Harry F. Ward

Harry Frederick Ward, Jr. (1873–1966) was a British-born American Methodist minister and political activist who emerged as a leading fellow traveler of the Communist Party, USA. Ward is best remembered as the first national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), leading the group from its creation in 1920 until his resignation in protest of the organization's decision to bar Communists in 1940.

Harry Frederick Ward, Junior was born in the County of Middlesex, located on the outskirts of the City of London, on October 15, 1873. Ward's father, Harry F. Ward, Sr., was a successful Chiswick businessman who also served as a Methodist lay minister. Ward's upbringing was steeped both in commercial and religious values and he began working in his father as a wagon-driver during his teenage years.

In 1878 Ward was sent away to a boarding school, a rather harsh and inferior environment to the more illustrious public schools occupied by the sires of the upper class. In the estimation of Ward's biographer, Eugene P. Link, this experience quite possibly contributed to Ward's later distaste for differentiation of society into social classes. During this interval Ward developed rheumatic heart problems which forced his removal from school to live with aunts in the rural environs of Lyndhurst, Hampshire. Ward later remembered the experience favorably, even naming his son, the illustrator Lynd Ward, after the English south coastal town.

Ward emigrated to the United States at the age of 17 in pursuit of a higher education. In May 1891 Ward arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah at the home of an uncle living there to take up work for him as a horse driver. He also worked for a time as a farmhand for another uncle living in the neighboring Western state of Idaho. In addition to these and other jobs, Ward dedicated part of his time to Methodist evangelism as a lay minister preaching to passersby on street corners.

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