Experiencing Exclusion: Scholarship after Inquisition

In 1952, while working on my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, two men from the Department of State came to our apartment and picked up my passport and that of my husband, Chandler Davis. In 1962, Chandler was finally allowed to immigrate to Canada with his family and take up a professorship at the University of Toronto. The ten years in between were packed with politics: Chandler’s refusal to answer questions before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC); his firing from the University of Michigan; his court case challenging HUAC; his six months’ prison term for contempt of Congress; and throughout, his inability to get a tenure-track appointment at any American university. I myself was not called to confess my political views or memberships but investigations against Chandler were based on the publication of Operation mind – a pamphlet which I had co-authored together with Elizabeth Douvan and which is presented here. I was without a passport and not part of a university community for years. This article reflects on the impact of this experience of persecution on my work as a historian, and the relationship between politics, activism, and what Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre called ‘the historian’s craft’ and ‘consciousness’.