Archibald E. Stevenson
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.
[2] 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.
"[5] 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.
[7] 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.
[5] 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.
"[5] 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.
With the Wilson administration embarrassed by the characterization of a number of its prominent friends in such a light,[8] Secretary of War Newton D. Baker quickly entered the debate, declaring:[9]
[12] 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.
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.
[14] 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.
[18] 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.
[19] Fifty raiders led by Deputy Attorney General Samuel A. Berger and Stevenson seized correspondence and other documents belonging to the Socialist Party-related school.
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.
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.
[24] Stevenson also publicly opined that American colleges, universities, and seminaries were showing signs of increasing hospitality to radical ideas.
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.
[22] In the latter year he decried Communist influence in American unions,[31] designed "to encourage industrial unrest and thus bring about a change in the social order by violent means.
"[32] In 1937 he joined a committee to lobby for the outlawing of sit-down strikes,[33] 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.
[34] He protested to Secretary of State Hull against a U.S.-Russian trade agreement[35] and called on the FCC to ban broadcasts by the Communist candidates for president and vice-president during the 1936 presidential campaign.
[37] 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.
