Wilson’s America” is currently open from 8:45 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. Monday through Friday. Starting Sept. 4, it will be open from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Monday through Friday until Dec. 28, 2012. The exhibition is open from noon to 5 p.m. on Sundays. A curator’s tour of the exhibition will be held Oct. 28, 2012, at 3 p.m.
What are the connections between Princeton and the Olympics?
With the upcoming 2012 Olympics on the horizon, this is a popular question. We have a blog entry from a few years ago concerning what Mudd has in its collections relating to the 1896 games.
Princeton University’s ties with the Olympics began at the revival of the Olympiad in 1896 when Dr. William Sloane, a Princeton professor, formed an American team for the games. On that team were four Princeton students. Robert Garrett, 1897 threw the discus 96 feet to defeat a Greek champion. Three other students participated in the Athens games: Herbert B. Jamison ’97 (second in the 400 meters), Francis A. Lane ’97 (second in the 100 meters), and Albert Clinton Tyler ’97 (second in pole-vault).
In 1984 NBC-TV aired a miniseries entitled The First Olympics: Athens 1896. The following clip shows the discus throw of Garrett.
Also in the archives is a laurel branch that was awarded to Albert C. Tyler for his second in the pole vault a the 1896 games.
There are a number of alumni that have won gold medals in the Olympics, as cataloged by Princeton Alumni Weekly writer, Gregg Lange ’70. Lange’s list and commentary includes:
• Karl Frederick ‘1903 is the only Tiger to win three gold medals, all in 1920 in Antwerp. One of the better-shooting Princeton lawyers of the post-Burr era, he won an individual gold in the 50-meter pistol and team golds in the same event and the 30-meter, too. He later pulled off an unlikely double, as president in turn of the National Rifle Association and the New York State Conservation Council.
• Herman “Swede” Whiton ’26 is the only Princetonian to win in two separate games and the first American yachtsman to win a race twice – the 6-meter sailing race at both the 1948 and 1952 Olympics in London and Helsinki with different crews.
• Nelson Diebel ’96 who was semi-rescued from weirdness by his Peddie swimming coach, then suffered chronic rotator-cuff inflammation, but put together an annus mirabilis after his Princeton freshman year in 1992 to win both the Olympic 100-meter breaststroke and the 4x100 medley relay gold in Barcelona.
• Four years after Garrett’s triumph in Athens, Frank Jarvis 1900 (a direct descendent of George Washington) won the 100-meter dash in 1900 in Paris. The first great Princeton sprinter, he already had won the national AAU title at 100 yards and two different Intercollegiate Association of Amateur Athletes of America (IC4A) titles.
• Bill Stevenson ’22, an Illinois cousin of his famed classmate Adlai II ’22 and a Rhodes scholar, had won the national championship AAU title in the 440 yard race in 1921. He went to Paris for the 1924 games and ran on the U.S. gold-medal 4x400-meter relay team. He eventually became president of Oberlin, then ambassador to the Philippines.
• Jed Graef ’64, whose high school didn’t have a swimming team, swam for the great Bob Clotworthy in Dillon Pool and went on to win the 200-yard backstroke at the NCAA and U.S. championships. Then he set a world record winning gold in the 200 meters at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, beating two Americans who earlier had defeated him. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 1988.
• Then came the rowers, products of the ever-burgeoning program down on Lake Carnegie. The first champion was Mike Evans ’81, whose gold medal in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics came, ironically, for Canada by 0.42 seconds over the United States, the first Princeton gold won for another country. It also was Canada’s first win in the featured men’s heavyweight eights, establishing a global stature that Canadians retain to this day. [Evans is now vice chairman of The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc.]
• Chris Ahrens ’98 waited six years after stroking the Princeton heavyweight eight to national championships in 1996 and 1998 to win his gold in 2004 in the men’s eights in Athens, coming out of retirement in 2003 after a wrenching fifth-place finish in Sydney in 2000.
AP Images
Caroline Lind ’06, stroke and heart of the magnificent 2006 women’s undefeated – and practically unchallenged – national champion open crew, rowed the No. 7 oar for the gold-medal-winning women’s eight in Beijing, their first Olympic championship in 24 years. She’s the first alumna to grab gold for the Tigers.
A search of our Senior Thesis Database shows there are 16 theses that have been focused on the Olympics. All theses can be viewed in our reading room.
In 1935 a travel agency advertised tours in the Daily Princetonian: “The steamship agency “Adriatic Exchange Travel Bureau,” at 226 East 86th Street, New York City, specialists in German travel since 1918, announces a number of “Thrift Tours” for next year’s Olympics to be held in Berlin, Germany. These tours are reasonably priced and are organized to appeal to all students who are interested in athletics.”
The Olympic Flame traveled through the Princeton campus in 1980 as a part of the Princeton Relays. Alison Carlson ’77 held the honor of holding the flame high.
Ever wonder what some of the staff here at Mudd spend their time working on? Our Technical Services department has been hard at work and here is a quick summary of what they have completed!
Maureen has been supervising the final inventory work for the Bill Bradley papers, working with Dan Linke on an exhibit about Woodrow Wilson and the 1912 election, and writing help text for the new finding aids site, which is now in beta testing, (along with her usual reference and accessioning work). She is also organizing a June 26 Delaware Valley Archivists’ Group meeting about copyright, copyfraud and rights & permissions policies in archives.
Lynn Durgin: Special Collections Assistant for Technical Services
Lynn worked with ProQuest, the Graduate School and OIT to implement a policy change on Publishing Options for Princeton University Dissertations, which now allows for dissertation embargoes in ProQuest and in Princeton’s DataSpace. She also completed processing of 13 University Archives accessions.
Adriane is wrapping up the 2-year grant project to process 2,500 linear feet of American Civil Liberties Union Records, which will be completed in June. This month, she finished the finding aid for the last series, so we now have the description of the entire collection online and researchers have started to come use it, and we physically put the boxes in order. She also started planning for the next phase of the Daily Princetonian digitization project, which will be for the years 2003-present and will repurpose PDFs saved by the Daily Princetonian staff where possible.
Christie completed reconciling the results of last summer’s P collection (Princetoniana) shelf read with Voyager (our cataloging system). She continued to investigate tools and methods for accessioning and managing born-digital materials in the archives through a site visit with electronic records archivists at Yale University. She also integrated additions to 12 different collections, oversaw the processing of another collection by a Special Collections Assistant, and met with developers from OIT to plan and move forward on the creation of a new web interface for the redesigned photograph, AV and memorabilia databases.
Today marks the bicentennial of the official declaration of the War of 1812. While the war itself had little influence on the daily experiences of Princeton students, on occasion, these students would witness soldiers passing through town on their way to the conflict. Some of these encounters were detailed in student correspondence to family members, and these letters also address the public sentiment towards the war and the tumultuous political climate that provided its impetus. A few examples of these writings are highlighted below.
The first excerpt is from a letter written by James Mercer Garnett, Jr., Class of 1814, to his mother, Mary E. Garnett of Pittsville, Virginia. Dated June 16, 1812, two days before President James Madison (a fellow Princetonian, Class of 1771) officially declared war on Great Britain, Garnett wrote his letter while traveling through Washington, D.C. on his way to Princeton. Meanwhile, Congress deliberated Madison’s grievances with England, which included British trade restrictions with France, British support of indigenous resistance to American expansionism, impressment of American soldiers in the British Royal Navy, and British seizure of American ships.
As I probably shall not have an opportunity to write, on the way between here and Princeton; I take the opportunity while my Father is writing, to let you know we have got so far safe on our journey.…I have not time to say much more now, as we are going to the Cappitol (sic) in a few minutes. Tell Uncle Mercer that the recruiting business goes on very slowly here; & that in stead (sic) of the 17 thousand men that are reported in our neighbourhood to have enlisted; the Secretary at war says there are only between three and five thousand. I fancy all the reports about what the senate have done are false, their doors are still closed; I expect we shall know what they have determined on tomorrow; the general oppinion (sic) about here is that we shall have war, although they say the public sentiment seems to be much against it.… Student Writings and Correspondence Collection (AC334, Box 9)
After several days of deliberation, the House of Representatives voted 79 to 49 for a declaration of war, and the Senate agreed by a vote of 19 to 13. On June 18, 1812, Madison signed this measure into law, becoming the first U.S. President to declare war on another nation.
The following excerpt is from a letter written by Walter Kirkpatrick, Class of 1813, to his cousin, Maria Cobb of Morristown, New Jersey dated July 6, 1812. In the letter, Kirkpatrick addresses the recent declaration of war, and the anticipated effect it will have on the college. He writes:
…War is indeed declared, yet it will not have that effect on this institution which you seemed to imagine it would have, the probability is that we shall continue here as we have done as idle spectators of the scene, since no student is obliged to perform military duty while he is a member of college .…Wednesday last a company of about one hundred soldiers passed through this place on their way to New York — They had with them 12 pieces of cannon, each piece being able to carry a ball of six pounds weight, and men followed at a considerable distance by four very large baggage-wagons guarded by about twenty soldiers…
A year ago, after the introductory slideshow at the She Roars Conference for female Princeton graduates and students, various audience members asked President Shirley Tilghman if there was a museum or other exhibit documenting the history of women at Princeton. I remember President Tilghman directing the conference participants to Mudd Library if they were interested in learning more about the history of coeducation at Princeton. Mudd has featured an exhibit this year called “She Flourishes: Chapters in the History of Princeton Women,” However, Wikipedia articles about Princeton women created using University archives resources would enhance the online accessibility of this information, while ensuring its reliability.
Enter the idea of hosting another Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Mudd, this time on the theme of Women at Princeton. Wikimedia Community Fellow Sarah Stierch’s recent interview on CBC Radio 2, in which she discussed the Wikipedia gender gap and the fates of articles about women in academia, inspired me to organize this even to highlight the contributions women have made to Princeton as an institution and to help close the Wikipedia gender gap.
With help from members of the Wikimedia of NYC chapter, new Wikipedia editors teamed up with experienced Wikipedians in order to research and create articles for the history of women at Princeton, Coeducation at Princeton, and a few notable faculty and staff members. By the end of the day, we had drafts of articles in a few different users’ sandboxes on Wikipedia and an article on coeducation that is ready for expansion.
Sophomore Anna Kornfeld Simpson wins a gold star for using the most books in the reference room while researching women engineers at Princeton!
By the numbers, we had:
*Total participants: 15
*Princeton students: 4
*Usernames created: 5
The Princeton University Archives, working in conjunction with the Princeton University Library Digital Initiatives, has nearly completed a monumental project that will change the way researchers investigate University history. The student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, has been digitized from its inception in 1876 through 2002. The site has been available in beta for almost two years, but all issues will be loaded as of June 30, 2012. At the suggestion of The Daily Princetonian alumni board who have been among the prime backers of this project, the site is named in honor of the newspaper’s long-serving production manager Larry Dupraz, and researchers are able to perform sophisticated keyword searches that can unlock the vast richness of the daily newspaper that documents so much of the University’s history. (For the years 2002– present, users may search online via the Daily Prince site.)
“I wrote my final paper for my Freshman Writing Seminar about how the presence of veterans on Princeton’s campus following World War II affected Princeton’s academic environment and social atmosphere,” said Jennifer Klingman ’13. “My research heavily relied on The Daily Princetonian archives, and I had to spend a lot of time and energy searching for relevant articles in Firestone’s microform versions of the newspaper. It was difficult to comb through the articles, and as a result my research was limited in scope. This spring, I wrote my history department junior paper on academic and social changes taking place at Princeton during the late 1940s and 1950s. The online Daily Princetonian archives proved to be invaluable. I was able to access the archives anywhere and at any time, and use the archives’ search function to find a number of extremely useful articles. My independent work has definitely benefited from the existence of the online archives.”
Freelance journalist W. Barksdale Maynard ’88 states “I am able to write about the social history of Princeton in an entirely new way and have restructured my research to take full advantage of this exciting new resource. For my Princeton Alumni Weeklyarticle on the early history of automobiles at Princeton, the Dupraz Digital Archives allowed me to identify every reference to cars as early as 1901, to pinpoint who owned them and what kinds. I would never have attempted this article without The Dupraz Digital Archives.”
Maynard’s PAW colleague, Gregg Lange ’70, regularly uses the site for his column, “Rally Round the Cannon,” which examines and appraises University history. “You can piece together the story of Princeton football or Woodrow Wilson in a dozen ways. But the unique accessibility of a daily publication allows more subtle topics to arise and recede, and for cross-generational tales to emerge. Be it Ella Fitzgerald singing at a Princeton dance at age 19, then receiving an honorary degree 54 years later; or student revolts against the clubs’ Bicker selection system in 1917 and 1940 presaging its loss of monopoly in 1968, the combination of detail and long view is indispensable in understanding the ethos of the institution over time, and essentially inaccessible without the DuPraz technology and precision. And existentially, if I never see another microfiche in my life I will die a happy man.”
Maynard added, “My regular column in PAW, “From Princeton’s Vault,” has benefited enormously. Recently I was able to identify the earliest references to Princetonians as “tigers,” which had been guesswork previously. It turns out we were wrong by a decade.
This has been an international project, with the newspapers sent from Princeton to Brechin Imaging in Canada, where TIFF images are generated using high end German cameras. The files are then sent via a hard drive to Cambodia, where Digital Divide Data analyzes the structure of each page and uses an optical character recognition (OCR) program to derive machine-readable text, which allows for keyword searching. The hard drive is then shipped to Austin, Texas, where the US office of New Zealand company DL Consulting loads the data into a content-management system called Veridian, which supports searching and browsing, online reading, article extraction and printing, and other features.
Within the library, many hands have worked for this project’s success. At Mudd Library, project archivists Dan Brennan and then Adriane Hanson have overseen the day-to-day work of the project, managing the shipment of the newspapers to Brechin, as well as supervising students with the quality control phase. University Archivist Dan Linke raised the funds from various University and alumni sources and coordinated the project.
Within the greater Library system, Cliff Wulfman, the Library’s Digital Initiatives Coordinator, took the lead in writing the Request for Proposals and then selecting and coordinating the work with DDD, as well as providing technical assistance, support and vision. The Library System Office’s Antonio Barrera designed the front end web page with Phil Menos providing server support, and Deputy University Librarian and Systems Librarian Marvin Bielawski allocated the funds to acquire the Veridian software.
The project employs the METS/ALTO markup standard, the same used by the Library of Congress’s Newspaper Digitization Project, which means that as software changes and improves, we will be able to sustain this resource for many years to come.
Recently project archivist Adriane Hanson participated in a panel at the recent spring conference of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference (MARAC) in Cape May, NJ. The topic of her talk was how she is handling the size of her current project, processing 2,500 linear feet of the records of the American Civil Liberties Union Records in a two-year project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).
In a nutshell, this feat is accomplished by:
1. Stay on top of the schedule through careful project management, collecting metrics to have realistic data on how long each task requires, and frequently revisiting and adjusting the timeline of the project.
2. Be flexible about the workflow, examining the way you have always done things and adjusting as needed to better work with a massive collection.
3. Think of it as data management. Use tools to repurpose data from one step of the project to another, and to analyze and transform the data once the box inventories are complete.
4. Spend extra time writing descriptions about each part of the collection to provide the researcher with important keywords to search for and context to understand the significance of the section. But do not spend time on description that is not aiding in searching, such as lists of document types in the collection inventory. Time should be spent on value-added description.
The slides and text for her presentation are available here.
If you have any questions for her, you can reach her by email:
Dear Mr. Mudd, I was wondering what is the most popular/most requested senior thesis in the University Archives collection?
This is a perennial question and the short answer is that with the exception of celebrity alumni theses, there are few theses that are pulled with any regularity, yet the collection as a whole (totaling over 60,000 theses) is our most used collection within the University Archives. Last year over 1,000 theses were viewed by visitors–mostly Princeton undergraduates–to the Mudd Library, which accounted for about 1/4 of all Archives materials circulated.
Wendy Kopp’s thesis is always among those requested by remote researchers–that is, those who do not visit the library in person, and whenever a Princetonian makes news or is on a hit show, their thesis is often requested.
In the past, this included Wentworth Miller III (when Prison Break was a hit), David Duchovny (for the X Files) and Dean Cain (Adventures of Lois and Clark), as well as all three now sitting Supreme Court Justices: Samuel Alito, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.
The entire theses collection can be searched via this database, and Archives staff are working to make future senior theses available online to the Princeton community starting in 2013.
