Morris Ernst

Morris Leopold Ernst (1888 – 1976) was an American lawyer and co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union.

He was born in Uniontown, Alabama on Aug. 23, 1888, to a Czech-born father and German mother. He lived in various locations around New York City from the age of 2. He attended the Horace Mann School and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1909. He was admitted to the bar in 1913 after studying law at night.

Career

Ernst practiced law in New York City and in 1915 co-founded the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst. In 1917, he helped found the National Civil Liberties Bureau, which would later become the American Civil Liberties Union.

From 1929 to 1959, he shared the title of general counsel at the ACLU with Arthur Garfield Hays. He became vice chairman of the ACLU's board in 1955.

In 1933, on behalf of Random House he successfully defended James Joyce's novel Ulysses against obscenity charges, leading to its distribution in the U.S.^[1] Because he wrote the foreword to the book, he was compensated with royalties on the sales of it, ultimately earning several hundred thousand dollars. He won similar cases on behalf of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming.

In 1937, as attorney for the American Newspaper Guild, he persuaded the Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) as applied to the press, establishing the right of media employees to organize labor unions.

Ernst was a strong supporter of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. In 1940, as head of the ACLU, he agreed to bar communists from employment there and even discouraged their membership, basing his position on a distinction between the rights of the individual and the rights of groups.

He counted Justice Louis Brandeis as a close friend and later had close personal relationships with Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and New York Governor Herbert Lehman. Besides politicians, he also was friendly with many cultural icons, such as Edna Ferber, E. B. White, Groucho Marx, Compton Mackenzie, Al Capp, Charles Addams, Grandma Moses, Heywood Broun, and Margaret Bourke White.

Perhaps his most controversial case found him on the opposite side from his political allies. In 1956, Jesús Galíndez, a critic of the regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, disappeared, abducted from New York City, it was charged, by Trujillo's agents. Hired by Trujillo to investigate the affair, Ernst's resulting report cleared the Trujillo regime of involvement in Galindez's disappearance, but the FBI and the press remained unconvinced.^[2]

Personal Life

In 1912 he married Susan Leerburger, with whom he had a son who died in infancy and a daughter. Susan died in 1922. Ernst married Margaret Samuels in 1923, and together they had a son and a daughter and five grandkids. Margaret died in 1964. Ernst kept a summer home on Nantucket and enjoyed sailing small boats. He died at home in New York City on May 21, 1976.

Morris Ernst's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.^[3]

Published works

• Hold your tongue!: Adventures in Libel and Slander (1932)
• America's Primer (1931)
• The Ultimate Power (1937)
• Too Big (1940)
• Foreword to Ulysses' (1942)
• The Best is Yet: Reflections of an Irrepressible Man (1945)
• The First Freedom (1946)
• So Far, So Good (1948)
• Report on the American Communist (1952)
• Touch Wood: A Year's Diary (1960)
• Untitled: The Diary of my 72nd Year (1962)
• The Pandect of C.L.D. (1965)
• The teacher, (editor, 1967)
• The Comparative International Almanac (1967)
• A Love Affair with the Law (1968)
• Utopia 1976 (1969)
• The Great Reversals: Tales of the Supreme Court (1973)
• Co-authored
  • with William Seagle, To the Pure: A Study of Obscenity And the Censor (1928)
  • with Pare Lorentz, Censored: The Private Life of the Movies (1930)
  • with Alexander Lindey Hold Your Tongue!: Adventures in Libel and Slander (1932)
  • contributor to Sex in the Arts (1932)
  • contributor to The Sex Life of the Unmarried Adult (1934)
  • with Alexander Lindey The Censor Marches On: Recent Milestones in the Administration of the Obscenity Law in the United States (1940)
  • with David Loth American Sexual Behavior and the Kinsey Report (1948)
  • with David Loth The People Know Best: The Ballot vs. the Poll (1949)
  • with David Loth, For Better Or Worse: New Approach to Marriage & Divorce (1952)
  • with Alexander Lindy, Hold Your Tongue! The Layman's Guide to Libel and Slander (1950)
  • with David Loth, Report on the American Communist (1952, 1962)
  • with Alan Schwartz Privacy: The Right to be Let Alone (1962)
  • with Alan Schwartz Censorship: The Search for the Obscene (1964)
  • with David Loth How High Is Up?: Modern Law for Modern Man (1964)
  • with Alan Schwarz Lawyers and What They Do (1965)
  • with Eleanora B. Black Triple Cross Tricks (1968)
  • with Malcolm A. Hoffmann Back and Forth: An Occasional, Casual Communication (1969)
  • with David Loth The Taming of Technology (1972)
  • contributor to Newsbreak (1974)

References

1. ^ TIME: A Welcome to Ulysses", Dec. 18, 1933
2. ^ TIME: "Whitewash for Trujillo", June 9, 1958
3. ^ Harry Ransom Center: "Ransom Center Receives NEH Grant To Preserve Papers of Morris Ernst", accessed Dec. 1, 2009

External Links

• New York Times: "Morris Ernst, 'Ulysses' Case Lawyer, Dies," May 23, 1976

Persondata
Name	Ernst, Morris
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Date of birth	1888
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Date of death	1976
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