The Origen of America’s

Intellectual Vacuum
By Chris Hedges
The blacklisted mathematics
instructor Chandler Davis, after
serving six months in the
Danbury federal penitentiary for
refusing to cooperate with the
House Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC), warned the
universities that ousted him and
thousands of other professors
that the purges would decimate
the country’s intellectual life.
“You must welcome dissent; you
must welcome serious,
systematic, proselytizing
dissent—not only the playful,
the fitful, or the eclectic; you
must value it enough, not
merely to refrain from expelling
it yourselves, but to refuse to
have it torn from you by
outsiders,” he wrote in his 1959
essay “...From an Exile.” “You
must welcome dissent not in a
whisper when alone, but publicly
so potential dissenters can hear
you. What potential dissenters
see now is that you accept an
academic world from which we
are excluded for our thoughts.
This is a manifest signpost over
all your arches, telling them:
Think at your peril. You must
not let it stand. You must
(defying outside power; gritting
your teeth as we grit ours) take
us back.”
But they did not take Davis
back. Davis, whom I met a few
days ago in Toronto, could not
find a job after his prison
sentence and left for Canada.
He has spent his career teaching
mathematics at the University of
Toronto. He was one of the
lucky ones. Most of the
professors ousted from
universities never taught again.
Radical and left-wing ideas were
effectively stamped out. The
purges, most carried out
internally and away from public
view, announced to everyone
inside the universities that
dissent was not protected. The
confrontation of ideas was
killed.
“Political discourse has been
impoverished since then,” Davis
said. “In the 1930s it was
understood by anyone who
thought about it that sales taxes
were regressive. They collected
more proportionately from the
poor than from the rich.
Regressive taxation was bad for
the economy. If only the rich
had money, that decreased
economic activity. The poor had
to spend what they had and the
rich could sit on it. Justice
demands that we take more
from the rich so as to reduce
inequality. This philosophy was
not refuted in the 1950s and it
was not the target of the purge
of the 1950s. But this idea,
along with most ideas
concerning economic justice and
people’s control over the
economy, was cleansed from
the debate. Certain ideas have
since become unthinkable,
which is in the interest of
corporations such as Goldman
Sachs. The power to exclude
certain ideas serves the power
of corporations. It is unfortunate
that there is no political party in
the United States to run against
Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of
elections, but there is no way I
can vote against Goldman
Sachs.”
The silencing of radicals such as
Davis, who had been a member
of the Communist Party,
although he had left it by the
time he was investigated by
HUAC, has left academics and
intellectuals without the
language, vocabulary of class
war and analysis to critique the
ideology of globalism, the
savagery of unfettered
capitalism and the ascendancy
of the corporate state. And while
the turmoil of the 1960s saw
discontent sweep through
student bodies with some
occasional support from faculty,
the focus was largely limited to
issues of identity
politics—feminism, anti-
racism—and the anti-war
movements. The broader calls
for socialism, the detailed
Marxist critique of capitalism,
the open rejection of the
sanctity of markets, remained
muted or unheard. Davis argues
that not only did socialism and
communism become outlaw
terms, but once these were
tagged as heresies, the right
wing tried to make liberal,
secular and pluralist outlaw
terms as well. The result is an
impoverishment of ideas and
analysis at a moment when we
desperately need radical voices
to make sense of the corporate
destruction of the global
economy and the ecosystem.
The “centrist” liberals manage to
retain a voice in mainstream
society because they pay
homage to the marvels of
corporate capitalism even as it
disembowels the nation and the
planet.
“Repression does not target
original thought,” Davis noted.
“It targets already established
heretical movements, which are
not experimental but codified. If
it succeeds very well in
punishing heresies, it may in the
next stage punish originality.
And in the population, fear of
uttering such a taboo word as
communism may in the next
stage become general paralysis
of social thought.”

It is this paralysis he watches

from Toronto. It is a paralysis
he predicted. Opinions and
questions regarded as possible
in the 1930s are, he mourns,
now forgotten and no longer
part of intellectual and political
debate. And perhaps even more
egregiously the fight and
struggle of radical communists,
socialists and anarchists in the
1930s against lynching,
discrimination, segregation and
sexism were largely purged from
the history books. It was as if
the civil rights movement led by
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had
no antecedents in the battles of
the Wobblies as well as the
socialist and communist
movements.
“Even the protests that were
organized entirely by Trotskyists
were written out of history,”
Davis noted acidly.

Those who remained in charge

of American intellectual thought
went on to establish the wider
“heresy of leftism” in the name
of academic objectivity. And
they have succeeded.
Universities stand as cowardly,
mute and silent accomplices of
the corporate state, taking
corporate money and doing
corporate bidding. And those
with a conscience inside the
walls of the university
understand that tenure and
promotion require them to
remain silent.
“Not only were a number of us
driven out of the American
academic scene, our questions
were driven out,” said Davis,
who at 84 continues to work as
emeritus professor of
mathematics at the University of
Toronto. “Ideas which were on
the agenda a hundred years ago
and sixty years ago have
dropped out of memory because
they are too far from the new
center of discourse.”
Davis has published science
fiction stories, is the editor of
The Mathematical Intelligencer
and is an innovator in the
theory of operators and
matrices. He is a director of
Science for Peace. He also
writes poetry. His nimble mind
ranges swiftly in our
conversation over numerous
disciplines and he speaks with
the enthusiasm and passion of a
new undergraduate. His
commitment to radical politics
remains fierce and
undiminished. And he believes
that the loss of his voice and the
voices of thousands like him,
many of whom were never
members of the Communist
Party but had the courage to
challenge the orthodoxy of the
Cold War and corporate
capitalism, deadened intellectual
and political discourse in the
United States.
During World War II Davis
joined the Navy and worked on
the minesweeping research
program. But by the end of the
war, with the saturation
bombings of Dresden and Tokyo,
as well as the dropping of the
nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, he came to regret his
service in the military. He has
spent most of his life working in
a variety of anti-war and anti-
nuclear movements.
“In retrospect I am sorry I didn’t
declare myself as a
conscientious objector,” he said.
“Not at the beginning of the
war, because if you are ever
going to use military force for
anything, that was a situation in
which I would be happy to do it.
I was wholehearted about that.
But once I knew about the
destruction of Dresden and the
other massacres of civilian
populations by the Allies, I think
the ethical thing to do would
have been to declare myself a
CO.”

He was a “Red diaper baby.” His

father was a professor, union
agitator and member of the old
Communist Party who was
hauled in front of HUAC shortly
before his son. Davis grew up
reading New Masses and
moved from one city to the next
because of his father’s frequent
firings.
“I was raised in the movement,”
he said. “It wasn’t a cinch I
would be in the Communist
Party, but in fact I was, starting
in 1943 and then resigning soon
after on instructions from the
party because I was in the
military service. This was part of
the coexistence of the
Communist Party with Roosevelt
and the military. It would not
disrupt things during the war.
When I got out of the Navy I
rejoined the Communist Party,
but that lapsed in June of 1953.
I never got back in touch with
them. At the time I was
subpoenaed I was technically an
ex-Communist, but I did not feel
I had left the movement and in
some sense I never did.”
Davis got his doctorate from
Harvard in mathematics and
seemed in the 1950s destined
for a life as a professor. But the
witch hunts directed against
“Reds” swiftly ended his career
on the University of Michigan
faculty. He mounted a challenge
to the Committee on Un-
American Activities that went to
the Supreme Court. The court,
ruling in 1960, three years after
Joseph McCarthy was dead,
denied Davis’ assertion that the
committee had violated the First
Amendment protection of
freedom of speech. He was sent
to prison. Davis, while
incarcerated, authored a
research paper that had an
acknowledgement reading:
“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.”
Davis, who has lived in Canada
longer than he lived in the
United States, said that his
experience of marginalization
was “good for the soul and
better for the intellect.”
“Though you see the remnants
of the former academic left still,
though some of us were never
fired, though I return to the
United States from my exile
frequently, we are gone,” he
said. “We did not survive as we
were. Some of us saved our
skins without betraying others
or ourselves. But almost all of
the targets either did crumble or
were fired and blacklisted.
David Bohm and Moses Finley
and Jules Dassin and many
less celebrated people were
forced into exile. Most of the
rest had to leave the academic
world. A few suffered suicide or
other premature death. There
weren’t the sort of wholesale
casualties you saw in Argentina
or El Salvador, but the Red-hunt
did succeed in axing a lot of
those it went after, and cowing
most of the rest. We were out,
and we were kept out.”
“I was a scientist four years
past my Ph.D. and the regents’
decision was to extinguish, it
seemed, my professional
career,” he said. “What could
they do now to restore to me 35
years of that life? If it could be
done, I would refuse. The life I
had is my life. It’s not that I’m
all that pleased with what I’ve
made of my life, yet I sincerely
rejoice that I lived it, that I
don’t have to be Professor X
who rode out the 1950s and
1960s in his academic tenure
and his virtuously anti-
Communist centrism.”