[Chan Davis, died last month at 96, faced down McCarthyite
blacklists and imprisonment to pursue a brilliant academic career.
Davis knew how to change and learn from political experience, but he
always remained loyal to his socialist principles.]
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H. CHANDLER DAVIS WAS A LIFELONG RADICAL AND A MORAL TOUCHSTONE FOR
THE LEFT  
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Alan Wald
October 6, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Chan Davis, died last month at 96, faced down McCarthyite
blacklists and imprisonment to pursue a brilliant academic career.
Davis knew how to change and learn from political experience, but he
always remained loyal to his socialist principles. _

Chandler Davis photographed in 1975. (Wikimedia Commons),

 

Chandler Davis (born Horace Chandler Davis and called “Chan” by
his friends) was an internationally esteemed mathematician, a minor
science fiction writer of note, and among the most celebrated
political prisoners in the United States during the years of the high
Cold War.

Dismissed from the University of Michigan (U-M) in 1954 for refusing
to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) on
First Amendment grounds, he served six months in Danbury Federal
Correctional Institution in Connecticut, then faced an academic
blacklist that drove him to pursue a career in Canada.

The death of this endlessly resilient, lifelong radical at the age of
ninety-six on September 24 in Toronto seems like the passing of an
emissary from a world of the socialist Left that no longer exists.
Despite errors of political judgment, which Chan was the first to
acknowledge, he was for many of us a moral touchstone in our own
decades of political upheaval and unpredictability.

A Red Diaper Baby

Chan came from a Communist family. His parents had joined the Party in
the early 1930s and he happily enlisted in its youth group, Young
Pioneers of America, while in elementary school. His father, Horace
Bancroft Davis (always called “Hockey”), a descendant of Boston
abolitionists and feminists, was a labor journalist and steelworker in
the 1920s, completing a doctorate on the steel industry at Columbia
University in 1934. His mother, born Marian Rubins, also did graduate
work at Columbia.

Hockey Davis is best known today for his books published with Monthly
Review — _Nationalism and Socialism_ (1967), _The National
Question: Selected Writings by Rosa Luxemburg_ (1976), and _Toward a
Marxist Theory of Nationalism_ (1978) — but he taught at many
colleges and universities from which he was regularly dismissed for
his radical politics. Both he and Marian spent the last years of their
careers teaching at historically black colleges in the South. After
Marian’s death from breast cancer in 1960, the Davis-Putter
Scholarship Fund was established for students working for social
change. In 1971, autobiographical memoirs of Chan’s parents were
published jointly as _Liberalism is not Enough_.

The death of this endlessly resilient, lifelong radical seems like the
passing of an emissary from a world of the socialist Left that no
longer exists.

Chan, born in Ithaca, thus had a peripatetic childhood, including a
year in Brazil. At the age of sixteen, in 1942, Chan was awarded the
prestigious Harvard National Scholarship and entered Harvard College
as an undergraduate. Throwing himself into a milieu of diverse
radicals, he also began attending meetings of the Astounding
Science-Fiction Fanclub. Immediately he gravitated toward a circle
known as “the Futurians,” originally a Marxist tendency that
evolved in the late 1930s in New York and included pro-Communists John
Michel, Frederik Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and Donald Wollheim, and later
the Trotskyist Judith Merril (born Judith Grossman).

In 1943, Chan joined the US Communist Party (CPUSA) but soon withdrew
(in accordance with Party policy) to participate in a Navy officers’
training program. Nevertheless, he managed to graduate from Harvard in
three years. In the spring of 1945, he received a commission at a
Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School, and then served on a minesweeper
in Florida.

In 1946, he entered the Harvard Graduate School Department of
Mathematics and published his first story in the May issue
of _Astounding Science Fiction_, “The Nightmare.” Featured on the
cover, which depicted the Statue of Liberty being decimated by an
atomic bomb, it was the first known fictional narrative to deal with
the subject of nuclear terrorism. Two years later, another piece in
Astounding Science Fiction, “Letter to Ellen,” addressed genetic
engineering. This was followed by another ten stories and a number of
essays.

Rejoining the CPUSA in 1946 as well, Chan found that he was under
discipline to keep his membership secret as he was not seen as
sufficiently orthodox to be a public representative. As a campus
activist, Chan joined the Federation of American Scientists, founded
by former members of the Manhattan Project who favored international
control and peaceful use of atomic energy.

He also became active in the efforts of the Progressive Party, formed
to support the 1948 presidential campaign of Henry Wallace. It was at
a meeting of Young Progressives that he encountered a politically
like-minded Smith College senior named Natalie Zemon, a student of
early modern history. Within a few weeks, they decided to get married.
The following year, she enrolled in graduate school at Radcliffe
College, which enabled her to take courses at Harvard.

Going on the job market in 1950, Chan received an offer from
University of California Los Angeles but drew back when he learned of
the California Loyalty Oath requiring university employees to sign a
pledge that they were not members of the CPUSA. With that in mind, he
chose to accept a position as an instructor at U-M, a rank that could
eventually lead to a tenured position. He and Natalie moved to Ann
Arbor, where she continued her graduate studies. Chan remained a
member of the CPUSA for the first years of his academic career.

Facing HUAC

By 1953, however, both he and his father had begun to have doubts
about what was happening in the Soviet Union. They were aware of
political repression under Joseph Stalin, although without knowing the
actual extent of it, and felt they were not getting accurate reports
from Party leaders. They also doubted the CPUSA’s political efficacy
in the United States, and both quietly dropped their membership.

In Chan’s case, he separated from the CPUSA not by means of a formal
resignation but by failing to resume contact with the Party after
taking a leave. Some months later, in the fall of 1953, he received a
subpoena to appear before HUAC.

The McCarthy-era events at U-M have by now received detailed study in
books such as Ellen Schrecker’s _No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and
the Universities_ (1986) and more recently in an excellent
unpublished study by Steve Batterson at Emory University, “The
Un-American Treatment of a Red Mathematician.” This makes for
lengthy and convoluted reading because of the maneuvers of President
Harlan Hatcher and several faculty administrators, not to mention the
many legal issues raised by the various appeal processes. But the gist
is that a year later, in 1954, Davis became one of three faculty
members suspended from the U-M after refusing to cooperate with the
HUAC hearings that were held in Lansing.

In the fall of 1953, Davis received a subpoena to appear before the
House Un-American Activities Committee.

Originally some fifteen faculty had been targeted by HUAC, but an
agreement was reached between the FBI and Hatcher to focus on five who
had the clearest connection to the CPUSA. One of these, future Nobel
Prize winner Lawrence Klein, became a cooperative witness, although he
was eventually driven out of U-M by an antisemitic senior member of
the economics department. Another, Nate Coburn, was excused from the
hearings due to serious illness. That left Davis, biologist Clement
Markert (who had fought for the Republican side in Spain), and
pharmacologist Mark Nickerson (the only one who was already tenured).

As a result of their uncooperative behavior in Lansing, the three were
required to answer questions about their personal political views
before U-M faculty committees. In this instance, only Davis refused to
respond to interrogations about his own political history, and
afterward he and Nickerson (seen as an antiauthoritarian troublemaker
by the leadership of his department) were summarily fired with
Hatcher’s agreement and denied severance pay.

In Nickerson’s case, the U-M faculty Senate opposed the firings, but
the Medical School would not back him. In the case of Davis, his
department and the College of Liberal Arts supported his
reinstatement, but the Faculty Senate opposed it. Markert, endorsed by
everyone, was reinstated, but felt his chances for tenure had been
compromised, so he accepted a new position at Johns Hopkins
University.

Even worse for Davis was the fact that Davis alone had pleaded the
First Amendment (freedom of speech) in the Lansing hearings, rather
than the more common Fifth Amendment (the right not to incriminate
oneself). He expected to be judged to be in contempt of Congress and
then planned to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, where
he hoped to win a victory ending the persecution of Communists.

Instead, he lost all appeals and was sentenced to a six-month prison
sentence in 1960. While incarcerated in Danbury, Connecticut, Chan
authored an academic paper that had an acknowledgement reading as
follows: “Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System.
Opinions expressed in this paper are the author’s and are not
necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons.”

In Exile

Blacklisted from teaching in the United States, in 1962 Chan and
Natalie relocated to the University of Toronto where they launched
highly successful careers. Chan specialized in the fields of algebra
and operator theory (a branch of functional analysis). Three
mathematical theorems are named in his honor, and he became vice
president of the American Mathematical Society, distinguished editor
of _Linear Algebra and Its Applications_, and editor-in-chief of
the _Mathematical Intelligencer_.

Natalie became the author of numerous books, most famously _The
Return of Martin Guerre_ (1983). She taught for sixteen years at
Princeton University, served as president of the American Historical
Association, and received the Holberg International Memorial Prize and
the National Humanities Medal.

In private conversation, Chan Davis lamented his naiveté about the
Communist movement but not his activism.

Throughout his Canadian decades, Chan remained on the far left,
although his illusions about the Soviet Union finally dissolved with
the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. He was an ardent activist against
the US war in Vietnam and traveled to North Vietnam in 1971 with other
mathematicians such as the former Trotskyist Laurent Schwartz. In
recent years, he was on the front lines in defense of Palestinian
rights and against the apartheid of the Israeli state. From his
hospital bed this past July, he spoke in support of Azat Miftakhov, a
mathematician being held as a political prisoner in Russia.

In private conversation, Chan lamented his naiveté about the
Communist movement but not his activism. He did, however, regret his
military service due to his horror at what he learned afterward about
the saturation bombings and use of nuclear weapons. In 1990,
reflecting on his CPUSA years, he wrote me that “I decided some time
in the 70s that what I really ought to have been is a Shachtmanite . .
. .” Afterward, he no longer identified himself as a
“Marxist-Leninist” but told biographer Batterson that he was a
“red-green eco-socialist.”

Although his science fiction writing stopped after the 1950s, his
stories continued to be reprinted. In 1986, he issued a volume of
poetry, _Having Come This Far_, and, in 2010, a selection of prose
edited by Josh Lukin, _It Walks in Beauty_. Several political essays
of his have received wide notice, including “From an Exile”
in _The New Professors_ (1960), and “The Purge” in _A Century
of Mathematics in America_ (1989).

In the cause of social transformation, Chan Davis was one who had
enlisted for the duration.

In 1990, following a revival of interest in the case of Davis and
others who has been suspended (Markert and Nickerson were also still
alive), the Senate Advisory Committee of U-M sought to convince the
U-M Regents to make amends in some fashion. When this failed, an
annual “Davis-Markert-Nickerson Lecture on Academic and Intellectual
Freedom” was established and has been held every year since then.
Even after he became the only survivor of the three, Chan continued to
return to U-M for all the lectures, always participating in one
fashion or another, going on stage and performing like a trooper.

Survived by Natalie and their three children, Chan was a person of
great vitality and charm, large-hearted, affectionate, gifted with
sharp political insight, and even a well-developed sense of the
ridiculous. An even-tempered and relentless optimist, he spoke with
unusual clarity and vigor, and unpretentious erudition. Moreover, he
had mastered enormous aggregates of knowledge, had expansive horizons,
a more retentive memory than a herd of elephants, and a wonderful
imagination to boot.

Yes, he could be a bit contrarian: during the thirty years of our
friendship, every time I sent him an essay that I had written he found
something with which to disagree. Still, in his unfailing solidarity
with social movements old and new, he established a new gold standard.
Even as he sloughed off worn-out political skin over the years, he
remained faithful to the bone of his convictions. To his last days he
walked the walk. In the cause of social transformation, Chan Davis was
one who had enlisted for the duration.

_[ALAN WALD is a member of the editorial boards of Against the Current
and Science & Society and was appointed the H. Chandler Davis
Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan in 2007.]_

_Thanks to the author for sending this to xxxxxx._

_The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
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* Chandler Davis
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* Radicalism
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* socialism
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* McCarthyism
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* 1950s
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* Red baiting
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* Black lists
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* academia
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* Academic Freedom
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* Education
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* U.S. history
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* Canada
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* HUAC
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* Communist Party
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