Rebel Lawyer by Charles Wollenberg

Author:Charles Wollenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Heyday/California Historical Society

CHAPTER 6

CITIZENS

In some respects, A. L. (Al) Wirin was to the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union what Wayne Collins was to the Northern California branch: the go-to lawyer for important cases. Born in Russia, Wirin immigrated to the United States with his family when he was a child. He grew up in a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in Boston. In spite of his humble origins, he graduated from Harvard then from Boston University School of Law. After working for a time at the ACLU headquarters in New York, he moved to Southern California and became staff attorney for the Southern California branch. In 1934, while advocating on behalf of farm workers in the Imperial Valley, he was kidnapped and beaten by pro-grower vigilantes. If anything, this strengthened his commitment to civil liberties and social justice. Although he eventually established a private practice in Los Angeles, like Collins, he continued participating in ACLU cases. During the war, he served as counsel for the JACL, and we have already seen that in that capacity, wrote the Supreme Court amicus brief in the Korematsu and Endo cases.

Until late 1945, Wirin was on cordial terms with Wayne Collins and Ernest Besig. In October 1944, he wrote to Collins: “Drop me a note about your adventure before the Supreme Court.” He later wrote approvingly about Eugene Rostow’s article attacking the court’s Korematsu ruling. On August 30, 1945, Wirin said that he and his fiancée were coming to San Francisco and suggested dinner with Collins, Besig, and their wives. The evening was apparently a success, for Wirin subsequently wrote Collins to thank him for an “unusually pleasant” time. But later that fall, Al Wirin became involved in a dispute over the renunciant cases that led to a permanent break with both Collins and Besig.

At about the same time that Collins was filing his first briefs in Abo v. Clark in November of 1945, Wirin was recruiting individual plaintiffs for his own renunciant case. He proposed that the two attorneys cooperate. He apparently told the Pacific Citizen, the newsletter of the JACL, that he was going to be one of the attorneys on the Abo case. Besig informed the Citizen that this was not true. The suit, he said, was filed by Wayne Collins “as a private attorney for the group with the full support of the American Civil Liberties Union of San Francisco” and without the participation of Al Wirin. The Citizen published the correction in its December 1 edition, and Wirin wrote Collins, asking him to set the record straight. Collins stood by Besig, telling Wirin, “I have never informed you that you were or that you would be associated with me in these cases.” On February 14, 1946, Wirin wrote a letter to Besig, which implied that Besig and Collins were in the case for the money, that they were just trying to keep the $75,000 collected by the Tule Lake Defense Committee. Wirin told Besig, “I don’t care to discuss the immigration cases with you any further; nor for that matter any other matter.

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