Sorrow and Liberties

Anthony Romero's first day on the job as the new executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union was Sept. 4, 2001. He was anxious to get started as he strode into the A.C.L.U. headquarters at the lower tip of Manhattan. From his 18th-floor office he had an amazing view of New York Harbor and, appropriately, the Statue of Liberty.

"I had spent part of the summer looking back at the history of the A.C.L.U.," he said. "And one of the things I looked at were the Palmer raids, which were right after the First World War."

A. Mitchell Palmer was an unsuccessful Senate candidate who was appointed attorney general by Woodrow Wilson in 1919. It was a tumultuous period, with the rise of revolutionary movements overseas and tremendous social and political upheaval in the U.S., including a series of bombings by suspected anarchists.

Palmer responded to the turmoil by leading a vicious and unprecedented campaign against alleged radicals and dissidents. Government agents in dozens of cities rounded up thousands of individuals, most of them immigrants. Many were brutalized and held without charge. Hundreds of eastern Europeans were deported without benefit of due process.

The Palmer raids (with a young J. Edgar Hoover as an important operative) would ultimately be discredited by history. They were illegal, unconstitutional and shameful. But at the time they had widespread support, so it took courage to speak out against them.

Among those with the requisite courage was Roger Baldwin, who in 1918 had been a founder of the National Civil Liberties Bureau. In 1920, in the heat of the controversy over the Palmer raids, the bureau became the American Civil Liberties Union.

Anthony Romero was immersed in that history when the awfulness of Sept. 11 occurred. And that history was on his mind when, amid the national sorrow and the fear that followed the terror attacks, President Bush and his attorney general, John Ashcroft, began elbowing the Constitution aside as they moved aggressively to expand the powers of the executive branch.

Mr. Romero was in a difficult position. He understood the depth of the sorrow and the fears. But he also understood, better than most, that both the strength and the greatness of the United States were rooted in the nation's commitment to freedom and the rule of law, and its remarkably successful system of governmental checks and balances.

And so the A.C.L.U. — sometimes in concert with other champions of civil liberties (not all of them on the political left, by any means) — has challenged a series of initiatives by the executive branch. It has filed lawsuits or otherwise objected to a variety of government policies, including the secret detention of people suspected of violating immigration laws; the use of material witness statutes as a form of preventive detention; and the refusal to allow American citizens arrested as "enemy combatants" to see their lawyers or challenge their detention before a civilian judge.