New York Lusk Committee to Investigate Alleged Radicals
The New York Legislature on this day created the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, known as the Lusk Committee, to investigate alleged radicals in the state.
The investigation produced a four-volume report, Revolutionary Radicalism, released on April 24, 1920, which established the model for later legislative investigations of political beliefs and associations.
The most important such investigations were conducted for 37 years by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), created on May 26, 1938. The report indulged in guilty-by-association to smear pacifists, civil libertarians, socialists, liberals and others for the alleged association with communism.
The Lusk Committee was an important part of the post-World War I Red Scare that included the infamous Palmer Raids, November 7, 1919, and January 2, 1920, in which thousands of alleged radicals and left-wing labor union members and leaders were rounded up by federal authorities.
Read the notorious report: Revolutionary Radicalism, 4 vols. (1920): https://archive.org/details/revolutionaryra00luskgoog
Read more: Christopher M. Finan, From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America (2007)
Learn more about the Red Scare: http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/SaccoV/redscare.html