Jerome Davis (sociologist)

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Jerome Dwight Davis (December 2, 1891 – October 1979) was a labor organizer and sociologist who founded Promoting Enduring Peace. Early in his life he campaigned to reduce the workweek, and as an advocate of organized labor.

Davis was born in Kyoto, Japan in 1891. He attended Newton High School in Newton, Massachusetts, then Oberlin College, where he graduated in 1913. He was manager for the YMCA in Russia where he worked with a number of Bolshevik leaders including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin. In 1924 he founded the Jerome Davis Research fund to support students at Oberlin College who "worked with labor" to facilitate "mutual understanding and cooperation in the field of industry."[1] He received a PhD in sociology from Columbia University and was a professor at the Yale Divinity School.

His failure to receive tenure at Yale caused controversy, as it was widely believed to be due to his activism and Socialist leanings.[2][3] It is alleged that he was a Stalinist sympathizer. He was blacklisted by the HUAC in the 1950s.

In the late 1930s he (along with D.N. Pritt, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and others) defended the Moscow Trials from critics. He claimed that, as a former Chairman of the Legislative Commission on Jails in the State of Connecticut, he had seen hundreds of criminals bluntly confess based on overwhelming evidence against them, and compared this with the reactions of the Moscow Trials defendants. He did, however, note that "there is a lot of false testimony in a trial of this kind."[4]

He founded the American group "Promoting Enduring Peace", issuing reprints of articles in pamphlet form that opposed militarism in the mid-1940s and formally forming the organization in 1952. As the first director of the organisation he organized many trips to the USSR for purposes of advocacy during the Cold War. The Gandhi Peace Award was first proposed by him, on March 13, 1959, and presented to the first recipient, Eleanor Roosevelt, the following year.

Quotes

  • "If democracy is to endure, capitalism as we know it must go." (From Capitalism and Its Culture, 1935, p. 519.)

Texts

References

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  2. YALE CONDEMNED FOR OUSTING DAVIS; Professors' Council Scores Its Action as a 'Violation of Academic Tenure'. New York Times, May 23, 1937
  3. N. E. A. HITS YALE FOR OUSTING DAVIS; Report, Adopted Unanimously, Says University Gave 'No Valid Reasons' for Action. New York Times, July 1, 1937
  4. Paul Hollander. Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. 2004. p. 162, 165.