The Actor and the ACLU

Burt Lancaster

When George H.W. Bush, in a craven bid to put himself into the White House, began to call the American Civil Liberties Union “un-American,” the ACLU needed someone substantial to defend it.

In a showdown, who better to back you than an actor who’s played Wyatt Earp? Without hesitation, the star signed on, and soon national ads were airing that began, “I’m Burt Lancaster and I have a confession to make: I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU.”

In fact, Lancaster was an ACLU board member, and had expressed his concerns about civil liberties and democratic ideals through his involvement in film projects such as Seven Days in May and Executive Action.

“His political ideas had now distilled down to what he called a central ‘simple’ belief: the Bill of Rights was what ‘made this country unique’ by empowering the individual while setting limits on government. The balance between them was fragile and too easily lost without the vigilance of a group like the ACLU,” wrote Kate Buford in her biography Burt Lancaster.

“In the feel-good ambiance of the Reagan/Bush era, he saw a nostalgic kind of conformity that had, in his opinion, nothing to do with the hard work of tolerating unpopular opinions if a free society. Censorship, discrimination, abortion rights — for him they were issues of personal freedom. ’He was a very common-sense kind of guy,’ said (ACLU communications director Linda) Burstyn, ‘very aware of his own strength, which made him protective of others who were not so strong — the people other people pushed around.’”

Although he could be cruel and controlling at times, Lancaster was also brave and generous, a self-made liberal intellectual who always pushed the limits of his art and regularly stood up for the underdog.

Director Sydney Pollack recalled, “You couldn’t scare him. He knew who he was, what he was worth — knew himself better than anyone I’ve ever met. He was, in a curious sense, fearless: he had no fear. I was always curious: Where’d this guy come from, to be like this? It was because there was nothing at stake for him in terms of his own self-worth.”

“Burt would come out in the morning to get the newspaper in a nightshirt and Rayfiel said that looking at him was like going to the zoo and there’s one animal that just stands out, that’s built different and better than anyone else. That’s what Burt was like — he was like a better animal. He had a stronger and more integrated character than most people have. He was in one piece.”

And director John Frankenheimer said Lancaster was “a very dedicated honest man who wanted to do good work in a society where it’s very difficult to do good work.”