ABSTRACT
Roger Nash Baldwin gave birth to the modern civil liberties movement in the United States. Baldwin was born in 1884 and died in 1991. His entire adult life was a testament to social justice, fundamental fairness, egalitarian politics, and an unflagging belief in the inestimable, inherent dignity of each person. A graduate of Harvard, Baldwin left Boston on the advice of Louis D. Brandeis for Saint Louis, Missouri, where he engaged in social work and liberal reform politics reflective of the progressivism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Roger Baldwin was devoted to American democracy, the Declaration of Independence, and an expansive reading of the Bill of Rights. Baldwin retired from the American Civil Liberties Union in 1950 and, over the course of the next two decades, sought to expand his civil liberties work internationally by directing the International League for the Rights of Man through the auspices of the United Nations.
