nanced, but highly effective civil liberties association, sponsored
initially by the radical wing of the peace movement. It was actu-
ally the first of its kind to offer free legal service to victims of
government repression and to conscientious objectors. However, it
had been ignored or misrepresented in the standard histories of the
civil liberties movement right up to 1990. ¹

In part, the Bureau's historic invisibility has been due to the
largely unconscious propensity of historians to study organizations
that endure over time and that demonstrate a record of long-term
achievement. Hence, the history of the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), founded in the same period as the Bureau of Legal
Advice, has attracted the attention of scholars; the Bureau of Legal
Advice, in existence for a relatively short time (from 1917 to
1920), has not. In addition, a rich, almost overwhelming docu-
mentation exists on the ACLU and its leaders. Historians, bound
by the methods of their craft, choose topics with an eye to the
evidence available for study; many scholars of the past would agree
with G. R. Elton's blunt, tendentious statement: "Historical study
is . . . the study of the present traces of the past; if men [sic] have
said, thought, done or suffered anything of which nothing any
longer exists, those things are as if they had never been." ²

Even so, in the case of the Bureau of Legal Advice, records do
exist. There is a small collection on the Bureau at the Swarthmore
College Peace Collection, and the main papers are, as already
noted, at the Tamiment Library. Is there, then, an additional rea-
son why historians have been remiss in acknowledging the Bu-
reau's history?

The male-centered nature of historical inquiry, not necessarily
a lack of evidence, predisposes scholars--even today, after twenty-
five years of creative feminist historical scholarship--to assume
that some things are "as if they had never been." Historians, not
expecting to find women active and innovative in civil liberties
work, have not found them to be so. To be sure, the very women
who were themselves the actors have unwittingly abetted in their
own invisibility: few activist women of the world war era, relative
to men, have written their memoirs. A similar trend holds true in
relation to private papers on deposit in archives. Those of men
predominate; being valued, they have survived--along with their
bias. I have been alternately fascinated and frustrated, when study-
ing the writings of men such as Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas,

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