The two of us find the Ukrainian Workers Theater handbill filed away in the New York State Archives in Albany. It is one of tens of thousands of pieces of evidence gathered in an archive called “Records of the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities.” It documents the activities of what was commonly known as the Lusk Committee, named for its chairman, State Senator Clayton R. Lusk, which formed in 1919 at the peak of the First Red Scare. The committee, working closely with both local law enforcement departments and federal agencies, was given extraordinary powers to surveil and subpoena people and organizations defined as suspicious under New York State’s criminal anarchy code. A Socialist Party flyer, itself seized and archived by the Lusk Committee, describes the committee as having “an army of troopers, spies, provocators [sic], pettifogging lawyers and press agents, reinforced by a ‘hand picked’ Grand Jury.” It was one node of a nationwide effort to destroy the anarchist, socialist, and radical labor movements of the preceding decades, setting a nativist agenda for years to come. Reacting to organizing by groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States and revolutions in Russia and Germany, state and federal governments unleashed violent suppression campaigns, providing an early blueprint for today’s policing practices, including media monitoring and the use of informants.
In New York State, Lusk’s “army” infiltrated thousands of radical meetings, spying on casual attendees, rank-and-file activists, and high-profile organizers like Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, feminist union organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, communist journalist John Reed, and pacifist and radical economist Scott Nearing. Their raids led to the criminal convictions of individual activists, the shuttering of entire organizations, and the expulsion of the five members of the Socialist Party in the New York State Legislature. The committee’s work culminated in new state laws used to persecute any suspected radical educator in the New York City public school system and to deport suspected anarchists and communists.
What interests us, though, is not just what the Lusk Committee damaged and destroyed, but what it saved: Over the course of its investigations, the committee collected tens of thousands of documents on a critical period in American radical history, preserved by the State of New York in both originals and microfilm to this day. Within the archive, we find polemics by various leftist factions, practical organizing plans, and utopian materials promoting visions of a new world that never came to be. We find flyers for rallies, concerts, and dance parties. We find handwritten personal messages. We find firsthand agent and informer accounts capturing the way people moved, spoke, and lived in communal spaces.
