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Joseph E. Davies
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| In office January 25, 1937 – June 11, 1938 |
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| Preceded by | William C. Bullitt |
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| Succeeded by | Laurence A. Steinhardt |
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| In office 1938 – 1939 |
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| Preceded by | Hugh Gibson |
| Succeeded by | John Cudahy |
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| Born | November 29, 1876 Watertown, Wisconsin |
| Died | May 9, 1958 |
Joseph Edward Davies (November 29, 1876 - May 9, 1958) was the second Ambassador to represent the United States in the Soviet Union.
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Biography
Born in Watertown, Wisconsin, to Edward and Rahel (Paynter) Davies, "Joe" Davies rose to prominence with the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, when he was appointed to Chair the Federal Trade Commission from 1915 to 1916. Wilson also appointed Davies to serve as an economic advisor to the United States during the Paris Peace Conference following World War I. By profession, Davies was an attorney.
Davies married Emlen Knight in 1902. Davies also was married to General Foods heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1935; the couple divorced in 1955.
Ambassador to the Soviet Union
Davies was appointed Ambassador to the Soviet Union by Franklin D. Roosevelt and served from 1936-38. His appointment was made in part based on his skills and politically loyalty to Roosevelt. Roosevelt possibly also believed that his wife’s inherited wealth was a strength in the appointment.
While Davies' predecessor, William Christian Bullitt, Jr. had been an admirer of the Soviet Union who gradually came to loathe Stalin's brutality and repression, Davies remained unaffected by news of the disappearance of thousands of Russians and foreigners in the Soviet Union throughout his stay as U.S. ambassador. His reports from the Soviet Union were pragmatic, optimistic, and usually devoid of criticism of Stalin and his policies. While he briefly noted the USSR's 'authoritarian' form of government, Davies praised the nation's boundless natural resources and the contentment of Soviet workers while 'building socialism'.1 He went on numerous sanitized tours of the country, carefully prearranged by Soviet officials. In one of his final memos from Moscow to Washington D.C., Davies bluntly assessed:
- "Communism holds no serious threat to the United States. Friendly relations in the future may be of great general value."2
Davies attended some of the Stalinist purge trials of the late 1930s, and despite widespread evidence to the contrary, was convinced of the guilt of the accused, although he was a lawyer himself. His opinions were at odds with most of the non-Stalinist press of the day, as well as those of his own staff, many of whom had been in the country far longer than Davies. Charles Bohlen later wrote:3
- "Ambassador Davies was not noted for an acute understanding of the Soviet system, and he had an unfortunate tendency to take what was presented at the trial as the honest and gospel truth. I still blush when I think of some of the telegrams he sent to the State Department about the trial." (p.51)
- "I can only guess at the motivation for his reporting. He ardently desired to make a success of a pro-Soviet line and was probably reflecting the views of some of Roosevelt's advisors to enhance his political standing at home."(p.52)
When a campaign began in the U.S. to intervene on behalf of Ruth Rubens, an American woman who had disappeared in Moscow and was being held in Butyrskaya Prison, the U.S. embassy staff was so upset about Davies’s inaction on behalf of those being arrested and liquidated that they contemplated mass resignation. Instead, they decided to initiate inquiries on Ruben's behalf. When Davies, who was out of the country, returned to Moscow, he apologized to the Soviet ambassador to the U.S. — and to FDR — for his staff’s attempts to help Rubens."4
When Davies’s wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, was woken up at night by gun blasts from the basement of the building across the street (the guns belonged to Stalin's secret police, the NKVD, who were in the process of murdering prisoners), her husband would explain that she had merely heard the sound of excavation drills for Stalin’s new Moscow metro subway system. Davies also ignored reports of American citizens being arrested by Stalin's secret police. Even after Americans living in the Soviet Union thronged the gates of the embassy in Moscow to plead for new passports to leave Russia (Stalin had taken their original U.S. passports for 'registration' purposes years before), Davies was unmoved. Though many were communists, others had moved to Soviet Russia as skilled auto workers to help produce cars at the recently-constructed Soviet automobile factory built by the Ford Motor Company. The American workers, suspected by Stalin of being 'poisoned' by Western influences, were dragged off with the others to Lubyanka Prison by the NKVD in the very same Ford Model A cars they had helped build, where they were tortured and either executed5 or exiled to Soviet gulags.6 Davies refused to lodge even a mild diplomatic protest, and later commented to the media: “The Soviet Union is doing wonderful things. The leaders of the government are an extremely capable, serious, hardworking, and powerful group of men and women.”7
It has since been revealed that many important artistic treasures from the Tretyakov Gallery and other collections were donated, or offered at nominal prices, to Davies and his wife, an art collector. He also bought art, at discount prices, that was expropriated from victims of Stalin's Terror.8
After Moscow, Davies was assigned to the post of Ambassador in Belgium (1938-1939) and Minister to Luxembourg concurrently before being called back to the United States following the declaration of war in 1939. Davies served as a special assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
Mission to Moscow
Davies' work in the Soviet Union resulted in his popular book, Mission to Moscow. The book was adapted as a Warner Brothers movie in 1943 starring Walter Huston as Davies and Ann Harding as his wife Marjorie Post Davies. As part of his book contract, Davies retained absolute control of the script, and his rejection of the original script caused Warner Brothers to hire a new screenwriter, Howard Koch, to rewrite the script in order to gain Davies' approval.9 The movie, made during World War II, showed the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin in an extremely positive light. Completed in late April 1943, the film was, in the words of Robert Buckner, the film's producer, "an expedient lie for political purposes, glossily covering up important facts with full or partial knowledge of their false presentation." It whitewashed the Moscow trials, rationalized Moscow's participation in the Nazi-Soviet Pact and its unprovoked invasion of Finland, and portrayed the Soviet Union as a non-totalitarian state that was moving towards the American democratic model, a Soviet Union committed to internationalism. The book was vague on the guilt or innocence of defendants in the Moscow trials, but the final screenplay portrayed the defendants as undeniably guilty. It also showed the purges as an attempt by Stalin to rid his country of pro-German fifth columnists.10
Using a U.S. Army Air Force plane and a nine-man crew, the Roosevelt administration flew Davies back to Moscow in May 1943 with copies of Mission to Moscow; Davies arranged for a private showing to Joseph Stalin. According to Davies, the Soviet dictator was pleased by the film, and approved it for general viewing by Soviet audiences, the first approval for an American-made film in over a decade. Even so, Soviet censors cut out a scene mentioning the Soviet secret police (NKVD).
Postwar Career
Following World War II, the Davies took up residence at Tregaron, where they entertained extensively
In 1950, the film Mission to Moscow became an object of attention by Congress, who saw it as pro-Soviet propaganda. Davies was largely silent on his role in the film, though he did submit a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947.11 Called to testify under oath before Congress, Jack Warner at first claimed that the film was made at the request of Davies, who with the approval of FDR had asked Warner Brothers to make the film (this version of the facts was confirmed by Davies' letter as well).12 Warner later recanted this version, stating that Harry Warner first read Mission to Moscow and then contacted Davies to discuss movie rights.13 Warner also admitted he had already fired Howard Koch, the screenwriter, allegedly because of his leftist politics. In later years, the film's defenders would argue that the film's inaccuracies were justified because of the need to retain Stalin's support for the Allies in the fight against the Axis powers. The film's critics argued that it demonstrated the desire of left-leaning proponents of Stalin in the Roosevelt administration and the OWI to introduce pro-Soviet, pro-Stalin communist propaganda under the guise of international unity against the Axis. During the era of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, the only person to suffer as a result of Mission to Moscow was the screenwriter, Howard Koch, who was blacklisted; after Davies submitted his letter to HUAC, he was never called to testify.
Davies was divorced by his wife Marjorie in 1955. After his death, Ambassador Davies was given the honor of being entombed at the Washington National Cathedral, in Washington, D.C..
References
- ^ Barmine, Alexander, One Who Survived, New York: G.P. Putnam (1945), p. 208: In reality, during Davies' ambassadorship the average Soviet worker spent 90% of his income on food, mostly black bread, potatoes, buckwheat, and cabbage. 94% of them lived in one-room apartments, (for most, this meant several persons to a single room), which were often constructed without electrical sockets. In the winter, many went without adequate heat as well.
- ^ Joseph Davies (April 20, 1938) Memorandum, Declassified, 1980.
- ^ Charles E. Bohlen (1973) Witness to History, New York: Norton.
- ^ Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia Penguin Press (2008), ISBN: 1594201684, 9781594201684
- ^ Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, Penguin Press (2008), ISBN: 1594201684, 9781594201684: Many of the slain Americans were dumped in the mass grave at Yuzhnoye Butovo District near Moscow.
- ^ Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia, Penguin Press (2008), ISBN: 1594201684, 9781594201684
- ^ Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin's Russia Penguin Press (2008), ISBN: 1594201684, 9781594201684
- ^ Tzouliadis, Tim, The Forsaken, Little, Brown, 2008
- ^ Culbert, David H., Mission to Moscow, University of Wisconsin Press (1980), ISBN 0299083845, 9780299083847, p. 17
- ^ Bennett, Todd, Culture, Power, and Mission to Moscow: Film and Soviet-American Relations during World War II, The Journal of American History, Bloomington, IN (Sep 2001), Vol. 88, Iss. 2
- ^ Culbert, David H., Mission to Moscow, University of Wisconsin Press (1980), ISBN 0299083845, 9780299083847, p. 16
- ^ Culbert, David H., Mission to Moscow, University of Wisconsin Press (1980), ISBN 0299083845, 9780299083847, p. 16
- ^ Culbert, David H., Mission to Moscow, University of Wisconsin Press (1980), ISBN 0299083845, 9780299083847, p. 16
- Davies, Joseph Edward. Mission to Moscow; (a record of confidential dispatches to the State department, official and personal correspondence, current diary and journal entries, including notes and comments up to October, 1941). Simon and Schuster, 1941.
- Maclean, Elizabeth Kimball. Joseph E. Davies: Envoy To The Soviets. Praeger Publishers, February 1993. ISBN 0-275-93580-9
External links
- United State Embassy, Russia. US Ministers and Ambassadors to Russia
- Political Graveyard Web Site
- Mission to Moscow (AMC Network)
- Mission to Moscow at the Internet Movie Database
Wikipedia content modification information:
- This page was last modified on 28 December 2008, at 06:31.
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