Swinburne Hale

Swinburne Hale (1884–1937) was an American lawyer and poet who is best remembered as one of the leading civil rights attorneys of the decade of the 1920s. Hale was a Harvard College classmate of Roger Nash Baldwin and law partner of Walter Nelles and was active in the establishment and early work of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Hale also played a role in the progressive politics of the early 1920s as a leading member of the Committee of Forty-Eight and a spokesman for the fledgling Farmer-Labor Party.

Early years

Swinburne Hale was born in 1884 in Ithaca, New York, one of four children of Latin scholar William Gardner Hale, head of the Latin Department at the University of Chicago. His mother, the former Harriett Knowles Swinburne, was college-educated and active in the women's suffrage movement.

Following the years of his basic academic preparation, Hale attended Harvard College, from which he graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 1905. After graduation from Harvard, Hale enrolled in Harvard Law School, obtaining his LL.B. degree from that institution in 1908.

Legal career

Political activity

In the fall of 1920 Hale was a publicist for the newly-formed Farmer-Labor Party. In his efforts on behalf of the FLP, Hale was careful to delineate the differences between his fledgling organization and the rival Socialist Party of America (SPA), noting that while the SPA included only "simon-pure socialists," the FLP made a broader appeal, targeting not only wage-workers but also farmers, small business proprietors, and professionals.

Death and legacy

Swinburne Hale died in 1937.

Hale's papers are housed at the New York Public Library in New York City, where they occupy 8 archival boxes and 1 oversized folder.

• Do We Need More Sedition Laws? : Testimony of Alfred Bettman and Swinburne Hale before the Committee on Rules of the House of Representatives. New York: American Civil Liberties Union, n.d. [1920].
• "Reds, Deportations, and Palmerism," in Alexander Trachtenberg and Benjamin Glassberg (eds.), The American Labor Year Book, 1921-1922. New York: Rand School of Social Science, n.d. [1921]; pp. 34-39.
• The Demon's Notebook: Verse and Perverse. New York: N.L. Brown, 1923.