Horace Bancroft Davis was born on August 10, 1898 in Newport, Rhode Island to Anna and Horace Andrew Davis. The Davis family had deep roots in the northeast. Horace's ancestors had come to America during the 17th century. Anna's family were Quakers, and her father and grandfather had been active in the abolition movement. Before the Civil War, her grandfather's home was a stop on the Underground Railroad. Her father, Norwell Penrose Hallowell, served in the Civil War. He commended one of the first Union regiments of African Americans troops, the 55th Massachusetts and led them in the Battle of Fort Wagner (featured in the film Glory).
Horace B.'s family enjoyed major financial security when he was growing up. They received a steady income from financial returns from a pharmaceuticals company (the Angier Chemical Company) that his grandfather had helped found. Horace B.'s father earned a law degree from Harvard University and once maintained a law practice, but he did little legal work and largely supported the family though the income from the grandfather's company and other investments.
The family moved to Staten Island (in New York City) when Horace B. was young. They moved a second time, to Boston, when Horace B. was a teenager (in 1911). The family settled into the town of Brookline, and Horace B. attended a private school (the Country Day School for Boys of Boston) in the neighboring town of Newton.
Horace B.'s father was active in the Republican party and once received the party's nomination for New York state legislature. Members of Horace's extended family carried on the tradition set by Anna's abolitionist ancestors. One of Horace B.'s cousins taught at a black school in the south, the Calhoun Colored School. Based in Lowndes County, Alabama, the Calhoun School had been founded in 1892 to provide practical training, in the spirit of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute.
Horace visited the Calhoun School for one winter vacation while a high school student. Towards the end of 1916, he began having some health issues. To help him recover, his cousin invited him to stay with her as Alabama offered a much milder winter than Boston as well as outdoor opportunities like horseback riding.
Horace B.'s visit to Alabama was his first time in the south. On the visit, he got to know black sharecroppers as his horseback rides took him through the farming area that surrounded the Calhoun School. Horace recalled the environment around the school as largely apolitical. Teachers focused on training students for skilled trades and avoided discussion over issues like political rights. However, students and teachers did celebrate holidays of special significance to Blacks. Horace participated in a January 1 celebration of Emancipation Day. Other participants included people who had personally experienced slavery. When asked, they would discuss their experiences, which they recalled as horrible and traumatic, but they preferred to avoid such discussions. In general, Horace B. recalled that the atmosphere was "forward-looking," and people avoided dwelling on the horrors of slavery.
Horace B. got to see more of the south on his return trip to Boston. His cousin took him to several HBCUs, including the Tuskgee Institute, Morehouse College, and the Hampton Institute. Horace recalled being impressed by buildings at Tuskgee, especially by the fact that they'd largely been built by the institute's own students.
Horace At Harvard
After graduating from high school (around 1917), Horace began attending Harvard University. This was somewhat of a family tradition. Not only was his father an alumnus of the university, but Horace's older brother Hallowell was a student. However, Horace's studies were interrupted by the First World War.
The United States entered the war in spring 1917, shortly before Horace began university studies. The Davis family was divided over the war. Horace's father approved of the war effort as he generally was a strong supporter of President Wilson. He became active in the war effort after he was recruited to move to Washington D.C. and serve on the Committee on Public Information (a propaganda agency created to promote enthusiasm for the war). Among his other activities on the committee, he authored a 1918 Fourth of July statement issued by the president.
Horace's mother was opposed to the war. She reached this opinion after consulting with the writing of Quakers on pacifism. Horace became convinced by her argument, and he joined her in opposing the war.
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Horace B. Davis, circa 1917
From a 1917 passport application |
Horace was never drafted into the military, but he decided to leave university to perform war-related humanitarian work. He volunteered for the American Friends Service Committee, a newly founded, Quaker-run organization. The committee was created to provide non-military service opportunities for people who wanted to be involved in the war effort. Horace was sent to Ornans, France to help build portable housing that would be shipped near the frontlines. Unfortunately, the health problems Horace had experienced a few years earlier returned. He was hospitalized in Ornans and then went to Samoëns (in the French Alps). During the last few of the months, he stayed in Paris.
Horace's work put him in some danger. While he was living there, Paris experienced nightly air raids and artillery bombardments. A greater danger for volunteers in the Friends Service was the influenza epidemic then raging through Europe. A number of volunteers that Horace knew fell ill, and a few even died.
Horace regarded his volunteer service as a major event in his political development. The work put him in close contact with political objectors, and he was exposed to left-wing ideas. By the end of his service, his views on the war had changed. He continued to oppose it, but now for political reasons rather than religious ones.
In total, Horace spent the last sixteen months of the war in France working for the Friends Service. Afterwards, he returned to Boston and resumed his studies at Harvard University. He returned a changed man. He had become deeply interested in the labor movement and decided that he wanted to work as a labor intellectual. At university, he changed his major from English to Economics.
Horace's mother had also become interested in left-wing politics, especially labor issues, during the war. Her interests developed through conversations with several leftist activists she hosted as guests. A major influence on her was the labor economist Robert W. Dunn. Horace never wrote about how his mother got to know Dunn, but they likely knew each other through common social connections. Both were raised as Quakers in Pennsylvania, and Dunn served in the American Friends Service Committee.
Horace and his mother became actively involved in the labor movement in early 1919. That February immigrant workers in the mill town of Lawrence went on strike to protest a decrease in wages. Many liberals in Boston were supportive of the strike, and three Boston pastors, Abraham Muste, Harold Rotzel, and Cedric Long, acted as spokesmen and leaders of the strike. Horace's mother knew the pastors because they all had been involved in the anti-war movement, and she and Horace joined them in supporting the strike.
Horace's activities included regular trips to Lawrence with other Bostonians to speak at meetings of strikers. Mill management together with the Lawrence city administration responded harshly to the strike. Horace recalled once traveling to Lawrence by train with twenty other activists. Upon arriving at the train station, they were met by a detachment of mounted police who rode their horses up to the sidewalk in an effort to intimidate and provoke the activists. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and Horace was able to participate in a strike meeting and then return to Boston without major incident. Other efforts were more disruptive. The pastors Musta and Long were once beaten by police and then arrested for inciting a riot. Two immigrant strike leaders were kidnapped, beaten, and left in another city. Despite the police violence, the workers were ultimately victorious. After four months, the mill owners agreed to a wage increase larger than the one strikers had originally demanded, and the strike ended.
That spring, a friend of Horace's (Arthur Fisher) planned to spend the summer working for a farmers' political organization, the National Nonpartisan League. The League was based in North Dakota and promoted a mildly socialist program that included state ownership of banks and agricultural facilities (like grain elevators) and state supported social programs like health insurance. Horace found the League's program appealing, and he traveled to Minnesota and spent the summer working as an organizer in Murray County.
Most of Horace's work for the League consisted of visiting farmers house-to-house and hosting meetings in schoolhouses. He succeeded in enrolling over one-hundred farmers in the League. Horace found it personally rewarding to see farming first-hand. Despite his success, he found that the work was a poor fit for him because he was too introverted. At the end of summer, he returned to his college studies.
Harvard provided Horace with an environment to explore his interest in left-wing politics. In spring 1919, students formed the Student Liberal Club. One of the first activities was to host a series of lectures on the then on-going Russian Revolution. The speakers included the statistician J. A. Hourwich and the war correspondent Colonel B. Roustam-Bek. Initially, Horace was blocked from joining the club because of personal issues with the cub leader of the club, but he later was able to join and even played a leadership role.
Horace found the Harvard administration generally to be conservative, but they were receptive to bringing left-wing speakers to campus to debate conservative professors. In December 1920, the Student Liberal Club hosted a discussion on "The Types of Socialism" with representatives of several socialist parties. The physician and activist Antoinette Konikow spoke about the Communist Labor Party (a forerunner of the CPUSA), the magazine editor Harry W. Laidler about the Socialist Party, and John T. "Red" Doran about the Industrial Workers of the World. The conservative Harvard economist Richard S. Merriam attended and debated the speakers. Horace was especially impressed with Doran. After introducing him, Merriam challenged him by asking, why should Harvard students be interested in socialism when they already have excellent opportunities to join the most privileged classes in America? Doran responded: "Circumstances will make you socialists." He proceeded to tell the audience about the repression that the IWW had experienced. In 1916, a group of about three hundred IWW members who had traveled to Everett, Washington to support a strike by shingle workers were attacked by over two hundred police officers and deputized vigilantes. The attack left at least five dead and more than twenty injured. The next year the Justice Department, newly empowered by federal laws created to support the war effort, raided IWW meeting halls and charged one hundred and one members with violations of the Espionage Act and similar laws. Horace reported that his argument was "big hit" with the audience.
During his senior year, Horace took advanced courses on economics with professors Frank Willliam Taussig, Allyn A. Young, and William Z. Ripley. The classes were a mixed bag. Ripley's class was on labor theory, and it was a "washout." Horace said Ripley didn't know the subject and showed up to lecture unprepared. The other two professors taught courses on theory. He said that Young's class was his favorite, but Taussig had a big impact on his teaching style. Taussig taught following the Socratic method, and Horace used the same method once he started teaching.
In general, Horace wrote he really enjoyed his courses. He especially enjoyed the courses he took on anthropology and drama.
The faculty member who had the greatest influence on Horace was Harold J. Laski, a lecturer in the government and history departments. Laski was regarded as the most left-wing faculty member on campus. In fall 1919, he attracted negative attention for speaking out in support of a strike by Boston police officers. Among the more liberal students, Laski was a well-regarded teacher who was known for regularly hosting students, including Horace, at his home.
At Laski's suggestion, Horace spent the summer after his junior year (in the year 1920) in England doing volunteer work for the Labour Research Department. The Department mostly researched information for Labour Party M.P.'s to use in their speeches. Horace's work involved estimating the minimum wage rates over a period of years. He also used his time in England to visit a few industrial cities, to meet with union leaders and workers, and to participate in trade union conferences. At the end of the summer, Horace returned to America impressed by the "greater solidarity and outright strength of the British union movement."
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Horace B. Davis, circa 1920
From The Harvard Freshman Red Book, 1920 |
Horace graduated from Harvard the next year. By this time, he had decided he wanted to work as a researcher for labor organization. However, he found that, in contrast to Europe, no such jobs were available in America. He decided instead to try to find work in the steel industry. In the summer of 1921, he left Boston for Pittsburg, a major center in the steel industry.
Horace traveled by hitchhiking and (illegally) hoping trains. Along the way, he picked up work when he could. He worked as an agricultural laborer and as a construction worker in Steelton and Jeanette (cities in Pennsylvania). When he finally arrived in Pittsburg, he found that his travels were for naught. There was an economic downturn, and steel mills were not hiring. Horace decided to head south for Clarksburg, West Virginia. In Clarksburg, he found a few days work at a plate mill and then continued his travels.
After leaving Clarksburg, Horace ran into trouble. He had (illegally) hoped a passenger train, and when the train arrived in the town of Piedmont, he was caught and arrested by a station cop. After learning Horace's identity, the cop became almost apologetic. He explained that he had mistaken Horace for a boy who had escaped from a nearby reformatory. Despite this, he still put Horace in jail.
The day after he was arrested, the cop informed Horace that the railroad company had decided to prosecute him for trespass and a company lawyer was on his way. The cop further explained that Horace would likely be sentenced to thirty days roadwork. He then left, only to come back a few minutes later. He released Horace from his cell, returned his personal belongings, and explained how to cross the border to Maryland (where he'd be free from West Virginia law). Horace asked if he would need to return later to stand trial. The cop said no and encouraged Horace to leave. When he checked his wallet, Horace realized that the cop's benevolence had not come for free: $10 was missing. The cop explained that this had been taken for "bail money."
Horace did not need further encouragement, and he left the jail for Maryland. By the time he crossed the border, it was late, so he slept in a barn. The next morning, he hitched a ride to Baltimore and then took a train to New York City. His experiences "on the bum" evidently made academic life seem more appealing. The day after he arrived in New York City – two days after he'd been arrested in West Virginia – he enrolled in Columbia University's graduate program in economics.
Graduate School
Horace enrolled Columbia University without any real enthusiasm for academics. His heart was in the labor movement. Despite this, he had a successful first year. His undergraduate coursework at Harvard had fully prepared him for Columbia graduate program, and he successfully passed his general exams that year, a year earlier than most students.
Horace spent considerable time at the New School for Social Research which was home to a number of left-wing thinkers. Among those at the school was the celebrated economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen. During his first semester, Horace attended Veblen's class, but it was "a washout." The class was held in a room that was connected to Veblen's lodgings. At the appointed hour, Veblen would walk into the classroom, lecture for an hour in front of twelve students seated around a table, and then leave. By December, Horace had dropped the course.
More influential was the economist Leo Wolman. In addition to his faculty position, he was director of research for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. This was exactly the sort of work that Horace was interested in. Horce attended a labor seminar that Wolman ran. Although Horace was uninterested in completing a dissertation, at Wolman's suggestion, he became interested in writing a book on the New York building trades.
Beyond the university, Horace developed a social circle of left-wing thinkers that included the legal scholar Karl Llewellyn and the psychologist Gardner Murphy. Conversations with them helped solidify Horace's political ideas.
Towards the end of his first year in graduate school, Horace was encouraged to apply for a job in the International Labor Office in Geneva. Such a position was attractive as it would provide Horace with an opportunity to learn about European labor movements first-hand. He received a job and left for Geneva in fall 1922. He traveled to Europe via an Italian ocean liner, and he used the opportunity to study Italian. Unfortunately, during the voyage, he was seriously injured. Years earlier, he had suffered a sports injury to his knee, and one day during his trip, something in the knee "snapped," and he became immobilized. As a result, when he arrived in Geneva, he had to postpone starting his job to recuperate.
When he finally started working for the Interational Labor Office, Horace was disappointed by his duties. He was largely responsible for reading newspapers for the Labor Office's information service. This worsened his health problems. The lighting in his office was poor, and after some time, the strain on his eyes developed into a permanent eyesight problem. For the remainder of his life, he would only be able to read text for a few hours a day.
By the end of 1922, Horace decided to leave the job in Geneva and focus on his health. At their invitation, he stayed with two on his cousins at their house on the Balearic Islands (off the coast of Spain). Horace continued to have problems with his knee, and he spent most of his visit bedridden.
He returned to America in 1923. He continued to focus on his health, staying at his parents' home in Brookline (near Boston). His time in the Boston area brought him into contact with the local Communist Party. The CPUSA leader Harrison George stayed at his family's home. He invited Horace to join the communist party, but he declined as he decided the party's politics conflicted with his own on matters such as pacifism.
Horace felt fully recovered from knee problems by fall 1924. Wanting first-hand experience working in industry, he set out for second time for Pittsburg to find a job in steel.
Repeating his trip from a few years earlier, Horace hopped trains and hitchhiked his way to Pittsburgh. This time he met with greater success. He found employment at the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, part of the U.S. Steel Corporation. The steel mill drew workers from all over. Working at the plant, Horace met Blacks from the south as well as immigrants from Italy and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mill workers were divided along racial lines with immigrants holding most of the semi-skilled jobs.
Relations between the new arrivals and the long-time workers could be tense. Horace rented a room from a white American who been working as a steel worker for twenty years. He would complain that immigrants were flooding the labor market as they had large families and were willing to accept low wages. While Horace was renting from him, the landlord was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Horace was surprisingly non-critical of his Klan membership. He wrote that his landlord was drawn to the Klan by its anti-immigrant politics and the social access it offered (in Pittsburgh, the Klan was a middle-class organization, so it provided social opportunities that were otherwise unavailable to a working-class man like the landlord).
The Pennsylvania Klan was at the height of its influence during the 1920s. In an intimidating demonstration of its power, the Klan burned a cross on a hill overlooking Pittsburgh while Horace was living in the city. At the time, the Klan focused on advocating for anti-immigrant policies and for alcohol prohibition. Surprisingly, anti-Black racism was not a major feature of the Klan even though the city's Black population was growing rapidly.
At the steel plant, Horace was first employed on a labor gang that was responsible for cleaning up the yard, a menial position. He held that position for a short time and was then assigned to a six-man team responsible for tapping a blast furnace (i.e. removing molten pig iron). Horace was surprised to find the work less exhausting than he was expecting. The processes of took about forty minutes, but then the team would wait for hours until the furnace needed to be tapped again. Workers on the team had much of that time to themselves and could even nap if they wanted to. Horace used this free time to explore the steel plant and study other aspects of its operations. Wanting to better understand the work done at the mill, he took several other jobs including that of ore dumper.
While working at the steel mill, Horace tried to join the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, one of the major steel workers' unions and a precursor to the United Steelworkers. Unfortunately for Horace, he tried joining at an inopportune time. Five years earlier, shortly after the end of World War I, steel companies had decisively defeated a national steelworkers strike (the Steel Strike of 1919) led by the Amalgamated Association. During the 1920s, there was no major effort at union organizing in the steel industry. Horace went so far as to travel to the Amalgamated Association's headquarters and met with the union president, Michael F. Tighe. However, at the meeting, Tighe lectured against organizing strikes and declined to admit Horace into the union.
In spring 1925, Horace attended a meeting of regional meeting of Quakers (a Young Friends Conference) and organized a workshop on industrial relations. Horace came away from the meeting feeling like the Quakers were not an effective movement for labor organizing. While the Quakers had been a large part of his introduction to left-wing politics, he would become decreasingly involved with the religion.
After working in the steel industry for a year, Horace decided to return to Columbia University. He remained indifferent to academic life but decided that teaching was a good way to earn an income. He was able to secure an appointment as an instructor in Columbia's Economics Department for the 1924-25 year. The next year, he moved to Cornell University to fill in for an economics professor (Sumner Slichter) who was on leave.
While at Cornell, Horace received a job offer from the University of California at Berkeley. However, he declined the offer in favor of a scholarship (the Amherst Scholarship) that allowed him to travel abroad and conduct research for his dissertation. Horace spent the next two years in various European countries, studying labor issues there. He and his family lived in Middlesbrough, England; Paris, France, and Dortmund, Germany.
Horace's fellowship was renewed for a third year, and he decided to return to Pittsburgh to continue his study of the steel industry. He arrived in 1928 and settled into a home near Schenley Park, near a steel mill (the Jones and Laughlin mill) he wanted to study.
When he arrived in the city, labor activity centered on the coal industry. State-wide, workers had been organized in the United Mine Workers (UMW) union, but workers unhappy with the union were working with the American Communist Party (CPUSA) to form a new union, the National Miners Union (NMU). This new union was small, and its membership was largely new immigrants from eastern and Southern Europe.
The NMU held a national convention that began on September 9. The first day was chaos. Because of communist involvement, the city police were hostile to the union, and they showed up to arrest participants. NMU members also had to contend with UMW toughs who showed to assault people.
Horace was present at the convention, and when the police showed up, he along with many union leaders fled by automobile. They went to a suburb, Wilmerding, that was outside the jurisdiction of city police. There, the convention resumed at the hall of a Lithuanian fraternal order sympathetic to the union.
Tensions died down the next day. A judge released the arrested NMU members after asking them to take a anti-communism oath. Horace and some left-wing professors at the University of Pittsburg were able to have a meeting with the city mayor and the chief of police. They were able to convince the mayor to tell the police chief to stop police harassment of the NMU. The Wilmerding sheriff and some deputies went to the convention meeting to observe, but they were treated in a friendly manner, and no arrests were made.
Horace found himself arrested during his year in the city. At the time, local communists were fighting with city officials for the right to hold street corner meetings. In August, local communists tried to hold a street corner meeting described in the press as an "international red day" meeting. Their permit to assembly had been revoked, and the police arrested twenty-three participant. Horace was not among the participants, but he and a local economics professor he was friendly with (Colston Warne) arrived in the area shortly after the arrested were made. A police officer told them to move on, and Horace's friend responded in a disrespectful manner, so the officer arrested the both of them. They ended up spending the night in jail with the communists who'd been arrested earlier. They met with the judge the next day. In a later account of his experience, Horace wrote that the judge was in a good mood and dismissed all charges against everyone. At the time, the press reported the situation was more tense. The judge was reported to have issued $10 fines, and four of the arrested communists refused to pay and were sentenced to ten days in jail. A police inspector for the district received a note threatening violence if there were further arrests. The message was from an individual who signed note "International Organization Cooperation," and asked "Please don't arrest those speakers from the park any more, or I will blow up your home – also the police station." The inspector dismissed the writer as a "crank," and nothing further came of the matter.
During this time, Horace occasionally did work for the Federated Press, a left-wing news service. Among the articles he published was one in the The New Republic about an incident at the University of Pittsburg where three students active in left-wing politics had been expelled. His most noteworthy article was an article in The Nation that developed from a trip he took to Birmingham, Alabama.
Birmingham was of interest to Horace because it was a major center for the steel industry. While there, he visited all-Black company town run by a U.S. Steel subsidiary. In interviewing workers, he learned that a Black mechanic at the Fairfield Works, Matt Lucas, had recently been murdered. Lucas's foreman felt that Lucas had been disrespectful, and shortly thereafter, Lucas was shot to death by three company guards. The company town was so isolated that, not only had the press not reported on the murder, but word of the incident hadn't even spread informally among Blacks in Birmingham.
Horace was able to draw attention to Lucas's murder by publishing an article on the incident in The Nation. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful in getting justice for Lucas's family. The steel company eventually gave his family $700 as restitution, but the guards who murdered him not only avoided criminal conviction but they even kept their jobs.
At the end of the year, Horace's scholarship funding came to an end. He began looking for further work, but his options were somewhat limited as many university administrators were leery of hiring someone so active in left-wing politics. He ended up finding a position at Southwestern Presbyterian University (now Rhodes College), a small private school in in Memphis, Tennessee.
Horace's move to Memphis would prove eventful. It was there that Horace first came to the attention of the FBI. We'll explore exactly what happened in a future post.
Sources
1. "Threat Sent to Policeman in Pittsburg." The Oil City Derrick [Oil City Pennsylvania], 3 August, 1929. pg. 1.
