Archibald E. Stevenson
Encyclopedia
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.
, located in the rural western part of the state. Stevenson's father was a noted geologist and a professor at New York University
. He was raised as a Presbyterian and later in life was a member of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church
of New York City
.
The precocious Stevenson was a published author at the age of nine, composing a travel memoir called From New York to Alaska and Back Again.
Stevenson graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Science degree
in 1904, graduating first in his class. Following graduation Stevenson began to follow in his father's footsteps, teaching at NYU as an instructor of Mineralogy
following graduation. In 1908 Stevenson was placed in charge of the Department of Geology at NYU.
The appeal of science did not hold Stevenson's interest and he studied law in his free time, graduating from New York Law School
with a law degree in 1909. He passed the New York State Bar exam in 1910 and was admitted to practice, forming a partnership called Graham & Stevenson. That same year, Stevenson married Katherine De La Vergne, with whom he had a daughter born in 1911.
In this interval Stevenson was a member of a number of prominent legal and scientific societies, including the New York Academy of Science, the Seismological Society of America
, the New York County Lawyers Association, the Sons of the Revolution, and Delta Phi fraternity
. Stevenson was also active with the National Vacation Bible School Association, serving as the chairman of the committee for metropolitan New York City
in 1915.
in the spring of 1917, Stevenson made the move from volunteer work in youth religious education and social work on the New York City's Lower East Side
to official patriotic activity. Stevenson was tapped to head the Committee on Aliens of the mayor of New York's Committee on National Defense. This new activity inspired Stevenson to volunteer his services to the U.S. Justice Department
in 1917, assisting it in its investigation of so-called "German propaganda." Stevenson began creating a card file indexing the names of individuals in the country whom he suspected of pro-German sympathies and worked in close connection with the War Department
's Military Intelligence Division
, based in New York City.
Stevenson was neither a special agent of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation
, nor a member of Military Intelligence, but was rather an activist who cooperated with both as a member of the American Protective League
, a non-government agency. On August 31, 1918, Stevenson learned the efficacy of the tactic of raiding one's political opponents when he and the American Protective League helped federal agents armed with a search warrant
storm the New York headquarters of the National Civil Liberties Bureau
, forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union
. Publications, documents, and minutes of the organization's governing body were seized for future scrutiny for potential prosecution.
On January 21, 1919, Stevenson was catapulted into national prominence by an appearance before the so-called Overman Committee
of the United States Senate
, which was then engaged in the first congressional investigation of "alien propaganda" and Bolshevism in America. During the course of his testimony, Stevenson read into the record a list of 62 names of individuals who held, in his own estimation, "dangerous, destructive, and anarchistic sentiments." Included among these were social worker and pacifist Jane Addams
, President of Stanford University
David Starr Jordan
, journalist Oswald Garrison Villard
, Sociology
professor Frederic C. Howe
, and an array of liberal clerics and academics.
Stevenson's testimony, an early example of a tactic later known as Red-baiting
, became national news. With the Wilson administration
embarrassed by the characterization of a number of its prominent friends in such a light, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker
quickly entered the debate, declaring:
The attack on Stevenson by liberal critics drew conservative supporters to his defense, including U.S. Senator Lee Slater Overman
, who proclaimed in committee that Stevenson had studied "German propaganda" in America for over a year and was thus "probably more familiar with the various groups of German and radical propaganda in the United States than anyone else in this country."
Though his influence at the War Department had attenuated, Stevenson still exerted considerable influence as a member of the powerful conservative Union League Club, a patriotic organization organized at the time of the American Civil War
. On January 9, 1919, a meeting of that influential social organization of New York City's political elite determined to establish a committee of five members given the task of studying radicalism in the city. Archibald Stevenson was named by the organization to head this new committee. The committee conducted a two month investigation before presenting its report at the March 13 monthly meeting of the group. Upon hearing the report, the membership of the group voted unanimously to petition the New York state legislature to appoint a special committee dedicated to the radicalism question.
Such a push did not come to the legislature out of the blue. During the course of his activity with the Union League Club anti-radicalism committee, Stevenson had frequently found himself in the New York state capital of Albany
. There he met with state Republican
political leaders, ultimately resulting in the creation of a state legislative committee to study radicalism in New York state — a committee headed by State Senator Clayton R. Lusk
.
A joint committee consisting of four Senators and five Assemblymen was appointed, with majority control in the hands of the Republican Party. Senator Clayton Lusk was elected chairman. The committee was formally established with a limited purview, "to investigate the scope, tendencies, and ramifications" of "seditious activities" and to report on its investigations of the same back to the legislature. Nowhere in its authorizing legislation was this committee given the power to conduct raids or to make arrests. Rather, the committee was designed to be merely administrative in nature.
In practice, the Lusk Committee's activity extended significantly beyond its prescribed agenda and it ran appreciably over budget — spending some $80,000 by January 1920. The committee exercised search warrants
against many of the organizations which it deemed to be centers of revolutionary propaganda, confiscating documents for further use.
The Lusk Committee met for the first time on June 12, 1919. That same day the office of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, the unrecognized
diplomatic office of Soviet Russia
, located at 110 West 40th Street in New York City, was raided by police authorities working in conjunction with the Lusk Committee. A mass of books, letters, and papers were seized in accordance with the search warrant, providing the Lusk Committee with fodder for further investigation. A set of subpoenas
from the Committee to leading members of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, including Ludwig Martens
, A. A. Heller, Gregory Weinstein, Isaac Hourwich, and Santeri Nuorteva
.
A second sensational raid directed by the Lusk Committee followed on June 21, 1919, when officers of the state constabulary and members of the American Protective League entered the premises of "The People's House," headquarters of the Rand School of Social Science
on East 15th Street. Fifty raiders led by Deputy Attorney General Samuel A. Berger and Stevenson seized correspondence and other documents belonging to the Socialist Party-related school.
In 1920, McAllister Coleman described Stevenson, his ideological opponent:
Stevenson was the principal author of the Committee's final report, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps being Taken and Required to Curb It. Of its 4,000 pages, ten percent represented the Committee's findings, the rest reprinted documents gathered during the Committee's investigations that detailed revolutionary propaganda and patriotism education. Critics viewed Stevenson as the driving force behind the Committee and the report. The New Republic believed the Report reflected Stevenson's earlier work in the Department of Military Intelligence because it described efforts to keep the U.S. out of World War I as the work of Socialist propagandists and identified pacifism with Bolshevism, which it called "a thoroughly dishonest attempt to mislead the reader."
Following termination of the Lusk Committee, Stevenson remained for a time in the news as a prominent conservative public intellectual. Reflecting the national consensus even after the Red Scare of 1919-20
, he continued to defend the limitations on free speech established during the war by the Espionage Act of 1917
and Sedition Act of 1918
. Reviewing Zachariah Chafee's Freedom of Speech for the New York Times, Stevenson wrote:
In April 1921 Stevenson protested New York City's organized "Town Hall Forum" of public lectures as "spineless" and "indeterminate" for failing to oppose revolutionary propaganda. Stevenson also publicly opined that American colleges, universities, and seminaries
were showing signs of increasing hospitality to radical ideas. Time
magazine described him in 1923 as "the most indefatigable prosecutor of the Reds in America, and the brains of the Lusk Committee."
Following the enactment of a law regulating educational institutions and teachers, as recommended by the Lusk Report, in 1921-22 Stevenson served on the State Advisory Council on the Qualification of Teachers.
In 1927, Stevenson published States' Rights and National Prohibition, in which he criticized national prohibition as "a part of the general movement to shift responsibility from the individual to the State" that will "end by destroying representative government." The book described the history of federal-state relations and warned that federal enforcement of national prohibition "involves a usurpation of the reserved powers of the States" and establishes a precedent for the surrender of their power to the national government. Reviews in some legal journals were brief and respectful, but Harvard Law Review published a review by Harvard Law Professor Thomas Reed Powell that said: "For unsupported assertions, for self-contradictions, for loose terminology, for non-sequiturs, for political foolishness, this book has few peers."
In the 1920s and 1930s, Stevenson was associated with the National Civic Federation
, by then a small right-wing group. He chaired its Committee on Free Speech in 1927, when he delivered a radio address on the proper limitations on the free speech of employees. He said:
Stevenson served as the National Civil Federation's general counsel from 1934 to 1936. In the latter year he decried Communist influence in American unions, designed "to encourage industrial unrest and thus bring about a change in the social order by violent means." In 1937 he joined a committee to lobby for the outlawing of sit-down strikes, tracing the tactic to Northern Italy in 1919 and 1920, where it led opponents of union radicals, in his view, to turn to Mussolini and fascism. He protested to Secretary of State Hull
against a U.S.-Russian trade agreement and called on the FCC
to ban broadcasts by the Communist candidates for President and Vice-President during the 1936 presidential campaign.
During the early 1930s, Stevenson headed a small organization called the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism. Later in the decade he worked as public relations counsel for the New York State Economic Council, a pro-business and anti-trade union
organization.
In the mid-1930s, Stevenson returned to an issue from his days with the Lusk Committee and defended requiring teachers to take a loyalty oath. He argued that such oaths were meant "to raise teaching to the dignity of a recognized profession" similar to the oaths taken by public officials and the Hippocratic Oath.
Stevenson moved to New Canaan, Connecticut
, in the 1930s and was active in local politics. He headed the town's Board of Finance from 1935 to 1940 and was first selectman in 1940. At a special town meeting in 1937, he led the movement to protest President Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court. He said it would "render insecure and valueless every constitutional guarantee.... Such a precedent would deliver into the hands of an ambitious President all the powers of government.... This is the road that was traveled by Adolf Hitler; it is the road of Mussolini and of every dictator throughout the whole course of history."
From 1942, Stevenson served as general counsel of the National Economic Council
, another conservative economic organization dedicated to carrying on campaigns against communism and socialism.
Lawyer
A lawyer, according to Black's Law Dictionary, is "a person learned in the law; as an attorney, counsel or solicitor; a person who is practicing law." Law is the system of rules of conduct established by the sovereign government of a society to correct wrongs, maintain the stability of political...
and legislative researcher. Stevenson is best remembered for his work as Assistant Counsel of the Lusk Committee of the New York State Senate
New York State Senate
The New York State Senate is one of two houses in the New York State Legislature and has members each elected to two-year terms. There are no limits on the number of terms one may serve...
from 1919 to 1920, the activities of which led to a series of sensational raids and trials of self-professed revolutionary socialists
Revolutionary socialism
The term revolutionary socialism refers to Socialist tendencies that advocate the need for fundamental social change through revolution by mass movements of the working class, as a strategy to achieve a socialist society...
. Stevenson was also the de facto author and editor of the Committee's four-volume report, which anticipated congressional investigations of communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
conducted in subsequent years.
Early years
Archibald Ewing Stevenson was born September 23, 1884 in Uniontown, PennsylvaniaUniontown, Pennsylvania
Uniontown is a city in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh and part of the Pittsburgh Metro Area. Population in 1900, 7,344; in 1910, 13,344; in 1920, 15,692; and in 1940, 21,819. The population was 10,372 at the 2010 census...
, located in the rural western part of the state. Stevenson's father was a noted geologist and a professor at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...
. He was raised as a Presbyterian and later in life was a member of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church
Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church
The Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church is a large congregation of the Presbyterian Church . The church was founded in 1808 as the Cedar Street Presbyterian Church and has been located on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street in midtown Manhattan since 1875. It has approximately 3,250 members from a variety...
of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
.
The precocious Stevenson was a published author at the age of nine, composing a travel memoir called From New York to Alaska and Back Again.
Stevenson graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Science degree
Bachelor's degree
A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...
in 1904, graduating first in his class. Following graduation Stevenson began to follow in his father's footsteps, teaching at NYU as an instructor of Mineralogy
Mineralogy
Mineralogy is the study of chemistry, crystal structure, and physical properties of minerals. Specific studies within mineralogy include the processes of mineral origin and formation, classification of minerals, their geographical distribution, as well as their utilization.-History:Early writing...
following graduation. In 1908 Stevenson was placed in charge of the Department of Geology at NYU.
The appeal of science did not hold Stevenson's interest and he studied law in his free time, graduating from New York Law School
New York Law School
New York Law School is a private law school in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. New York Law School is one of the oldest independent law schools in the United States. The school is located within four blocks of all major courts in Manhattan. In 2011, New York Law School...
with a law degree in 1909. He passed the New York State Bar exam in 1910 and was admitted to practice, forming a partnership called Graham & Stevenson. That same year, Stevenson married Katherine De La Vergne, with whom he had a daughter born in 1911.
In this interval Stevenson was a member of a number of prominent legal and scientific societies, including the New York Academy of Science, the Seismological Society of America
Seismological Society of America
The Seismological Society of America is an international society devoted to the advancement of seismology and its applications in understanding and mitigating earthquake hazards and in imaging the structure of the Earth....
, the New York County Lawyers Association, the Sons of the Revolution, and Delta Phi fraternity
Delta Phi
Delta Phi is a fraternity founded in 1827 at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Founded as part of the Union Triad, along with the Kappa Alpha Society and Sigma Phi Society, Delta Phi was the third and last member of the Triad...
. Stevenson was also active with the National Vacation Bible School Association, serving as the chairman of the committee for metropolitan New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
in 1915.
Professional anti-radical
When the United States entered World War IWorld War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
in the spring of 1917, Stevenson made the move from volunteer work in youth religious education and social work on the New York City's Lower East Side
Lower East Side
The Lower East Side, LES, is a neighborhood in the southeastern part of the New York City borough of Manhattan. It is roughly bounded by Allen Street, East Houston Street, Essex Street, Canal Street, Eldridge Street, East Broadway, and Grand Street....
to official patriotic activity. Stevenson was tapped to head the Committee on Aliens of the mayor of New York's Committee on National Defense. This new activity inspired Stevenson to volunteer his services to the U.S. Justice Department
United States Department of Justice
The United States Department of Justice , is the United States federal executive department responsible for the enforcement of the law and administration of justice, equivalent to the justice or interior ministries of other countries.The Department is led by the Attorney General, who is nominated...
in 1917, assisting it in its investigation of so-called "German propaganda." Stevenson began creating a card file indexing the names of individuals in the country whom he suspected of pro-German sympathies and worked in close connection with the War Department
United States Department of War
The United States Department of War, also called the War Department , was the United States Cabinet department originally responsible for the operation and maintenance of the United States Army...
's Military Intelligence Division
Military Intelligence Division
The Military Intelligence Division was a military intelligence branch of the United States Army, established in 1885. It was the first standing intelligence agency of the Army; the Union Army had had a Bureau of Military Information, but that had reported to the Commanding General for less than a...
, based in New York City.
Stevenson was neither a special agent of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
, nor a member of Military Intelligence, but was rather an activist who cooperated with both as a member of the American Protective League
American Protective League
The American Protective League was an American organization of private citizens that worked with Federal law enforcement agencies during the World War I era to identify suspected German sympathizers and to counteract the activities of radicals, anarchists, anti-war activists, and left-wing labor...
, a non-government agency. On August 31, 1918, Stevenson learned the efficacy of the tactic of raiding one's political opponents when he and the American Protective League helped federal agents armed with a search warrant
Search warrant
A search warrant is a court order issued by a Magistrate, judge or Supreme Court Official that authorizes law enforcement officers to conduct a search of a person or location for evidence of a crime and to confiscate evidence if it is found....
storm the New York headquarters of the National Civil Liberties Bureau
National Civil Liberties Bureau
The National Civil Liberties Bureau was an American civil rights organization. In 1920, it changed its name to the American Civil Liberties Union ....
, forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union
American Civil Liberties Union
The American Civil Liberties Union is a U.S. non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." It works through litigation, legislation, and...
. Publications, documents, and minutes of the organization's governing body were seized for future scrutiny for potential prosecution.
On January 21, 1919, Stevenson was catapulted into national prominence by an appearance before the so-called Overman Committee
Overman Committee
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...
of the United States Senate
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
, which was then engaged in the first congressional investigation of "alien propaganda" and Bolshevism in America. During the course of his testimony, Stevenson read into the record a list of 62 names of individuals who held, in his own estimation, "dangerous, destructive, and anarchistic sentiments." Included among these were social worker and pacifist Jane Addams
Jane Addams
Jane Addams was a pioneer settlement worker, founder of Hull House in Chicago, public philosopher, sociologist, author, and leader in woman suffrage and world peace...
, President of Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
David Starr Jordan
David Starr Jordan
David Starr Jordan, Ph.D., LL.D. was a leading eugenicist, ichthyologist, educator and peace activist. He was president of Indiana University and Stanford University.-Early life and education:...
, journalist Oswald Garrison Villard
Oswald Garrison Villard
Oswald Garrison Villard was an American journalist. He provided a rare direct link between the anti-imperialism of the late 19th century and the conservative Old Right of the 1930s and 1940s.-Biography:...
, Sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
professor Frederic C. Howe
Frederic C. Howe
Frederic Clemson Howe was a member of the Ohio Senate, Commissioner of Immigration of the Port of New York, and published author. He was also president of the League for Small and Subject Nationalities....
, and an array of liberal clerics and academics.
Stevenson's testimony, an early example of a tactic later known as Red-baiting
Red-baiting
Red-baiting is the act of accusing, denouncing, attacking or persecuting an individual or group as communist, socialist, or anarchist, or sympathetic toward communism, socialism, or anarchism. The word "red" in "red-baiting" is derived from the red flag signifying radical left-wing politics. In the...
, became national news. With the Wilson administration
Woodrow Wilson
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A leader of the Progressive Movement, he served as President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, and then as the Governor of New Jersey from 1911 to 1913...
embarrassed by the characterization of a number of its prominent friends in such a light, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker
Newton D. Baker
Newton Diehl Baker, Jr. was an American politician who belonged to the Democratic Party. He served as the 37th mayor of Cleveland, Ohio from 1912 to 1915 and as U.S. Secretary of War from 1916 to 1921.-Early years:...
quickly entered the debate, declaring:
Mr. Stevenson has never been an officer or an employee of the Military Intelligence Division of the War Department.... I personally have no sympathy with the publication of lists of persons classified with reference to their supposed opinions, and grouped under general designations, such as 'pacifists,' which may mean any one of a dozen things, some of them quite consistent with the finest loyalty to the country and some of them inconsistent with such loyalty.
The attack on Stevenson by liberal critics drew conservative supporters to his defense, including U.S. Senator Lee Slater Overman
Lee Slater Overman
Lee Slater Overman was a Democratic U.S. senator from the state of North Carolina between 1903 and 1930. He was born in Salisbury, N.C., the son of William H. and Mary E. Slater Overman. He attended Trinity College , Class of 1874, where he was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity...
, who proclaimed in committee that Stevenson had studied "German propaganda" in America for over a year and was thus "probably more familiar with the various groups of German and radical propaganda in the United States than anyone else in this country."
Though his influence at the War Department had attenuated, Stevenson still exerted considerable influence as a member of the powerful conservative Union League Club, a patriotic organization organized at the time of the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. On January 9, 1919, a meeting of that influential social organization of New York City's political elite determined to establish a committee of five members given the task of studying radicalism in the city. Archibald Stevenson was named by the organization to head this new committee. The committee conducted a two month investigation before presenting its report at the March 13 monthly meeting of the group. Upon hearing the report, the membership of the group voted unanimously to petition the New York state legislature to appoint a special committee dedicated to the radicalism question.
Such a push did not come to the legislature out of the blue. During the course of his activity with the Union League Club anti-radicalism committee, Stevenson had frequently found himself in the New York state capital of Albany
Albany, New York
Albany is the capital city of the U.S. state of New York, the seat of Albany County, and the central city of New York's Capital District. Roughly north of New York City, Albany sits on the west bank of the Hudson River, about south of its confluence with the Mohawk River...
. There he met with state Republican
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
political leaders, ultimately resulting in the creation of a state legislative committee to study radicalism in New York state — a committee headed by State Senator Clayton R. Lusk
Clayton R. Lusk
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....
.
Lusk Committee service
On March 20, 1919, at the behest of Archibald Stevenson and the New York Union League Club, Republican State Senator Walters introduced a resolution creating a formal sub-committee of the Senate on "Bolsheviki Activities." This proposal quickly passed the Senate and was sent to the New York State Assembly, which approved the measure on March 26 by a vote of 110 to 10. An appropriation of $30,000 was passed to fund the committee's activities.A joint committee consisting of four Senators and five Assemblymen was appointed, with majority control in the hands of the Republican Party. Senator Clayton Lusk was elected chairman. The committee was formally established with a limited purview, "to investigate the scope, tendencies, and ramifications" of "seditious activities" and to report on its investigations of the same back to the legislature. Nowhere in its authorizing legislation was this committee given the power to conduct raids or to make arrests. Rather, the committee was designed to be merely administrative in nature.
In practice, the Lusk Committee's activity extended significantly beyond its prescribed agenda and it ran appreciably over budget — spending some $80,000 by January 1920. The committee exercised search warrants
Search warrant
A search warrant is a court order issued by a Magistrate, judge or Supreme Court Official that authorizes law enforcement officers to conduct a search of a person or location for evidence of a crime and to confiscate evidence if it is found....
against many of the organizations which it deemed to be centers of revolutionary propaganda, confiscating documents for further use.
The Lusk Committee met for the first time on June 12, 1919. That same day the office of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, the unrecognized
Diplomatic recognition
Diplomatic recognition in international law is a unilateral political act with domestic and international legal consequences, whereby a state acknowledges an act or status of another state or government in control of a state...
diplomatic office of Soviet Russia
Soviet Russia
Soviet Russia usually refers to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, one of the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. It may also denote:* Soviet Russia , magazine of the Friends of Soviet Russia in the United States...
, located at 110 West 40th Street in New York City, was raided by police authorities working in conjunction with the Lusk Committee. A mass of books, letters, and papers were seized in accordance with the search warrant, providing the Lusk Committee with fodder for further investigation. A set of subpoenas
Subpoena
A subpoena is a writ by a government agency, most often a court, that has authority to compel testimony by a witness or production of evidence under a penalty for failure. There are two common types of subpoena:...
from the Committee to leading members of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau, including Ludwig Martens
Ludwig Martens
Ludwig Christian Alexander Karl Martens was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician and engineer.-Early years:...
, A. A. Heller, Gregory Weinstein, Isaac Hourwich, and Santeri Nuorteva
Santeri Nuorteva
Santeri Nuorteva was a Finnish-Soviet journalist and one of the first members of the Finnish parliament. Nuorteva served in the Finnish parliament as a member of the Social Democratic Party from 1907–1908 and 1909–1910...
.
A second sensational raid directed by the Lusk Committee followed on June 21, 1919, when officers of the state constabulary and members of the American Protective League entered the premises of "The People's House," headquarters of the Rand School of Social Science
Rand School of Social Science
The Rand School of Social Science was formed in New York City by adherents of the Socialist Party of America in 1906. The school aimed to provide a broad education to workers, imparting a politicizing class-consciousness, and additionally served as a research bureau, a publisher, and the operator...
on East 15th Street. Fifty raiders led by Deputy Attorney General Samuel A. Berger and Stevenson seized correspondence and other documents belonging to the Socialist Party-related school.
In 1920, McAllister Coleman described Stevenson, his ideological opponent:
Mr. Stevenson is conventional and sincere. Anyone who talks with him for five minutes will appreciate his sincerity. He sees himself as one of the saviors of American institutions, now threatened by the menace of a foreign philosophy. He believes with all his heart and soul that there is a widespread plot in this country to overthrow the Republic by violent means.... He is convinced that the Socialist Party of America is dominated by the "foreign element" and that its teachings are consequently "un-American." "AmericanismAmericanism (ideology)Americanism is an ideology or belief in devotion, loyalty, or allegiance to the United States of America or to its flag, traditions, customs, culture, symbols, institutions, or form of government.It is like Country-love...
" in Mr. Stevenson's mind, is largely determined by an individual's uncritical acceptance of the late war and war spirit.
With such a background, Mr. Stevenson spent three years studying and exposing the extremes of radicalism, and he has succeeded in persuading a large part of the public that the dream-world of plots and counterplots, revolutions, and assassinations through which he moves, actually exists.
Stevenson was the principal author of the Committee's final report, Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps being Taken and Required to Curb It. Of its 4,000 pages, ten percent represented the Committee's findings, the rest reprinted documents gathered during the Committee's investigations that detailed revolutionary propaganda and patriotism education. Critics viewed Stevenson as the driving force behind the Committee and the report. The New Republic believed the Report reflected Stevenson's earlier work in the Department of Military Intelligence because it described efforts to keep the U.S. out of World War I as the work of Socialist propagandists and identified pacifism with Bolshevism, which it called "a thoroughly dishonest attempt to mislead the reader."
Later years
In 1920 Stevenson served as counsel to the committee of the State Assembly that recommended the expulsion of its five Socialist members.Following termination of the Lusk Committee, Stevenson remained for a time in the news as a prominent conservative public intellectual. Reflecting the national consensus even after the Red Scare of 1919-20
First Red Scare
In American history, the First Red Scare of 1919–1920 was marked by a widespread fear of Bolshevism and anarchism. Concerns over the effects of radical political agitation in American society and alleged spread in the American labor movement fueled the paranoia that defined the period.The First Red...
, he continued to defend the limitations on free speech established during the war by the Espionage Act of 1917
Espionage Act of 1917
The Espionage Act of 1917 is a United States federal law passed on June 15, 1917, shortly after the U.S. entry into World War I. It has been amended numerous times over the years. It was originally found in Title 50 of the U.S. Code but is now found under Title 18, Crime...
and Sedition Act of 1918
Sedition Act of 1918
The Sedition Act of 1918 was an Act of the United States Congress that extended the Espionage Act of 1917 to cover a broader range of offenses, notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds...
. Reviewing Zachariah Chafee's Freedom of Speech for the New York Times, Stevenson wrote:
The danger does not come from small groups which seek to use the torch and bomb, but rather from those quasi-political and economic organizations which teach that the workers should organize into revolutionary industrial unions for the purpose of using the coercive power of the general strike as a means to enable an organized minority to veto the decisions of the ballot box and to impose its will upon the American people. If to prevent the teaching of such a doctrine be an infringement of constitutional rights, it would also be an infringement of such rights to prevent the establishment of schools for the training of pickpockets, safebreakers and other criminals. The first duty of any Government is to protect itself. The sedition statutes...are destined for that purpose and do not abridge the civil liberties of the people.
In April 1921 Stevenson protested New York City's organized "Town Hall Forum" of public lectures as "spineless" and "indeterminate" for failing to oppose revolutionary propaganda. Stevenson also publicly opined that American colleges, universities, and seminaries
Seminary
A seminary, theological college, or divinity school is an institution of secondary or post-secondary education for educating students in theology, generally to prepare them for ordination as clergy or for other ministry...
were showing signs of increasing hospitality to radical ideas. Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
magazine described him in 1923 as "the most indefatigable prosecutor of the Reds in America, and the brains of the Lusk Committee."
Following the enactment of a law regulating educational institutions and teachers, as recommended by the Lusk Report, in 1921-22 Stevenson served on the State Advisory Council on the Qualification of Teachers.
In 1927, Stevenson published States' Rights and National Prohibition, in which he criticized national prohibition as "a part of the general movement to shift responsibility from the individual to the State" that will "end by destroying representative government." The book described the history of federal-state relations and warned that federal enforcement of national prohibition "involves a usurpation of the reserved powers of the States" and establishes a precedent for the surrender of their power to the national government. Reviews in some legal journals were brief and respectful, but Harvard Law Review published a review by Harvard Law Professor Thomas Reed Powell that said: "For unsupported assertions, for self-contradictions, for loose terminology, for non-sequiturs, for political foolishness, this book has few peers."
In the 1920s and 1930s, Stevenson was associated with the National Civic Federation
National Civic Federation
The National Civic Federation, was a federation of American businesses and labor leaders founded in 1900. It favoured moderate progressive reform and sought to resolve disputes arising between industry and organized labor. It emerged first in 1893 as the Chicago Civic Federation , which was also...
, by then a small right-wing group. He chaired its Committee on Free Speech in 1927, when he delivered a radio address on the proper limitations on the free speech of employees. He said:
I refer to those cases...in which a teacher, professor or clergyman is called in question by his employer for his conduct in office. His personal liberty is usually not at stake. It is his salary that is threatened.... Apparently, whoever pays the individual's salary has no freedom whatever. The pay check must be drawn once a month even though the teacher, professor or clergyman refuses to teach or preach what he is paid to do. The employer has an unquestionable right to demand that he be given what he pays for. If the employee feels that this demand limits his academic freedom, he is free to resign and go elsewhere to express himself as he pleases.
Stevenson served as the National Civil Federation's general counsel from 1934 to 1936. In the latter year he decried Communist influence in American unions, designed "to encourage industrial unrest and thus bring about a change in the social order by violent means." In 1937 he joined a committee to lobby for the outlawing of sit-down strikes, tracing the tactic to Northern Italy in 1919 and 1920, where it led opponents of union radicals, in his view, to turn to Mussolini and fascism. He protested to Secretary of State Hull
Cordell Hull
Cordell Hull was an American politician from the U.S. state of Tennessee. He is best known as the longest-serving Secretary of State, holding the position for 11 years in the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt during much of World War II...
against a U.S.-Russian trade agreement and called on the FCC
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...
to ban broadcasts by the Communist candidates for President and Vice-President during the 1936 presidential campaign.
During the early 1930s, Stevenson headed a small organization called the International Committee to Combat the World Menace of Communism. Later in the decade he worked as public relations counsel for the New York State Economic Council, a pro-business and anti-trade union
Trade union
A trade union, trades union or labor union is an organization of workers that have banded together to achieve common goals such as better working conditions. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members and negotiates labour contracts with...
organization.
In the mid-1930s, Stevenson returned to an issue from his days with the Lusk Committee and defended requiring teachers to take a loyalty oath. He argued that such oaths were meant "to raise teaching to the dignity of a recognized profession" similar to the oaths taken by public officials and the Hippocratic Oath.
Stevenson moved to New Canaan, Connecticut
New Canaan, Connecticut
New Canaan is a town in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States, northeast of Stamford, on the Fivemile River. The population was 19,738 according to the 2010 census.The town is one of the most affluent communities in the United States...
, in the 1930s and was active in local politics. He headed the town's Board of Finance from 1935 to 1940 and was first selectman in 1940. At a special town meeting in 1937, he led the movement to protest President Roosevelt's plan to enlarge the Supreme Court. He said it would "render insecure and valueless every constitutional guarantee.... Such a precedent would deliver into the hands of an ambitious President all the powers of government.... This is the road that was traveled by Adolf Hitler; it is the road of Mussolini and of every dictator throughout the whole course of history."
From 1942, Stevenson served as general counsel of the National Economic Council
National Economic Council
The National Economic Council of the United States is the principal forum used by the President of the United States for considering economic policy matters, separate from matters relating to domestic policy, which are the domain of the Domestic Policy Council...
, another conservative economic organization dedicated to carrying on campaigns against communism and socialism.
Death
Archibald Stevenson died at his home in New Canaan, Connecticut, on February 10, 1961. He was 77 years old at the time of his death.Works
- From New York to Alaska and Back Again. New York: Styles and Cash, 1893.
- Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics with an Exposition and Discussion of the Steps being Taken and Required to Curb It: Filed April 24, 1920, in the Senate of the State of New York. (Editor.) Published in 4 volumes, Albany, NY: Lyon, 1920.
- Correspondence Relative to the Conduct of the Labor Temple, 14th Street and 2nd Avenue, New York City. With Jesse Franklin Forbes. New York: n.p., n.d. [c. 1921].
- States' Rights and National Prohibition. New York: Clark, Boardman, 1927.
- New England in Washington's Day. New Canaan, CT: John E. Hersam, 1929.
- What Kind of Social and Political Philosophy is Taught in the Schools? An Address by Archibald E. Stevenson of the New York Bar, Delivered before the Citizens' and Taxpayers' Confrence on Quality and Cost of Public Education, Held at Hotel Ten Eyck, Albany, N.Y., February 5, 1940. New York: New York State Economic Council, n.d. [1940].
- Revolution through "Social Science" in the Schools. With Augustin G Rudd and Merwin Kimball Hart. New York: American Parents Committee on Education, n.d. [c. 1940].
- Forging Another Link in the Chain: The Pending Bill to Put All Private Employment Agencies under Washington Bureaucratic Control (H.R. 5510): A Statement Made Before the Executive Committee of the New York State Economic Council, October 29, 1941. New York: New York State Economic Council, n.d. [1941].
- Education for Citizenship. New York: New York State Economic Council, n.d. [1941].
- Bulwark of Freedom, the State and National Bills of Rights: An Address by Archibald E. Stevenson... New York: New York State Economic Council, 1942.
Further reading
- Todd J. Pfannestiel, Rethinking the Red Scare. The Lusk Committee and New York's Crusade against Radicalism, 1919-1923. London: Routledge, 2003.
External links
- Lusk Committee Papers finding aid, New York State Archives, Albany, NY.
See also
- Overman CommitteeOverman CommitteeThe 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...
- Lusk Committee