This book successfully uncovers the inner workings of the ACLU in the crucial decades of the New Deal, World War II, and the Cold War. It meticulously delineates the tense relations between the national office and the branches, especially those in northern and southern California, and the eventual triumph of the branches over the Board of Directors in New York in the 1950s.

In Chapters 2, 5, 7, and 8, this focus on the branches reaps great rewards. They show that the obsession with communism shared especially by Norman Thomas, Morris Ernst, and other board members – and erratically by founder Roger Baldwin – had far less appeal to grassroots civil libertarians. While some of the latter were communists, most simply accepted the logic of local coalition-building in the pursuit of rights. Few of these militants worried about currying favor with New Deal officials who insisted that the ACLU distance itself from communists. And nearly all the zlocals – even anticommunists – deeply resented the New York office's high-handed attitude toward them. Even worse, Kutulas notes, “Whenever a branch deviated from or challenged policy, the ready explanation at headquarters was Communist sympathies” (182).

The book succeeds less well in shedding light on “the making of modern liberalism.” At first, Kutulas clearly distinguishes radicals such as Baldwin, who fought directly against conscription, unjust prosecutions, and the Red Scare during and after World War I, from progressive and New Deal liberals, whose commitment to civil liberties wavered. Sometimes Kutulas characterizes this difference as an opposition between “relativism” and “absolutism” (e.g. 93). The problem with this formulation is, first, that many notable actors played more than one role and, second, that, with the exception of Alexander Meiklejohn, almost none deserved to be called absolutist. Those so labeled almost always use the term as an intensifier, not a philosophical label. They are better called strong libertarians, as opposed to their more moderate libertarian adversaries. The difference between them hinges on how many exceptions, and of what kind, to civil libertarian principle they were willing to tolerate.

The greatest test of such tolerance came during World War II and the Cold War, when many New Deal liberals on the board (and, of course, many liberals and conservatives elsewhere) determined to fight the antifascist war at whatever temporary cost to libertarian principle, even if this meant ignoring government harassment or prosecution of suspected Nazi sympathizers or rationalizing the internment of Japanese Americans. In the Cold War many of these same liberals campaigned to withhold legal protection from “totalitarian” communists and fellow-travelers, and to exclude them from the board. They refused to oppose in principle Truman's loyalty program and the Smith Act, seeking rather to make sure they were applied fairly. Sometimes succeeding, at other times failing in these efforts, they brought the ACLU to the brink of fracturing.

Kutulas's retelling of this story gets confusing when she overlays it with a narrative about “the making of modern liberalism.” It is never clear whether the relativist–absolutist opposition is synonymous with the liberal–radical one. Sometimes the terms “progressive” and “extremist” (111) seem to stand in for these polar positions, but not consistently or convincingly. Moreover, the useful tale of branches against headquarters also sometimes gets conflated with the radical–liberal dichotomy.

The problem is not so much with Kutulas as with the contemporary state of discourse on liberalism. At a time when “neo-liberal” signifies market fundamentalist, and when a variety of postmodernist perspectives treat liberalism and the whole Enlightenment project that is said to undergird it as part of a “disciplinary” regime that inscribes racism, sexism, imperialism, and consumerism into modern society and culture, it is not surprising that Kutulas's discussion sometimes founders.

What is necessary is an understanding that at the heart of the liberal tradition since its birth in the religious wars of the late middle ages is a libertarian commitment to the moral priority of individual rights within all political and social arrangements. Over time, market liberalism (or laissez-faire) and regulatory and welfare-state liberalism (or progressivism) offered rival strains of or emphases within the liberal tradition. These three strains often combined, separated, and admixed with a variety of other political persuasions, producing complicated crosscurrents and contradictions within parties, policies, and individuals.Footnote ¹ Those freethinkers and sex radicals who revived libertarian thinking in the late nineteenth century, and successors such as Theodore Schroeder and his colleagues in the Free Speech League in the early twentieth century, encountered opinions on left and right that gave priority not to individual rights but to corporate, communal, or state prerogatives, often in the name of the collective good.

Thus, when the ACLU was born, progressive had made “individualism” and “liberty” dirty words, inseparable from the ideology of rapacious capitalism. They could defend individual liberties only as pragmatic social goods: the health of the democratic republic depended on such rights, argued progressive legal scholars and judges.Footnote ² As the ACLU in the 1920s and 1930s regained a vision of individual rights that went beyond such a rationale, some friends and enemies accused it of departing from its mission. In fact it was recovering a libertarian impulse that was beleaguered but venerable and vibrant.

A study of the ACLU that places it in this much broader context of the making of modern liberalism is overdue. To that task Kutulas's work contributes considerable insight into the ways in which activists struggled with immediate challenges and deployed ideological resources to direct and explain their actions.