Jerome Dwight Davis (December 2, 1891 – October 19, 1979), was an American activist for international peace and social reform, a labor organizer, and a sociologist who founded the organization Promoting Enduring Peace. Early in his life, he campaigned to reduce the workweek and as an advocate of organized labor.
Background
Davis was born in Kyoto, Japan on December 2, 1891, to American missionaries Jerome Dean Davis and Frances Hooper. His father helped found Doshisha University and then taught there. Davis spent his early childhood in Japan.
In 1904, Davis came to the US with his parents to get an American education. He attended Newton High School in Newton, Massachusetts and Oberlin Academy. In 1913, he graduated from Oberlin College, where he had served as president of the local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). He spent a year in community service at the Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association, through which he helped obtain a half holiday for workers in some larger local factories.
Career
In 1914, Davis started a doctorate simultaneously at the Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. He financed his studies through work. He performed social work, worked as assistant at Broadway Tabernacle, and lectured for the City of New York.
During the summer of 1915, he worked as a private secretary to Sir Wilfred Grenfell in Labrador, Canada, and helped him in a wide array of services. Grenfell arrested felons and also extracted teeth. In the fall of 1915, Davis took leave from his studies to travel to Europe and work with prisoners of war (POWs) during the Great War. Their plight became a lifelong interest.
YMCA (Russia) Davis spent 1916–1918 in Russia. He was sent to Russia by the YMCA to work with German POWs. He also set up YMCA centers for Russian soldiers. Upon American entry into World War I in 1917, he was appointed as head of all YMCA work in Russia. For the US Government, he oversaw distribution of more than a million copies of President Wilson's Fourteen Points message to German soldiers.
He opposed US military intervention in Russia during its civil war in favor of working with the new Soviet Union. During the 1920s, Davis returned to Russia several times and continued to advocate for Soviet cooperation. His chart of the construction of the Soviet government was published in Workers' Dreadnought. By 1920, however, he had returned to the States, and finished his studies at the Union Theological Seminary. In 1922 he obtained a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University.
Academia From 1921 to 1924, Davis worked as an associate professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. There, he also advocated for organized labor. He investigated and published findings on a strike in Manchester, New Hampshire. The Federal Coal Commission asked him to investigate operations of West Virginia coal mines. He also served as chairman of the Social Service Commission of the Congregational Church.
In 1924, he founded the Jerome Davis Research fund to support students at Oberlin who "worked with labor" to facilitate "mutual understanding and cooperation in the field of industry."
From 1924 to 1936, Davis was appointed a Gilbert L. Stark professor of "practical philanthropy" at the Yale Divinity School. He helped organize labor forums for the New Haven Trades Council. He developed labor ideals adopted by the Congregational and Christian Churches of America. He chaired the Social Service Commission of Protestant churches in Connecticut. From 1924 to 1936, he also chaired the Legislative Commission on Jails of the State of Connecticut for twelve years. He used a $50,000 Federal grant to review Connecticut prisoner records, with findings published in 1932. In 1935, Davis wrote a biographical introduction on William Gayley Simpson for his book Toward The Rising Sun, which is a book that critiques Christianity.
In 1928, Davis was a member of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, part of VOKS (Russian "Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei" — Всесоюзное общество культурной связи с заграницей, All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries).
When he did not receive tenure at Yale, the decision was controversial and was widely believed to be a result of his socialism. The National Education Association, the American Federation of Labor, and the American Association of University Professors investigated the case. Yale denied permission to New York Supreme Court Justice Ferdinand Pecora and US Senator Gerald P. Nye to speak on campus for fear of their support for Davis.
American Federation of Teachers From 1936 to 1939, Davis served as president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). During his second term (1936–1937), Davis joined Lovestoneites and others in trying to lead the AFT out of the AFL and into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). However, the Communist Party USA, although it supported the CIO as a policy, itself did not want certain AFL unions like the AFT to leave, because the CPUSA might lose influence in the AFL.
In the late 1930s, Davis (along with Denis Nowell Pritt, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and others) defended the Moscow Trials of the Stalin purge era in the Soviet Union from critics. Davis claimed that, as a former Chairman of the Legislative Commission on Jails in the State of Connecticut, he had seen hundreds of criminals confess based on overwhelming evidence against them. He compared that experience to the confessions given by defendants in the Moscow Trials. He did note that "there is a lot of false testimony in a trial of this kind."
For the rest of his life, Davis worked on and off as visiting professor at colleges and universities. During the 1940 presidential elections, Davis served as delegate from Connecticut to the Democratic National Convention.
World War II During World War II, he headed YMCA POW efforts in Canada. From 1943 to 1944 Davis worked as a correspondent for the Toronto Star in Moscow. In January 1944, he was part of the delegation of Western correspondents who visited the graves in Katyn forest at the invitation of the Soviets. He believed the Soviet version that the Germans were the perpetrators.Urban, Thomas: The Katyn Massacre 1940. History of a Crime. Barnsley 2020, pp. 122, 130.
From 1939 to 1945, Davis was involved in a libel lawsuit he filed (see below). In 1949, he led a peace mission to Europe.
Promoting Enduring Peace In 1952, Davis founded the organization Promoting Enduring Peace, Inc., in which he remained active through 1974. The group issued reprints of articles in pamphlet form that opposed the militarism of the mid-1940s, and formally formed the organization in 1952. As its first director, Davis organized many trips to the USSR during the Cold War, in an effort to continue communicating with Russian leaders. In 1957, his group met for two hours with Nikita Khrushchev. In 1970, his group met with Alexei Kosygin. In 1973 and 1975, Davis led similar trips for educators to China, which had been controlled by Communists since shortly after World War II.
He proposed creation of the Gandhi Peace Award on March 13, 1959. He presented it to the first recipient, Eleanor Roosevelt, the following year.
Controversy
Davis supported world peace and international cooperation with all nations, which included working with the Communist states of the USSR and China. Most scholars recognize that his support was based on admiration for Communism and its leaders. Scholar Judy Kutulas writes that Davis found Joseph Stalin to be an impressive intellectual and one useful during a revolutionary period, yet she carefully described him as a non-communist who supported the USSR as an "inveterate front supporter."
During the Cold War and anti-Communist fears in the United States, Davis's efforts were considered suspicious and he earned many opponents to his work. In 1961, the Church League of America wrote: Jerome Davis, who was kicked out of office in the American Federation of Teachers because of his long pro-Soviet, pro-Communist record, has been identified in numerous pages of Government hearings as one of the top Communist Front joiners in the United States. Davis, according to Biddle, had decided that the Fish Committee of 1930 investigating Communism had been "far more dangerous to liberty and freedom than the pitiful handful of Communists in the United States ever has been. Of all his publications, Behind Soviet Power stirred up the most attention, at least among anti-communists. Ilya Ehrenburg, a "Soviet newspaperman," wrote its foreword. In 1951 the libertarian The Freeman magazine wrote about him: There is that strong group in the Methodist Church led by Bishop Ward. Many have belonged to every subversive group in the nation. They love Soviet Russia; they apologize for her all the time... The Methodist Church is the largest of the Protestant denominations. Its Federation for Social Action publishes a Social Questions Bulletin, which goes to every Methodist clergyman. The Federation has among its members half the bishops of the church. It includes the heads of their largest theological schools, editors of their papers, heads of various important boards, ministers of their largest churches. To date none of them has been heard to object to what their Federation says. Take Jerome Davis, who apologizes for Russia every day and has backed many organizations which have been named as Communist fronts. His book Behind Soviet Power is one of the most outspoken apologies for Russia yet published. It was sent free of charge to more than 23,000 Methodist clergymen. With it went a letter stating that it was a gift from the Methodist Federation and adding that every clergyman must read it. There are some queer things in that book, as odd as some statements that Davis made when he spoke to the National Convention of the Methodists. Read them and wonder! Soviet concentration camps, according to Davis, are "simply places to keep criminals." On the jailing of innocent people, the shooting of those who oppose Russia in the slave nations, Davis has this to say: "If Russia sends innocent people to concentration camps and tightens up civil liberties, it's the fault of the American government." Just how is not revealed. He further says: "In the last thirty years the Soviet Union has a record for peace the equal of the United States." Again, "Back of all our fear is the demonstrated success in planned economy, first in the Soviet Union, then Poland and Czechoslovakia." I wonder what Davis has read lately?
Libel suit against Saturday Evening Post (1939-1945)
From 1939 to 1945, Davis pursued a libel case against the Curtis Publishing, owners of Saturday Evening Post, then the most widely circulated magazine in the US, for an article in published in 1939. In "Communist Wreckers in American Labor," from the September 2, 1939 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, reporter Benjamin Stolberg described Davis as a "Communist and Stalinist", and said that the American Federation of Teachers was "the only AFL union controlled by the Communists" (at a time when Davis headed the AFT).
Davis hired ACLU co-founder and nationally known lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays to represent him in the suit. Stolberg hired Louis Waldman, an "Old Guard" Socialist and anti-communist labor lawyer. The case reached the New York Supreme Court, with Justice John F. Carew presiding.
Plaintiff