Foreign yet domestic liberties: the imperial imaginary of the ACLU and the U.S. colonial empire, 1920-1941

Abstract

Foreign Yet Domestic Liberties is concerned with how and why did the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) interest and involve themselves in the U.S. colonial empire between 1920 and 1941. This study demonstrates that the ACLU were committed to the defense of and advocacy for civil liberties such as freedom of speech, the press, and assembly throughout the U.S. colonial empire. This study argues that an imperial imaginary on the part of the ACLU was of great significance to their engagement with the colonial empire. Their imperial imaginary was critical for how they perceived and understood the colonial realm. It is further argued that that this helped facilitate their coming to increasingly compromise their attempts to check abuses of colonial state power and, instead, come to accommodate themselves with a varied and insecure civil liberties dispensation for the U.S. colonies.