Jerome Davis (sociologist)

Jerome Dwight Davis (born December 2, 1891 in Kyoto ; † October 19, 1979 ) was an American activist of the Christian trade union movement , sociologist and journalist who had made a name for himself in the USA as a mediator in labor disputes and an activist of the peace movement , but was also controversial as an admirer of the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin .

Life

Davis' parents were evangelical missionaries . His father got a teaching position for the Dōshisha University in the old Japanese imperial city of Kyoto, where the son was born. When he was 13 years old, the family moved to Oberlin Ohio , where he attended school and then the liberal Oberlin College . There he also became chair of the student union of the Christian Young People's Association (YMCA). He was also involved in organizations fighting for workers' rights in Minneapolis .

After college, he enrolled in theology at a seminary in Dayton, Ohio, and Columbia University in New York at the same time . But he interrupted his studies in 1915 to volunteer for the YMCA in the European theater of war. He was part of a YMCA delegation that looked after 29 camps for prisoners of war in the Russian Empire , and his travels took him to Turkmenistan . At the request of the US government, he took over the distribution of one million leaflets with President Woodrow Wilson's 14-point program for soldiers of the German Army .

After his return, he completed his studies in Dayton and submitted his dissertation at Columbia University, where he in 1922 doctorate was. The year before, he had traveled to Soviet Russia for the first time as an employee of an aid program against the famine after the Russian Civil War . In publications he advocated recognition of the Bolshevik leadership under Vladimir Lenin .

After his return to the USA, he took on a position as a research assistant at the traditional Dartmouth College in Hanover ( New Hampshire ). There, too, he was involved in public bodies and in organizations of the Protestant churches for the expansion of workers' rights. In 1924 he got a teaching post from Yale University for its theological department, the "Yale Divinity School".

However, his teaching post as professor of sociology at Yale was not extended in 1936. According to the press, the majority of professors on the Divinity School Presidium disagreed with Davis' criticism of capitalism. His departure from Yale sparked a debate in the press about academic freedom. Big newspapers like the New York Times sided with Davis. Davies was also elected chairman of the American Federation of Teachers.

In 1940 he became a delegate of the Democratic Party , which, contrary to the previous regulation, pushed through the candidacy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third term. At the YMCA, he took over the management of prisoners of war of the Axis powers who were interned by the British in camps in Canada .

In 1943 he took over the post of Moscow correspondent for the Canadian daily " Toronto Star ". In January 1944 he belonged to the group of correspondents who visited the mass graves of Katyn at the invitation of the Soviet authorities and took part in the press conference of the Soviet Commission of Inquiry ( Burdenko Commission ). His reports, in which he confirmed the Soviet version, were also taken over by some US and Swedish newspapers. In 1945 he was able to interview Mahatma Gandhi in India .

He was involved in campaigns against NATO, which was founded in 1949 . He was mentioned as a supporter of communist organizations in the report of the Committee on Un-American Activities of the US Congress (HUAC) established at the instigation of Senator Joseph McCarthy .

In 1952 Davis founded the organization "Promoting Enduring Peace" (PEP) as part of the peace movement . The invitation to tender for the Gandhi Peace Award (Gandhi Peace Award), which Eleanor Roosevelt received for the first time in 1960, goes back to his initiative . Oberlin College awards a scholarship named after Davis.

Relationship to the Soviet Union

Davis presented the developments in the Soviet Union as exemplary in his works. He praised the dekulakization accompanying forced collectivization as a success. In 1943 he lost a civil lawsuit for $ 150,000 in compensation against the Saturday Evening Post , which had called him a "Communist and Stalinist."

In 1945 Davis participated alongside John Hersey , Richard Lauterbach , Edgar Snow Edmund Stevens and Alexander Werth in a campaign by pro-Soviet journalists against the publisher and publicist William Lindsay White , who had described the Soviet system as a party dictatorship in his book "Report on the Russians" which the masses would be oppressed and exploited.

Davis reiterated his position on the Soviet system, which he had already expressed in many articles, in his 1949 book “Behind Soviet Power. Stalin and the Russians ”, to which the former US ambassador to Moscow, Joseph E. Davies , wrote the preface. Like Davis, Davies was criticized by part of the US press as a Stalin admirer at the same time.

In his book, Davis introduces Stalin as a statesman who reads poetry and whose goal is to strengthen democracy (pp. 7, 38). He defended collectivization and the special rights for the NKVD secret police (pp. 12, 28-29), and justified the show trials during the Stalinist purges and the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact (pp. 12, 29-30). He also propagated the version that the German occupiers were the perpetrators of the Katyn massacre. He sharply criticized the Polish government- in- exile in London and, after the war, praised the head of the Polish Communist Party , the Stalinist Bolesław Bierut (pp. 99–100). Moreover, he tried in an entire chapter to refute the accusation that Stalin wanted to install communist regimes in the countries that were first liberated by the Red Army and then occupied (pp. 98-103). He assumed US diplomats, who warned of the expansion of the Soviet Union under Stalin, that they were " Nazis at heart " ( really Nazis at heart , p. 119).

Even after Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the XX. At the CPSU convention in 1956, at which the latter accused Stalin's crimes against party members, Davis stuck to his positive assessments of the Soviet system.

Works

• with Theodor Lüddecke: Industrial Peace: A Symposium. Paul List, Leipzig 1928.
• The New Russia Between the First and Second Five Year Plans. Books for Libraries Press, New York 1933, ISBN 978-0-8369-0365-2 .
• Behind Soviet power. Stalin and the Russians. The Readers Press, West Haven Conn. 1949. ( online )

Web links

• Literature by and about Jerome Davis in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Biographical data, unless otherwise stated, according to: Oberlin College & Conservaty .
2. ^ ^{A b} Jerome Davis: Behind Soviet Power. Stalin and the Russians. West Haven, Conn. 1949, p. 3.
3. ^ The Cambridge History of Russia Vol. III. Ed. Ronald Grigor Suny. Cambridge 2006, pp. 12-13.
4. ↑ cf. The Jerome Davis Case , 1937.
5. ↑ Yale condemned for Ousting Davis , in: New York Times , May 23, 1937 p. 21
6. ^ Clarence Taylor: Reds at the Blackboard: Communism, Civil Rights, and the New York City. New York 2013, p. 51.
7. ^ Papers of Jerome Davis Franklin D. Roosevelt Library & Museum
8. ↑ Jerome Davis: Behind Soviet Power. Stalin and the Russians. West Haven, Conn. 1949, p. 99.
9. ^ Report on the Communist "peace" offensive; a campaign to disarm and defeat the United States , p. 56.
10. ↑ A Brief History of Promoting Enduring Peace ( Memento of the original from March 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. www.pepeace.org 
11. ↑ Gandhi Peace Award , peacenews.org
12. ^ Sociology Awards
13. ↑ Daniel Chirot: Modern Tyrants: The Power and Prevalence of Evil in Our Age. Princeton NJ 1994, p. 124.
14. ↑ Dr. Davis defended by Sherwood Eddy, New York Times , May 20, 1943, p. 16.
15. ↑ William L. Oneill: A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals . New York 1982, p. 91.
16. ↑ Edmund Stevens: Russia is no Riddle. New York 1945, p. 295.
17. ↑ Dennis Dunn: Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin. America's Ambassadors to Moscow. Lexington 1998, p. 62.
18. ^ Walter L. Hixson: American Diplomacy of the Second World War. New York 2003. p. 152.
19. ^ Paul Hollander: Political Pilgrims. Western Intellectuals in the Search of the Good Society. New Brunswick / London 1998, p. 166.