Swinburne Hale
Swinburne Hale (1884–1937) was an American lawyer, poet, and socialist, 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 Isaac Shorr 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. Background. Swinburne Hale was born  on April 5, 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 Harriett Knowles Swinburne was college-educated and active in the women's suffrage movement. In 1905, Hale received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, where he lived in Grays Hall during freshman year. In 1908, he received an LLB from Harvard Law School. Career. Hale moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, where he came to know many writers and artists while practicing as a lawyer. By 1912 , he was already an outspoken advocate for women's suffrage. Hale was a member of the law firm of Hale, Nelles, and Shorr, which "defended radicals." His partners were Isaac Shorr and Walter Nelles. Carlo Tresca, a prominent Italian anarchist, was well acquainted with them. Publishing. In 1917, Hale helped publish a magazine called "New France" that focused on American reconstruction France after World War I. World War I. In 1918, Hale became a captain in the Intelligence Division of General Staff of the United States Army. Law and politics. After World War I, Hale "became more closely identified with  Socialist activities," although his partner Walter Nelles described him as "not a Socialist but interested in socialism." In 1919, Hale became a member of the Committee of 48, a progress party for social reform that went on to support Robert M. La Follette as presidential candidate for a Progressive Party in 1924. He also served as counsel for communists taken to Ellis Island for deportation as a result of the Palmer Raids that comprised the First Red Scare. Hales was very active in 1920: Personal life and death. Walter Nelles was a personal friend of Hale's. Hale married twice . In 1910, he married Beatrice Forbes-Robertson; they divorced in 1920. They had three daughters. In 1921, he married Marie Tudor Garland Green, a disinherited heiress. Between 1922 and 1924 while living mostly in Taos, New Mexico, Hale had an affair with artist Greta R. Hercz. In 1925, Hale bought a coal yard in Westport, Connecticut, to remake into a studio with apartments as an artists and writers colony. Also in 1925, Hale suffered a nervous breakdown. Swinburne Hale died age 53 on July 3, 1937, in a sanitarium in Westport, Connecticut. Legacy. His papers are housed at the New  York Public Library in New York City, where they occupy 8 archival boxes and 1 oversized folder. The papers cover 1908-1924 with "primarily of personal correspondence" and "do not reflect his activities as a lawyer or his socialist sympathies." Works. Poetry: Law-Politics: