National Lawyers Guild, a progressive legal organization founded in 1937 by lawyers opposed to the American Bar Association (ABA), which was then politically conservative and did not admit African Americans. Early guild members included prominent liberals like Morris Ernst, New Dealers like Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson, African Americans like Charles Houston, and women like the radical labor lawyer Carol Weiss King. In addition, many members had ties to other reformist organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the International Labor Defense. Whereas in the 1930s the ABA supported property rights and laissez-faire, the guild championed New Deal economic and legal reforms, declaring that "human rights" should be "more sacred than property rights," and the group accordingly supported President Franklin Roosevelt's controversial court-packing plan. Guild lawyers represented the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the 1937 sit-down strikes and in Hague v. Congress of Industrial Organizations (1939), which established workers' free speech rights to use public streets to demonstrate and organize. The early guild also advocated legal aid for poor people. Government-supported legal aid did not appear until the 1960s, but some local guild chapters operated privately funded law clinics in the 1940s that helped nonelite attorneys gain a professional foothold, and brought legal help to people not otherwise able to afford it.
The general conservative reaction against the New Deal in the late 1930s brought specific charges from guild opponents that it was a subversive organization. This accusation exacerbated internal tensions, with liberal guild members increasingly demanding statements from other members endorsing democracy and disavowing "dictatorships," whether fascist, nazi, or communist. Radical members (including many who were communists) resisted these calls, opposing what they saw as unfair conflations of fascism and communism. In 1940, liberal and New Dealer members began resigning from the guild over this issue.
The guild's public standing improved during World War II, and subsequently, its president was officially invited to the United Nations' founding and the Nuremberg trials. However, the guild became reentangled in the national debate over communism when its members represented many prominent McCarthy era defendants, including several of the Hollywood Ten and the leaders of the Communist Party, USA. The House Committee on Un-American Activities responded by denouncing the guild as "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party," and the Justice Department attempted to list it as a subversive organization. No guild wrongdoing was ever found, but the accusations reduced membership by 80 percent in the 1950s.
Guild membership recovered in the 1960s when it represented civil rights organizations such as the Mississippi Freedom Project and antiwar protesters like the Chicago Seven. The guild remained active in left-progressive legal causes from the 1970s onward, including immigrant rights, gay and lesbian rights, death penalty repeal, and Palestinian statehood.
Bibliography
Auerbach, Jerold S. Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Bailey, Percival R. "The Case of the National Lawyers Guild, 1939–1958." In Beyond the Hiss Case: The FBI, Congress, and the Cold War. Edited by Athan G. Theoharis. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982.
Ginger, Ann Fagan, and Eugene M. Tobin, eds. The National Lawyers Guild: From Roosevelt through Reagan. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.
