Rapp-Coudert Committee

The Rapp-Coudert Committee was the colloquial name of the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Educational System of the State of New York — a committee of the New York State Legislature. Between 1940 and 1942, the Rapp-Coudert Committee sought to identify the extent of communist influence in the public education system of the state of New York. Its inquiries lead to the dismissal of more 40 instructors and staff members at the City College of New York for their political affiliations, actions the committee's critics regarded as a political "witch-hunt."

The government of the state of New York had a long record of activity in the investigation of alleged seditious activities long before the establishment of the Rapp-Coudert Committee in 1940. Two decades earlier, in March 1919, the state had launched a Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, headed by Senator Clayton R. Lusk, which had orchestrated raids to seize documents and conducted prosecutions in an effort to publicize and neutralize radical influence in the state.

In the halls of Congress, New York representative Hamilton Fish III had chaired a Congressional investigative committee which in 1930 took and published extensive testimony on communism in America, a matter which Fish deemed ""the most important, the most vital, the most far-reaching, and the most dangerous issue in the world."

New York City, with its massive size and extensive immigrant population, was the headquarters of the Communist Party USA, save for a handful of years in the middle 1920s when the party moved to Chicago, and a focal point for American communist activity.

The abrupt flip-flop of the American Communist Party line following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 thrust the role and influence of the roughly 60,000 member organization into the public eye. Within days after the signing of the political agreement between Nazi Germany, headed by Adolf Hitler, and the Soviet Union, headed by Joseph Stalin, American Communists moved as one from vocal public opposition to fascism as part of a broad Popular Front to advocacy of non-intervention in the erupting European conflict, characterizing the fight between Germany and Britain as an "imperialist war" of little import to the American working class.

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