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ERNST, MORRIS L. 1888-1976

ATTORNEY AND POLITICAL ACTIVIST

A Champion of Individual Rights

An active member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Morris L. Ernst spent his legal career fighting for the rights of people outside the mainstream of American society.

Background

Born to Jewish parents in the rural Alabama town of Uniontown, Morris Leopold Ernst experienced firsthand the consequences of being a social outsider. After graduating from New York Law School in 1912, he spent most of the next six decades with the New York City law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff, and Ernst.

Defending the "Outsider."

During the 1920s Ernst provided legal counsel to many of the political radicals detained in the "Palmer Raids" during the Red Scare of 1920, and he was a frequent legal adviser to the NAACP, becoming a member of its national board of directors in 1925, Through his close friendship with birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, Ernst was retained as general counsel to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1927 and held that position for more than three decades. In 1929 he unsuccessfully argued before the Supreme Court that the beliefs of conscientious objector Rosika Schwimmer did not disqualify the Hungarian-born professor from becoming a citizen of the United States.

The Obscenity Issue

During the 1920s Ernst was also interested in the legal issues relating to obscenity, co-authoring with William Seagle To the Pure … A Study of Obscenity and the Censor (1928), the first of several books Ernst devoted to that subject. In 1933 he headed the legal team for Random House in its successful challenge to the obscenity ruling that had prevented the American publication of James Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922).

Friendship with Roosevelt

During the 1920s, a decade dominated by conservative Republicans, a liberal Democrat like Ernst had limited influence, but through his association with the rising political star Franklin D. Roosevelt, with whom he became friends in the mid 1920s, Ernst's ability to shape events increased dramatically in the 1930s. When Roosevelt became governor of New York in 1929, he appointed Ernst to the state insurance commission. After Roosevelt took office as president in March 1933, Ernst served as an unofficial consultant on domestic social policy. During his frequent trips to Washington, D.C., he usually stayed at the White House, and he was widely recognized as the president's personal liaison to such important legal figures as Supreme Court Justices Louis D. Brandeis and Harlan Fiske Stone. During World War II Ernst undertook several secret diplomatic assignments for Roosevelt, and he also enjoyed ready access to every subsequent president from Harry'S Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson.