"TRIAL BY FIRED": AN ACADEMIC'S ACCOUNT OF THE RED SCARE

"When the Red Scare tore across campus in the 1950s, three University of Michigaqn faculty members were hauled to an anti-Communist hearing. Math instructor Chandler Davis chose a gutsy legal defense, lost his job, went to prison, and emerged fighting to get his life back."

By Elizabeth Watson
From UM LSA (Literature, Science and the Arts) Magazine Fall 2016

The FBI banged 
on the door of the married couple’s apartment on William Street in downtown Ann Arbor, where they lived above a bike and hobby shop.

The feds were searching for the author of Operation Mind, a pamphlet that spread word across campus that the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) should not be welcome in Detroit. This was 1952, a time when HUAC fingered suspected Communists – threats, in the committee’s view, to freedom in America – and dragged the accused into courtrooms for interrogation.

With such strong words against HUAC, the pamphlet and its creators quickly drew suspicion from the United States government.

FBI agents had already stopped at the shop where Operation Mind had been printed. On an invoice for the print job, they found the signature of Chandler Davis, a new instructor on the faculty of the math department. The FBI tracked him down to his apartment and confiscated his passport, along with the travel documents of his wife, Natalie Zemon Davis (Ph.D. ’59).

At the time, Zemon Davis was a doctoral student in the Department of History at U-M, studying people who’d historically been marginalized and rejected. The Davises had just returned from a trip to France, where Zemon Davis had spent months gathering research material from local archives. She loved poring over official documents from the 16th century, which described the lives of printers who worked in secret for fear of social backlash and political punishment. Zemon Davis was the one the feds were really looking for—she’d written Operation Mind.

She and Elizabeth Douvan (M.S. ’48, Ph.D. ’51), who later became a professor at U-M’s Institute for Social Research, had worked together on the pamphlet and published it anonymously. Like the 16th-century printers she studied in France, Zemon Davis felt the fear of repression and repercussions as the anti-Communist Red Scare peaked in the 1950s. She and Douvan knew they had to be careful.

But Davis had signed the invoice and the check at the print shop, so he took the fall instead of getting them all in trouble. And his pedigree made Davis an easy target. His father was a university professor who moved the family around the country as he repeatedly got fired for voicing strong political beliefs. Both of Davis’s parents joined the Communist Party, his great-grandfather was an outspoken abolitionist, and he had ancestors who fought on both sides of the Revolutionary War. Davis himself engaged in revolutionary politics, turning down a position at UCLA because the job would have required him to sign a “loyalty” oath against Communism.

A few months after the FBI nabbed the couple’s passports, HUAC sent Davis a subpoena that called him to an official government hearing. He’d been branded 
a Communist.
                                                                    Bold Plan

After World War II ended, veterans – Davis included, who’d served in the U.S. Navy – deployed in large numbers to universities across the country to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. Chandler and Natalie met at Harvard, where they’d both helped with the presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace. Natalie spotted Chandler walking around with a ping-pong paddle; she liked that he was the first political radical she knew who played sports and protested. In three weeks, they were engaged. Three weeks after that, they married.

When Davis got his legal summons in Ann Arbor, the couple made a joint decision to fight the charges. “I persist in what I consider the best defense of freedom of thought even when it is not expedient,” Davis later wrote. Their decision was anything but expedient, and the plan they devised involved incredible risk.

Davis would refuse to answer HUAC’s questions, using as a defense the First Amendment, which gave him the right to freedom of speech and assembly. He also would decline to use the more common strategy of pleading the Fifth Amendment—the right to silence if his own answer could serve as evidence incriminating him—because he didn’t want to imply that his political beliefs made him a criminal.

Davis’s unlikely goal was to get convicted for contempt of Congress during his HUAC hearing. Only then could he take his case to the Supreme Court and make the bold statement that government-sponsored anti-Communism was wrong, unjustified, and illegal.

“A strange plan? Well, it seemed like the thing to do at the time,” Davis wrote in The Purge, his detailed account of the events. “The motivation was my resolution to face the Red Hunt as squarely as possible.”
                                                                Conviction

The hearing took place in Lansing, in the House chamber of the Michigan State Capitol. U-M alumnus Kit Clardy (L.L.B. ’25)—also known as “Michigan’s McCarthy,” who had been dismissed from his post in the state government 20 years before on mysterious charges of “malfeasance and misfeasance”– led the official investigation of three U-M faculty: Chandler Davis; Clement Markert, a professor in the Department of Zoology; and Mark Nickerson, a tenured professor in the Department of Pharmacology. Economics Ph.D. students Edward Shaffer (A.B. ’48, M.A. ’49) and Myron Sharpe (M.A. ’51) also received subpoenas and testified.

Davis followed through with his plan. While the others rebelled by pleading the Fifth to every political question, Davis invoked the First Amendment. In further hearings led by special committees of their U-M faculty colleagues, Professors Markert and Nickerson responded frankly to questions from peers about their politics. Davis still refused, insisting, “I will not talk politics under duress.”

Markert was suspended from U-M but later reinstated. Nickerson was fired, despite having tenure. Davis was fired by U-M, lost his appeal to the Supreme Court, and served a sentence of six months in prison.
                                                              Political Prisoner

Jail is boring. Davis realized, writing later, “Prison is not one of the heroic or ecstatic forms of martyrdom.”


To read the rest of this story, click on link below:

https://lsa.umich.edu/lsa/news-events/all-news/search-news/trial-by-fired.html