The Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, popularly known as the Lusk Committee, was formed in 1919 by the New York State Legislature to investigate individuals and organizations in New York State suspected of sedition.
The Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, popularly known as the Lusk Committee, was formed in 1919 by the New York State Legislature to investigate individuals and organizations in New York State suspected of sedition.
A private, two-month-long investigation of radicalism conducted by a committee of the New York City Union League Club produced a unanimous vote of the club's members to petition to the New York State Legislature for a government investigation. [1]
Within days, the New York State Legislature established the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities by Concurrent Resolution on March 26, 1919. The nine-member Committee targeted offenses committed under the criminal anarchy articles of the State's Penal Code. [2] The committee was chaired by freshman State Senator Clayton R. Lusk of Cortland County. who had a background in business and conservative political values, referring to radicals as "alien enemies." [3] With the exception of a minor case, this was the first time that the state's criminal anarchy statutes had been invoked since they were enacted in 1902 following the assassination of United States President William McKinley by an anarchist in Buffalo, New York.
For more than a year the Committee gathered information on suspected radical groups by raiding offices and examining documents, infiltrating meetings, assisting law enforcement agents in thousands of arrests, and subpoenaing witnesses to testify at the committee's hearings. The committee's use of search warrants and raids was an exceptional departure from legislative practice. It also had the cooperation of local police departments and prosecutors to enable it to operate aggressively despite its limited budget. [4]
The committee and the federal government's Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI, cooperated by sharing information, interrogation expertise, and informants. Rayme W. Finch, formerly an agent in the Bureau's New York office, became the committee's chief investigator. This cooperation allowed federal authorities whose powers were limited by the lack of a peacetime anti-sedition statute to use state authority against radicals. [5]
On June 12, the police and private detectives working for the Committee raided the Russian Soviet Bureau, an agency headed by Ludwig Martens, that sought American recognition of the new Bolshevik government. Some of those arrested were immediately interrogated by the Committee about Soviet propaganda in the U.S. and other witnesses quoted from seized documents to demonstrate that the Russian Bureau aimed at the violent overthrow of the government. [5] A second raid on the Rand School, an institution that espoused the peaceful evolution of socialism and taught history, economics, and English language skills, followed. Among the documents seized was a large volume of birth control literature. [6] While the press had demonstrated little sympathy for the Russian Bureau, the liberal and radical press, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), defended the Rand School. [7] Others raids targeted the left wing of the Socialist Party and the IWW. When they analyzed the materials it hauled away, it made much of attempts to organize American Negroes and calls for revolutions in foreign-language magazines. [8] [9] The committee's agents raided 73 branches of the newly organized Communist party on November 8, a Saturday evening when the radicals would be celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. They raided the offices of dozens of radical publications as well. Most of the literature obtained in the raids was available for sale in bookstores. Raids in upstate cities followed, including Buffalo, Utica, and Rochester, and then on the offices of Communist newspapers in New York City.
The committee's investigation officially ended when it submitted its final report with recommendations to the legislature in April 1920. The report, published as Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps being Taken and Required to Curb It, ran to more than 4,000 pages. De facto editor of the report was Archibald E. Stevenson, Assistant Counsel of the committee, whom critics asserted "directed its activities from the start." [10]
Only ten percent of the four volume work constituted a report, while the rest reprinted materials seized in raids or supplied by witnesses, much of it detailing European activities, or surveyed efforts to counteract radicalism in every state, including citizenship programs and other patriotic educational activities.
The committee's work led to the conviction on charges of criminal anarchy of two anarchist editors, who were sentenced to years in prison and other radical immigrants were deported. [11] As a result of the committee's work, five Socialist Party members of the legislature were expelled in 1920. It produced a negative reaction on the part of the press and the public that helped change national attitudes against the anti-red campaign of 1919–20. [12]
The legislature considered the committee's recommendations for curbing and countering radical propaganda. It passed a series of laws funding anti-radical work by the Attorney-General and the training of teachers of patriotism who would use their expertise in factories and businesses. Other bills defined the kinds of institutions that could provide education and forbade private instruction outside them. Another required public school teachers take loyalty oaths [13] Governor Al Smith vetoed the legislation, [14] objecting in particular to government power over instruction. [15] He called the legislation's supporters "prejudiced," "hysterical," and "mainly interested in the control of liberal thought." His veto of the school licensing bill said: "The safety of this government rests upon the reasoned and devoted loyalty of its people. It does not need for its defense a system of intellectual tyranny, which, in the endeavor to choke error by force must of necessity crush truth as well." The legislature passed the same bills again after Smith left office, and Republican Governor Nathan L. Miller signed them on May 12, 1921. [16]
Smith was re-elected in November 1922. The Lusk laws were repealed early in 1923 and an attempt to prosecute the Rand School for operating an educational institution without a license was suspended. [17] Writing in the September 1921 issue of Current Opinion, Lusk described his Committee's work as "repression carried on by and with the consent of the vast majority in the interests of that majority" and explained his belief that " a reasonable and wise repression of revolutionary activities tends toward the maintenance of law, order and peace in the community." [18]
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The One Big Union is an idea originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries amongst trade unionists to unite the interests of workers and offer solutions to all labour problems.
Alexander Mitchell Palmer was an American attorney and politician who served as the 50th United States attorney general from 1919 to 1921. He is best known for overseeing the Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of 1919–20.
The first Red Scare was a period during the early 20th-century history of the United States marked by a widespread fear of far-left movements, including Bolshevism and anarchism, due to real and imagined events; real events included the Russian 1917 October Revolution and anarchist bombings in the U.S. At its height in 1919–1920, concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and the alleged spread of socialism, communism, and anarchism in the American labor movement fueled a general sense of concern.
Red Summer was a period in mid-1919 during which white supremacist terrorism and racial riots occurred in more than three dozen cities across the United States, and in one rural county in Arkansas. The term "Red Summer" was coined by civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson, who had been employed as a field secretary by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1916. In 1919, he organized peaceful protests against the racial violence.
The American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) was an American pacifist organization established in response to World War I. The organization attempted to keep the United States out of the European conflict through mass demonstrations, public lectures, and the printed word. Failing in that effort with American entry into the war in April 1917, the Union battled against conscription, action which subjected it to state repression, and military intervention. The organization was eventually dissolved after the war in 1922.
Clayton Riley Lusk was an American lawyer and politician from New York. He is now mostly remembered as chairman of the "Lusk Committee", and was Acting Lieutenant Governor of New York in 1922.
The Russian Soviet Government Bureau (1919-1921), sometimes known as the "Soviet Bureau," was an unofficial diplomatic organization established by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in the United States during the Russian Civil War. The Soviet Bureau primarily functioned as a trade and information agency of the Soviet government. Suspected of engaging in political subversion, the Soviet Bureau was raided by law enforcement authorities at the behest of the Lusk Committee of the New York State legislature in 1919. The Bureau was terminated early in 1921.
The Overman Committee was a special subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary chaired by North Carolina Democrat Lee Slater Overman. Between September 1918 and June 1919, it investigated German and Bolshevik elements in the United States. It was an early forerunner of the better known House Un-American Activities Committee, and represented the first congressional committee investigation of communism.
The Left Wing Manifesto is the name bestowed upon two distinct programmatic documents of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party during the factional war in the Socialist Party of America of 1919.
The following is a bibliography on American Communism, listing some of the most important works on the topic.
The Union of Russian Workers in the United States and Canada, commonly known as the "Union of Russian Workers" was an anarchist political association of Russian emigrants in the United States. The group was established shortly after the failure of the Russian Revolution of 1905 and was essentially annihilated in America by the 1919 Red Scare in which it was targeted by the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice. Thousands of the group's adherents were arrested and hundreds deported in 1919 and 1920; still more voluntarily returned to Soviet Russia. During its brief existence the organization, which was only loosely affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, published numerous books and pamphlets in Russian by anarchist writers, operated reading rooms and conducted courses to teach newly arrived Russians English, and fulfilled a social function for emigrants half a world from home.
The Russian Socialist Federation was a semi-autonomous American political organization which was part of the Socialist Party of America from 1915 until the split of the national organization into rival socialist and communist organizations in the summer of 1919. Elements of the Russian Socialist Federation became key components of both the Communist Party of America and the rival Communist Labor Party of America as "Russian Federations" within these organizations. Following the unification of these two groups in 1921, the resulting unified Russian Communist Federation gradually evolved into the so-called Russian Bureau of the Communist Party, USA.
The People's Freedom Union was a left wing American political group which existed from 1919 to 1920. Established as a federation of liberal and radical organizations in New York City, the People's Freedom Union conducted marches in support of political prisoners detained under the Espionage Act during World War I, campaigned for a restoration of American civil rights suspended under the war, and agitated against American intervention in Mexico and Soviet Russia.
The Revolutionary Age was an American radical newspaper edited by Louis C. Fraina and published from November 1918 until August 1919. Originally the publication of Local Boston, Socialist Party, the paper evolved into the de facto national organ of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party which battled for control of the Socialist Party throughout the spring and summer of 1919. With the establishment of the Left Wing National Council in June 1919, the paper was moved from Boston to New York City gained status as the official voice of the nascent American communist movement. The publication was terminated in August 1919, replaced by the official organ of the new Communist Party of America, a weekly newspaper known as The Communist.
Archibald E. Stevenson was an American attorney and legislative researcher. Stevenson is best remembered for his work as Assistant Counsel of the Lusk Committee of the New York State Senate from 1919 to 1920, the activities of which led to a series of sensational raids and trials of self-professed revolutionary socialists. Stevenson was also the de facto author and editor of the committee's four-volume report, which anticipated congressional investigations of communism conducted in subsequent years.
Harry Mordecai Winitsky (1898–1939) was an American left wing political activist who was a founding member of the Communist Party of America. Winitsky is best remembered as one of the chief defendants of the New York "Criminal Anarchism" prosecutions that were part of the First Red Scare of 1919–1920. Winitsky served two years in prison of a 5 to 10-year sentence beginning in March 1920. Released on bail in 1922, Winitsky was ultimately pardoned by New York Governor Al Smith in January 1924. Winitsky left the Communist Party USA in 1929.
Pierre Renaudel was a French socialist politician and journalist.
The International Labor Defense (ILD) (1925–1947) was a legal advocacy organization established in 1925 in the United States as the American section of the Comintern's International Red Aid network. The ILD defended Sacco and Vanzetti, was active in the anti-lynching, movements for civil rights, and prominently participated in the defense and legal appeals in the cause célèbre of the Scottsboro Boys in the early 1930s. Its work contributed to the appeal of the Communist Party among African Americans in the South. In addition to fundraising for defense and assisting in defense strategies, from January 1926 it published Labor Defender, a monthly illustrated magazine that achieved wide circulation. In 1946 the ILD was merged with the National Federation for Constitutional Liberties to form the Civil Rights Congress, which served as the new legal defense organization of the Communist Party USA. It intended to expand its appeal, especially to African Americans in the South. In several prominent cases in which blacks had been sentenced to death in the South, the CRC campaigned on behalf of black defendants. It had some conflict with former allies, such as the NAACP, and became increasingly isolated. Because of federal government pressure against organizations it considered subversive, such as the CRC, it became less useful in representing defendants in criminal justice cases. The CRC was dissolved in 1956. At the same time, in this period, black leaders were expanding the activities and reach of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1954, in a case managed by the NAACP, the US Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional.
McAlister Coleman was an American journalist, author, and political activist on behalf of socialism and organized labor. Coleman gained public notice as a leading leftist critic of the Lusk Committee of the New York State Legislature in 1920. He was subsequently a frequent candidate for public office on the ticket of the Socialist Party of America. Coleman is today best remembered as an early biographer of Eugene V. Debs as well as the author of a 1943 work of social history, Men and Coal.
Evans Clark (1888–1970) was an American writer strongly committed to first to Communist and Socialist causes and then liberal socio-economic issues, served for a quarter century as first executive director of the Twentieth Century Fund, and was husband of Freda Kirchwey.
