The ACLU expelled its only openly communist board member, Elizabeth Grille Flynn. She had been in the free speech fights with the IWW decades earlier. The episode is really the coda to this move from the labor left to liberalism.
Featuring Laura Weinrib on The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Did you know that the ACLU was founded as a radical labor organization allied with the IWW? Weinrib traces the rise of the modern civil liberties movement, and modern constitutional liberalism more broadly, from World War I through the New Deal. She explains how the ACLU went from defending free speech as a means to revolutionary ends to a liberal position exalting free speech as an end unto itself—including the anti-union speech of bosses and the political speech of corporations.
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Check out
Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America by Joshua Frank haymarketbooks.org/books/1940-atomic-days
Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages by Ray Acheson haymarketbooks.org/books/1883-abolishing-state-violence