Rethinking the Red Scare: The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade against Radicalism, 1919-1923

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 fulllength 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...