He spent a year in community service at the Minneapolis Civic and Commerce Association, through which he helped obtain a half holiday for workers in some larger local factories.
During the summer of 1915, he worked as a private secretary to Sir Wilfred Grenfell in Labrador, Canada, and helped him in a wide array of services.
For the US Government, he oversaw distribution of more than a million copies of President Wilson's Fourteen Points message to German soldiers.
[1][2][3][4] In 1924, he founded the Jerome Davis Research fund to support students at Oberlin who "worked with labor" to facilitate "mutual understanding and cooperation in the field of industry.
[1][2][3][4] In 1928, Davis was a member of the American Society for Cultural Relations with Russia, part of VOKS (Russian "Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul'turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei" — Всесоюзное общество культурной связи с заграницей, All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries).
Yale denied permission to New York Supreme Court Justice Ferdinand Pecora and US Senator Gerald P. Nye to speak on campus for fear of their support for Davis.
[1] During his second term (1936–1937), Davis joined Lovestoneites and others in trying to lead the AFT out of the AFL and into the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).
[12] In the late 1930s, Davis (along with Denis Nowell Pritt, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and others) defended the Moscow Trials of the Stalin purge era in the Soviet Union from critics.
Davis claimed that, as a former Chairman of the Legislative Commission on Jails in the State of Connecticut, he had seen hundreds of criminals confess based on overwhelming evidence against them.
As its first director, Davis organized many trips to the USSR during the Cold War, in an effort to continue communicating with Russian leaders.
In 1973 and 1975, Davis led similar trips for educators to China, which had been controlled by Communists since shortly after World War II.
Davis supported world peace and international cooperation with all nations, which included working with the Communist states of the USSR and China.
During the Cold War and anti-Communist fears in the United States, Davis's efforts were considered suspicious and he earned many opponents to his work.
In 1961, the Church League of America wrote: Jerome Davis, who was kicked out of office in the American Federation of Teachers because of his long pro-Soviet, pro-Communist record, has been identified in numerous pages of Government hearings as one of the top Communist Front joiners in the United States.
Davis, according to Biddle, had decided that the Fish Committee of 1930 investigating Communism had been "far more dangerous to liberty and freedom than the pitiful handful of Communists in the United States ever has been.
[17] In 1951 the libertarian The Freeman magazine wrote about him: There is that strong group in the Methodist Church led by Bishop Ward.
Davis hired ACLU co-founder and nationally known lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays to represent him in the suit.
[21][22] He also testified that AFL president William Green had asked him to take "decisive action against the communistic influences" in AFT's Teachers Union Local 5 of New York.
[25] Hays rested the case for Davis by calling two last witnesses, Reverend Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick of Riverside Church (New York) and Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise of the American Jewish Congress.
[26] Stolberg testified that the late Dr. Henry R. Linville, who left the AFT to form the Teachers Guild, considered Davis a communist or fellow traveler.
[27] The defense introduced evidence from former CPUSA head Earl Browder, AFL president William Green, and others to document how Stolberg developed the allegedly libelous article.
Former Saturday Evening Post editor William W. Stout testified to that effect; AFT vice president John D. Connors said that Davis followed the Communist party line.
[30] American Mercury editor Eugene Lyons, also a former Moscow correspondent, testified that passages from Davis's book The New Russia (1933) showed a "type of Soviet propaganda" which he called a "whitewash of terror."
"[31] Georgetown University president Dr. Edmund A. Walsh testified that Davis "accepts the ultimate objective of communism and belongs psychologically and morally to the group that advocates it," though he falls short of 100% advocacy because he is "not prepared to go the last ten per cent".
Dr. Halford E. Luccock, a professor of Homiletics at Yale Divinity School, testified that Davis had criticized the USSR for "disregard of the human values of free speech and its intolerance of religion."
That afternoon, just before deliberation began, Judge Carew advised the jury that, under the laws of New York State, "no man has a legal right to be a Communist.
[38] At the height of anti-Communist concerns in the 1950s, Davis refused to testify against colleagues and acquaintances, and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee.