| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930–1960. By Judy Kutulas. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. xiv, 305 pp. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8078-3036-9.)

This book is one of a number on the history and politics of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to appear over the last four decades. Judy Kutulas does not claim to have found an original research topic, but she does delineate in detail how anticommunism and a desire to be taken seriously by political authorities in Washington came to overwhelm the national organization's commitment to genuine individual liberty. She also sets out a rich and interesting description of the various local affiliates and their members, who often had a far more radical view of their political role at a time of world war and then cold war than did their timid, remote colleagues in the organization's New York headquarters. Whereas many senior national aclu members were, in Kutulas's eyes, principally concerned with proving their patriotic credentials by marginalizing members of the Popular Front coalition left over from the 1930s, activists on the ground in Chicago and California had to deal with heavy civil rights caseloads that often reaffirmed their commitment to the left and their disillusionment with consensus Cold War liberalism.

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