Morris Ernst

Morris Leopold Ernst was born in Uniontown, Alabama, on August 23, 1888, to Carl and Sarah Bernheim Ernst. His father, born in what is now Czechoslovakia, worked as a peddler and shopkeeper. His mother graduated from Hunter College.[2] The family moved to New York when Morris was two, and lived in several locations in Manhattan.[2] He attended the Horace Mann School and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1909. He studied law at night at New York Law School where he graduated in 1912 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1913.[2]

Ernst practiced law in New York City and in 1915 co-founded the law firm of Greenbaum, Wolff & Ernst.[2] He joined the board of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1927 and was one of the most prominent and successful ACLU attorneys from the 1920s through the 1960s.

From 1929 to 1954, he shared the title of general counsel at the ACLU with Arthur Garfield Hays. He became vice chairman of the ACLU's board in 1955.[2]

In 1933, on behalf of Random House, he successfully defended James Joyce's novel Ulysses against obscenity charges, leading to its distribution in the U.S.[3] He won similar cases on behalf of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming.[2][4]

In 1937, as attorney for the American Newspaper Guild, he argued successfully in the Supreme Court that it should uphold the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act (the Wagner Act) as applied to the press. The case established the right of media employees to organize labor unions.[2]

Ernst was a strong supporter of J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. In 1940, as head of the ACLU, he agreed to bar communists from employment there and even discouraged their membership, basing his position on a distinction between the rights of the individual and the rights of groups. In 1946, President Harry Truman appointed him to the President's Committee on Civil Rights.[2]

He counted Justice Louis Brandeis as a close friend and later had close personal relationships with Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and New York Governor Herbert Lehman.[2] Besides politicians, he also was friendly with many cultural figures, including Edna Ferber, E. B. White, Groucho Marx, Michael Foot, Compton Mackenzie, Al Capp, Charles Addams, Grandma Moses, Heywood Broun, and Margaret Bourke-White.

In 1956, Jesús Galíndez, a critic of the regime of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, disappeared, abducted from New York City, it was charged, by Trujillo's agents. Hired by Trujillo to investigate the affair, Ernst's resulting report cleared the Trujillo regime of involvement in Galindez's disappearance, but the FBI and the press remained unconvinced.[5]

In 1912, he married Susan Leerburger, with whom he had a son (who died in infancy) and a daughter. Susan died in 1922. Ernst married Margaret Samuels in 1923, and together they had a son and a daughter. Margaret died in 1964. Ernst kept a summer home on Nantucket, Massachusetts, and enjoyed sailing small boats. He died at home in New York City on May 21, 1976. He was survived by his son, both daughters, and five grandchildren.[2]

Morris Ernst's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[6]

Author

Co-author

• Introduction to This Deception by Hede Massing (1951)

United States v. One Book Called Ulysses

• "Papers of Lawyer and Civil Liberties Advocate Morris L. Ernst Now Cataloged", Harry Ransom Center
• Guide to the Morris L. Ernst Banned Books Collection