The American Civil Liberties Union membership roster has climbed to 400,000 during the last two years—a one-third increase from its mid-1990s plateau of 300,000. For decades, the ACLU relied on a loyal cadre of renewers to fill its ranks, but most of the members who joined since Sept. 11, 2001, are unsolicited and younger than 30.

New members are from Republican, Democrat, conservative, and liberal. In recent months, ACLU staff lawyers have worked with Republican representatives and senators; Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president of the national rifle association; and Phyllis Schlafly, the president of the Eagle Forum. This work supports the ACLU’s claim that it has widespread support for law suits against John Ashcroft, U.S. attorney general, regarding the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that expose private records and for the right of detainees at Guantanamo Bay to receive due process rights and access to lawyers.

Nadine Strossen, the ACLU president, and Steve Shapiro, the ACLU legal director, said their membership increase indicates people want less-intrusive government. They might be right. When CNN, USA Today, and Gallup polled 507 people in January 2002, 47 percent of them said the government should suppress their civil liberties if that was necessary to fight terrorism and 49 percent said the government should not. The same question nine months later showed that 33 percent would let their liberties be violated but 62 percent were unwilling. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent. The ACLU is hoping to ride the growing concern about civil liberties to friendlier legislation with tighter controls on Ashcroft.

Norman Dorsen, past ACLU president, sees the challenges Strossen faces, particularly those that have emerged in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, as more difficult than any he confronted during his 15 years as ACLU president, including the organization’s decision to defend a group of neo-Nazis who wanted to stage a demonstration in Skokie, Ill., home to many Holocaust survivors. “Sept. 11 is opening up an era, the end of which is not only not in sight but possibly a long way off. It’s a convulsive event in national and world history,” Dorsen said, and the ACLU must continue fighting against Ashcroft even if it wins the case against the Patriot Act.

The jump in membership is characteristic of distressed times, Dorsen said. “It’s unfortunate that you have to have a poor civil liberties climate for membership to rise, but that’s the nature of people, to react to visible or felt threats.”

With extra membership dues, the group can run more programs, strengthen its lobbying, and hire more staff. More members create a deeper well of future leaders.

“You make the best situation of the situation you’re dealt,” Strossen said of the terrorist attacks. “And I think the best to come is the younger generation that is invigorated as mine was over the Vietnam War and a slightly older (generation) was with civil rights movement.”

The ACLU handles cases about all civil liberties, though, and the coming war over gay marriage will pit the country’ coldest organized civil liberties defender against a powerful president in a major political battle. President George Bush has proposed adding an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define marriage as solely between a man and a woman.

He is seeking to set a federal standard—and thus bring marriage under the purview of the Constitution and Supreme Court—for statutes that have varied from state to state. In response, the ACLU has filed lawsuits in Washington, Oregon, California and New York challenging statutes that define marriage as heterosexual. Staff lawyers plan to take the suits to the states’ highest courts, if necessary.

The ACLU is not against religion, said Strossen, who was raised Unitarian but is not religious now. Yet the group constantly faces “completely unjustified attacks that if you are opposed to government-sponsored religion, that means you are anti-religious,” she said.

Religious groups, Dorsen said, have “pressed their agenda very hard and found it necessary to resist other agendas—gay rights, abortions—rights that they oppose. The religious groups are much more aggressive on imposing their views on public matters when they have been assisted by governments, notably the [Ronald] Reagan and current government administrations, that have been very sympathetic and have supported them,” he said.

Like Dorsen, Strossen, now 53, was involved with the ACLU in the late 1970s, first becoming a member of its national board of directors in 1983. She was on the national executive committee beginning in 1985, was general counsel from 1986 to 1991. She became president in 1991.

As president, she has kept the ACLU’s profile high. This has been especially true since Sept. 11. She has maintained a breakneck schedule of speeches across the country, often on college campuses. In one month alone, she lectured in North Carolina, Mississippi, Iowa, New York, Pennsylvania and Alaska.

At a discussion about the Bill of Rights in September, Strossen argued with Steven Brill, a Yale-education lawyer who is the author of After and founder of CourtTV. She and he traded ideological insults and argued over the effectiveness of the Patriot Act. At the end of the night, Brill drew boos from the crowd, and Strossen had cheers and congratulations for her strong defense of civil liberties even time of increased security.

On countless stages and television shows, Strossen’s polished delivery draws people to her and the ACLU, said Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment scholar and attorney with a long history of working with the ACLU.

“One of the extraordinarily abilities she has is to explain on television and in newspapers and other publicly the civil liberties side of various public issues,” Abrams said. “She performs in a very skillful way, which always manages to make the ACLU position sound both reasonable and non-threatening.”

Strossen preaches a consistent sermon. She loves hearing about people who are shocked the ACLU is defending conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh’s privacy rights in Florida.

“I’m always very happy about instances that those who don’t follow the ACLU closely are surprised when we’re defending somebody they don’t think of as an ACLU supporter,” Strossen said. “That’s the bread and butter of our work—a neutral and even-handed defense for everyone.”

The breadth of cases wins both friends and enemies for the ACLU. One of Strossen’s old debate foes is Edwin Meese, who served as Reagan’s attorney general and now directs the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Meese was cordial when describing the differences between Strossen and himself.

“She has a very liberal view that anything should be allowed, and I think that the people should be able to exercise their democratic rights to determine what kind of communities they live in,” Meese said. He believes “that the PATRIOT Act is a reasonable, middle of the road means of protecting the public, and [the ACLU and Strossen] are much less interested in that.”

Certainly, lawmakers believed in enough in the act to pass it overwhelmingly on Oct. 12, 2001. Few representatives or senators read the 342-page bill before it passed by 337 to 79 in the House and by 96 to 1 in the Senate. The law gave new powers to law enforcement for surveillance and tracking criminals. The ACLU is suing Ashcroft to alter Section 215, which allows officers to subpoena records from libraries, phone companies, and credit card companies without telling the suspect.

Strossen splits time with the ACLU with teaching both required and advanced elective courses in constitutional law at New York Law School. She teaches law school part-time because, at least ostensibly, the ACLU presidency is a volunteer and part-time position.

“It’s just that the opportunity to be the head of the most important organization in the world,” and she pauses for a qualifying statement—“well, I shouldn’t say that because I don’t know every organization in the world, but certainly the most important organization in the country,” and then continues, “it’s a unique position. I can accomplish much more from my ACLU position than I can accomplish from being one of hundreds or probably thousands of people around the country who teach constitutional law.”

Strossen’s assistants schedule her time in half-hour increments often months in advance; she always speaks in a measured tone as though she were reading all her words from a teleprompter. The only time she slowed a recent speech was an aside while introducing a law suit called ACLU v. John Ashcroft, “…which pretty much sums up my life lately,” she said.

Strossen balances her teaching and ACLU schedules with time with husband Eli Noam, an economics professor at Columbia University; the couple have no children. Her hobbies include a fervent love for cabaret and opera music. She took her flair for public speaking to a cabaret singing class several years ago and performed “I Have No Regrets,” made famous by Edith Piaf, at an Upper East Side nightclub.

Her schedule is exhausting merely to discuss—she wakes around 4 a.m. to work before the phone rings; students and colleagues say they have received email from her at 2 and 3 a.m. She rides a stationary bike to exercise because it allows her to burn calories and read; she estimates that she reads several books each week.

Strossen, a slender brunette with a wide smile, cut her teeth in college activism during the women’s movement and the time of Roe v. Wade when she attended Harvard for her undergraduate and law degrees. She put herself through law school by working two jobs, participated in a bouquet of extra-curricular clubs, kept her GPA high enough to edit the Harvard Law Review, and graduated magna cum laude in 1975. After graduation, she returned to the network of lakes she grew up amidst in Minnesota. Within a year, she was on the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union board of directors and taking cases as a volunteer lawyer.

Strossen’s even-handedness drew note from her friends, students, and co-workers. She consistently declined to phrase cases as “the biggest battle” or “the greatest crisis” facing her organization today. She only identified the latest battle or newest crisis—evidence of her unwavering belief that civil liberties are, and always have been, under attack.

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