Morris Ernst was an American lawyer and prominent attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.
18 Facts About Morris Ernst
2.
Morris Ernst promoted an anti-communist stance within the ACLU itself, and was a member of the President's Committee on Civil Rights.
3.
Morris Leopold Ernst was born in Uniontown, Alabama, on August 23,1888, into a Jewish family.
4.
Morris Ernst's father, Carl Ernst, had been born in Plzen, Bohemia, and had worked as a peddler and shopkeeper; while his mother, Sarah Bernheim, was the daughter of German immigrants and had graduated from Hunter College.
5.
The family moved to New York when Morris was two, and lived in several locations in Manhattan where Carl ran a general store.
6.
Morris Ernst attended the Horace Mann School and graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, in 1909.
7.
Morris Ernst studied law at night at New York Law School where he graduated in 1912 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1913.
8.
Morris Ernst joined the board of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1927 and was one of the most prominent and successful ACLU attorneys from the 1920s through the 1960s.
9.
Morris Ernst became vice chairman of the ACLU's board in 1955.
10.
Morris Ernst displayed considerable skill at harnessing the media to publicise and foreground his cases and initiatives, as well as his ability to educate a courtroom audience on the topics in question.
11.
Also during this period, Morris Ernst enjoyed the first of a succession of parallel civic appointments when he was appointed in 1932 to the State Banking Board, where he participated in the drafting of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
12.
Morris Ernst had developed, since the late 1930s, a distrust of communism and was a strong supporter of J Edgar Hoover and the FBI, even going so far as to pass on confidential letters and ACLU documents to Hoover.
13.
Morris Ernst 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.
14.
Morris Ernst married Margaret Samuels in 1923, and together they had a son and a daughter.
15.
Morris Ernst kept a summer home on Nantucket, Massachusetts, and enjoyed sailing small boats.
16.
Morris Ernst died at home in New York City on May 21,1976.
17.
Morris Ernst was survived by his son, both daughters, and five grandchildren.
18.
Morris Ernst's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.