| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade against Radicalism, 1919–1923. By Todd J. Pfannestiel. (New York: Routledge, 2003. xiv, 229 pp. $75.00, ISBN 0-415-94767-7.)

Todd J. Pfannestiel has produced the first full-length scholarly work on the Joint Legislative Committee of the State of New York Investigating Seditious Activities, better known as the Lusk Committee (for state senator Clayton R. Lusk, its chair), as a window into the first Red Scare. The Lusk Committee constituted a red-hunting juggernaut from 1919 to 1923. Most famously, the committee assumed powers it did not legally possess to conduct two sensational raids in New York City in June 1919. At the Soviet Bureau, the Bolsheviks' rump diplomatic mission, and at the socialist, decidedly non-Bolshevik Rand School of Social Science, the committee collected names, confiscated a wide range of materials, and detained, interrogated, and later subpoenaed officials. Less famously, the committee secured the passage of state laws in 1921 requiring loyalty oaths for public school teachers and expanding the state's ability to license private schools (an attempt to shut down the Rand School). The committee was derailed during the later governorship of Alfred E. Smith, when the 1921 laws were repealed.

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