Swinburne Hale

Swinburne Hale (April 5, 1884 – July 3, 1937) was an American lawyer, poet, and socialist, best remembered as one of the leading civil rights attorneys 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.

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. He wrote to Tom Mooney, "We are in a hot bed of repression here, with only a very few lawyers who are willing and able to handle the situation, and who are hopelessly overworked."

Personal life and death

Walter Nelles was a personal friend of Hale's. Between 1922 and 1924 while living mostly in Taos, New Mexico, Hale had an affair with artist Greta R. Hercz, and married her in November 1924, though it is unclear if he was still married at the time. The wedding was officiated by judge Frank W. Parker, and was reported in The Santa Fe New Mexican.

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: The Demon's Notebook: Verse and Perverse. New York: N.L. Brown, 1923

Law-Politics: 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. . "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. ; pp. 34–39.