Remembering a Red Scare Hero, H. Chandler Davis

A few personalities and images have come to signify resistance during the McCarthy Era: Edward R. Murrow asking “Upon what meat does this our Caesar feed…”; Lillian Hellman telling a Congressional committee, “I will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions;” Pete Seeger asking his trial judge for permission to sing “Wasn’t That a Time?;” Hollywood writers Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. leaving for prison after their contempt of Congress convictions; and Joseph Welch demanding of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “At long last, have you no decency?”

But far from the publicity glare of hearings in Washington DC, New York City, and Hollywood, the devastation of the Red Scare era took a heavy toll in academia, especially at state colleges and universities. Hundreds of professors, scholars, and instructors were hounded from their jobs (my own parents faced a red-hunting inquisition from the New York City Board of Education).

In the academic sphere, there was one case that stood out, that of University of Michigan mathematics professor H. Chandler Davis (1924-2022). Upon receiving a subpoena about his political activities from the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Davis refused to answer questions, mounting a First Amendment defense, rather than the more commonly used Fifth. He lost his teaching position; his passport and that of his wife, the historian Natalie Zemon Davis (1928-2023), were confiscated. When Davis’s final appeal was denied in 1960, he spent six months in prison. His 1963 paper on convex curves contained a footnote with a humorous acknowledgment: “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 the late 1980s, a group of University of Michigan academics brought new attention to the case, urging an official apology for the firing of Davis and his colleagues Clement Markert and Mark Nickerson. The apology never came, but in 1990 the Faculty Senate established the annual Davis-Markert-Nickerson Academic and Intellectual Freedom lecture.

More than seventy years after his encounter with HUAC, Davis is still setting a standard for a principled defense of academic freedom. Four current and former academics at the University of Michigan (Michael Atzmon, John Cheney-Lippold, Gary D. Krentz, and Melanie S. Tanelian) have sought to ensure that Davis’s activism is remembered, editing a collection of essays, In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis: Activism and the Struggle for Academic Freedom. Out of the fourteen contributors to this volume, nine have delivered the Davis-Markert-Nickerson lecture.

As the editors point out in their introduction, the book was conceived as an “appropriate memorial” for Davis after his death in 2022. But the events of this past year – with universities caving in to extortionate demands from the Trump administration – gave the publication a more urgent timeline. Thus the book could not have appeared at a more fraught moment, when, as contributor Ellen Schrecker observes, not just academic freedom but the whole idea of the university is at stake. Another contributor, Silka-Maria Weineck, evokes a German phrase to describe what many have seen since January 2025: fremdscham, “an acute embarrassment that grips you on behalf of others as you watch them act shamefully.”

For those unfamiliar with the career of this remarkable polymath (he was also a poet, composer, and writer of science fiction), some context is helpful. Contributor Alan Wald (who currently holds a seat at the University of Michigan named for Davis) notes that in 1953 Davis was not targeted for past associations but for current activism. The evidence was an anti-HUAC pamphlet called “Operation Mind,” which recounted previous HUAC interrogations and urged protests against the planned hearings in Michigan. Ironically, it had been written not by Davis, but by his wife Natalie Zemon Davis, then a graduate student, along with her friend Elizabeth Douvan. When the suspicious printer reported the content to the authorities, it was Chandler Davis who was identified as the one who paid for the printing.

When Davis was summoned to testify, it was “a deflating moment,” as he wrote in an autobiographical account titled The Purge.Investigators had dug up just six items: “half wrong, and mostly vague: manifestly, just guesswork.” His friend Siobhan Roberts recalled in a tribute in The Nation that “he felt that more of his efforts should have been worthy of the FBI’s scrutiny.” Roberts explains that Davis had invited the indictment in order to challenge the constitutionality of McCarthyism. “The point was to get the Supreme Court to accept the argument in my defense that the hearing was illegal and so nothing I did at it (cogent or not) could be the basis for a finding of guilt,” he explained.

In 1962, thanks to a Canadian colleague, Davis secured a position in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, where he remained for over thirty years, teaching generations of students. He became known for his work in linear algebra, and for being one of the inventors of fractals, most notably the Dragon Curve. His colleague Michael Harris recalls that he was part of what he described as a ‘band of rebels’ within the mathematics community that helped establish the Association for Women in Mathematics and the National Association of Mathematicians for underrepresented minorities. He was also an original member of Science for the People, a group with a mandate to “mobilize American scientists, engineers, teachers, and students who yearned to practice a socially and economically just science, rather than one that served militarism and corporate profits.”

. An early opponent of the U.S. war in Vietnam, Davis was the chairman of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and frequently invited young Americans evading the draft to his family home. A colleague remembers that for decades every Friday he stood in the Toronto Vigil against the Occupation of the Territories, a movement inspired by the Women in Black in Israel. He regularly returned to Ann Arbor to attend the Academic Freedom Lectures named in his honor, and was frequently the first in the audience with a provocative question.

Davis’s’ own activism – as a self described “red-green eco-socialist” – continued until his death in 2022, whether it was aiding scientists and scholars around the world, from Poland to China, or supporting the struggle for Palestinian rights. Just before his death, he gave an address from his hospital bed in support of the Russian mathematician Azar Miftakhov, a dissident who had been jailed in 2109.

The last word in the book is given to Davis himself, a 2019 piece called No Premature Burial for Academic Freedom, which is as the editors say, “a communication sent to the members of the University of Michigan community.” In it, he draws parallels between his own experience and that of faculty members who might today be leery of taking certain positions such as criticism of Israel. “In the first place, constantly guarded speech is not free speech.” He goes on to caution the young academic: “If you have a few years to go till tenure, and you’re treading carefully all the while, there’s a risk you may wind up imitating the uncritical conformists so successfully that there’s no difference.” Firing is not the only punishment hanging over one’s head: “If you speak up for Gaza’s access to clean water, or if you quarrel with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s so-called ‘working definition of antisemitism,’ you will be put on the list, and when you go for your next job, you will have opposition from the start.”

Ellen Schrecker, author of No Ivory Tower, an invaluable examination of academia during the Red Scare, says of Davis, “No other individual has displayed as much personal integrity, lucid intelligence and plain old courage in resisting the political repression of that grim period.” What provides an ideal to Schrecker and other scholars seventy years after the HUAC encounter is that Davis’s political engagement was not confined to the battles of the 1950s. It is the evidence of his lifelong activism and continued outspokenness that has inspired many of the contributors to this book.

The various writers have interpreted their mandate broadly; some discuss academic freedom issues and barely mention Davis at all, while most others use his example as a beacon in this time of renewed attacks on liberal arts education and academic freedom.

The first essay, reprinted from Academe, the periodical of the American Academy of University Professors (AAUP) is by Joan Scott, a review of Steve Patterson’s book, The Persecution of Professor Chandler Davis. It is a helpful jumping-off point, summarizing the facts of Davis’s firing, and bringing the controversy to the present day: “The challenges that Chandler Davis faced in the 1950s have returned with a vengeance in the form of red state governors and legislators seeking to police what is taught and thought….We are now experiencing what many are calling a new McCarthyism.”

In fact, the title of Dima Khalidi’s Davis-Markert-Nickerson lecture in 2021 was The New McCarthyism? Academic Freedom and Palestine. In her essay in this anthology, Khalidi notes the irony in the fact that her lecture was itself subject to censorship. The University of Michigan’s social media office insisted on removing all references to Palestine in its publicity. As a result, Khalidi says sardonically that she removed the question mark in the title for her essay in this book. She, like fellow contributor Juan Cole, has been distressed to witness a burgeoning agenda to “enforce paramenters of acceptable discourse, scholarship, and teaching on race, gender, climate, and other critical issues.”

Law professor Gene Nichol writes of the honor bestowed on him when Chandler Davis introduced him before his 2018 Davis-Markert-Nichlson lecture: “He chose to speak uncomfortable truths as a mean and dangerous panic spread across the country…He didn’t know the costs that would come – to his name, his family, his safety, his work, even his ability to live in his homeland – but he knew much of it.” Nichol links the Davis case with a 1963 attempt to suppress speech at the University of North Carolina (an event known as the Speaker Ban) and the courageous efforts of the UNC Chancellor, William Aycock, to fight the ban. Nichol ends his piece by noting current efforts, as in Florida, to stifle faculty speech with the plaintive plea, “Where are Chandler Davis and Bill Aycock when we need them?”

Henry Reichman, a longtime scholar of academic freedom issues, in an essay titled, Choice, Responsibility, and Neutrality, says, “Chandler Davis’s experience – indeed, his entire life – should remind us that academic freedom is about the right and ability to choose freely what we research, write, and think about.” Reichman’s up-to-date essay laments the Congressional interrogation last spring of three university presidents, who attempted to give nuanced responses to loaded questions, with disastrous results. He also decries other recent events: the rescinding of a faculty appointment for Black scholar Nikole Hannah-Jones at the University of North Carolina due to the objections of a wealthy board member; and the wholesale right-wing takeover of the formerly progressive New College in Sarasota, Florida.

Perhaps my favorite essay in this timely collection mixes the personal and the political: an article written by Natalie Zemon Davis that appeared in The Historical Journal, shortly before her death in 2023. Zemon Davis’s obituary in the New York Times called her “a social and cultural historian whose imaginative and deeply researched investigations of the lives of marginalized figures — peasants, long-forgotten women, border crossers of all sorts — profoundly influenced the discipline.” In this essay, Zemon Davis and her co-author Stephen Hanß connect her study of scholarship during the Inquisition of the 16th century with an account of the modern-day “inquisition” that upended her family. She finishes her essay on a positive note: “And look at Chandler and me – we haven’t done too badly! I remain a historian who always sees possibilities in the past, and the expectation, with Spinoza, that the future will always contain some brave enough to speak with ‘independence of mind.’”

One friend quotes Chandler Davis as saying, “In mathematics and in life, it is not OK to give up on a problem or a cause just because the struggle is difficult.” Those are definitely words to live by as 2026 begins. Thanks are due to the editors of this volume for keeping the legacy of this remarkable couple alive.

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