http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Nash_Baldwin
Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21, 1884 – August 26, 1981) was a noted civil libertarian, pacifist, and social activist who held Communist views in his youth, yet continued to promote a Socialist agenda. He was one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and its executive director until 1950; many of the ACLU's original landmark cases took place under his direction.
Baldwin's Communist beginning and distinct socialist view's still have power over the organization much as like Ayn Rand still hold over the objectivist, and Adam Smith still holds over the free marketers. Now is everyone in the ACLU a communist? No, and I doubt that is their point, they seem to simply be illustrating a point, its usually called illustrating absurdity by being absurd.
Here are a few of Baldwin's own words.
"I have continued directing the unpopular fight for the rights of agitation, as director of the American Civil Liberties Union.... I am for socialism, disarmament and ultimately for abolishing the state itself as an instrument of violence and compulsion. I seek the social ownership of property, the abolition of the propertied class and sole control by those who produce wealth. Communism is, of course, the goal."-From the Harvard Class Book of 1935, entitled "Thirty Years Later", spotlighting Baldwin's class of 1905 on its thirtieth anniversary.
"I saw in the Soviet Union many opponents of the regime. I visited a dozen prisons — the political sections among them. I saw considerable of the work of the OGPU. I heard a good many stories of severity, even of brutality, and many of them from the victims. While I sympathized with personal distress I just could not bring myself to get excited over the suppression of opposition when I stacked it up against what I saw of fresh, vigorous expressions of free living by workers and peasants all over the land. And further, no champion of a socialist society could fail to see that some suppression was necessary to achieve it. It could not all be done by persuasion. "- From Baldwin's Freedom of the USA and the USSR, writen in September of 1934 in Soviet Russia Today.