||The neutrality of this article is disputed. (January 2011)| He
was manager for the YMCA in Russia where he worked with a number
of Bolshevik leaders including Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
In 1924 he founded the Jerome Davis Research fund was
established in 1924 to support students at Oberlin College who
"worked with labor" to facilitate "mutual understanding and
cooperation in the field of industry." He received a PhD in
sociology from Columbia University and was a professor at the
Yale Divinity School. His failure to receive tenure caused
controversy, as it was widely believed to be due to his activism
and Socialist leanings. It is alleged that he was a Stalinist
sympathizer. He was blacklisted by the HUAC in the 1950s. In the
late 1930s he (along with D.N. Pritt, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt
Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and others) defended the Moscow Trials
from critics. He claimed that, as a former Chairman of the
Legislative Commission on Jails in the State of Connecticut, he
had seen hundreds of criminal