Commitments

DC: Let’s now return to your life story. Let’s go beyond your involvement in investigating the history of women in relation to the whole of history to the larger question of your commitments. Your family, in terms of its politics, was for the Democrats, no?

NZD: Yes. Except for the 1936 election, when he bizarrely voted for the Republican Alfred Landon, my father was a firm Democrat.¹ I don’t know my mother’s political views; I don’t remember her ever talking to me about them.

DC: But as for you, during your youth, which political camp did you identify with?

NZD: In 1940, my father subscribed to PM, a new liberal-left periodical, which I read faithfully the minute I got home from school.² I especially followed Max Lerner³ and I. F. Stone.⁴ But even earlier in my grade-school years, I recall being concerned about questions of justice. This was linked with my being a Jew in a neighborhood with few Jewish families and in a world where anti-Semitic expressions were common, from the virulent sermons of Father Coughlin in nearby Dearborn to Hitler’s hysterical harangues that we’d hear about on the radio.⁵ I reacted in two ways. At Christmastime, when all the houses around our dark one were decked with lights, I hoped that the true messiah would come soon and tell the neighbors of their mistake, and also save us all from Hitler. As I grew a bit older, I began to have the sentiment—more enduring and important—that Jews, as a minority people, had a special mission to struggle for justice. If you wish, this was a social version of the idea of the chosen people, but one born from my personal experience rather than from formal teaching.

Then at Kingswood, my high school, a Jew among the goyim, I was president of the student council: I took my role very seriously indeed and wrote in the student newspaper about “an alert, enlightened student body” and about how “there can be no barrier between the [student] groups, for each of us finds her place in the scheme of things.” My politics were more liberal than those of my classmates from Detroit’s elite families: one of my best friends and I were the two Democrats in a sea of Republicans. Then during my last year at Kingswood, we had a mock election at the time of the U.S. presidential election and I voted for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate.⁶ At that date, I assure you, I knew virtually nothing about socialism. In our current events class, we talked of the concentration camps as they came into the news, but never of socialism! I guess I must have wanted to appear as a rebel.

Two experiences of my high school years also influenced my moral and political sensibilities. One was the excessive competition I saw around me, which seemed so characteristic of American life: competition for grades among students, or competition for boyfriends or for popularity, competition for the best material goods—clothes or cars or houses—and the highest income among the middle-class families, and the inequalities all this resulted in. I found this very troubling, and it bothered me when that spirit hooked into me, say, in regard to grades, and set me at odds with my classmates, with whom I wanted to have friendship. I struggled for moral perspective on this—I can see now that an earnest phrase of mine from the school newspaper, “for each of us finds her place in the scheme of things,” was an early effort to get an alternate view.

The other big experience was the race riots in Detroit in 1943, the uprising of the blacks who had come to Detroit from the South to work during the war and the fights between them and the whites.⁷ The only black people whom I actually met up close during those years were the women who came to our house to cook or iron—the Schwartzer, my mother called them in Yiddish. But I knew of the discrimination against the black families in Detroit, and the riots and the reaction to them made it very evident. I felt solidarity with black people, a solidarity against discrimination. And in those days, there were political alliances between some Jewish groups and groups fighting for the rights of blacks—in fact there still are such alliances, despite the emergence in the last decades of right-wing Jews close to the Republican leadership.

Anyway, I had all these ideas and feelings in my head and heart when I arrived at Smith College in 1945. The political life there was very active in those years right after the war, with all the shades of opinion. I had friends of all different views, but I directed myself toward the little group on the left, of socialists and Marxists.

DC: Did you discover Marxism because you shared the intellectual affinities of your friends or by directly reading Marx?

NZD: A bit of both. I still remember how enthralled I was when I first read The Communist Manifesto in a history class.⁸ I could see how the forms of competition that I had found so troubling were embedded in a whole capitalistic system with its profit motive. The idea of a world of equality, where everyone could have access to what they needed to live, where learning and the arts would be open to everyone captivated me. This utopian world charmed me.

DC: Wasn’t this a sort of symbolic transfer of the image of the new Jerusalem or the overdue reclaiming of a Jewish hope that enabled Marxism to give history a purpose for you?

NZD: In a way, but not via the channel of Zionism. My knowledge of that movement did not come from my aunt Anna, who, though a devoted Zionist, did not discuss it with me, and in any case her brand of Zionism had no connection with socialist or left Zionism. A boyfriend from my high-school days told me about the Zionist founder Theodor Herzl.⁹ I read some of his writings and about his life; I was interested, but not persuaded. My turning to the socialist ideal was rather a secularization of the messianic hopes of my girlhood, nourished by my reading and my history studies and my conversations with Smith friends.

DC: What kind of reading did you do?

NZD: I read some of the Marxist classics—parts of Capital; Plekhanov’s essay on the materialist concept of history,¹⁰ which did not impress me; Lenin’s State and Revolution,¹¹ which was fun to read while I was studying revolutions; Engels’s Origin of the Family.¹² These Marxist perspectives were always seasoned by other reading, for at the same time I was deep into Vico’s New Science and Max Weber’s works. Thinking back, I especially enjoyed the cultural criticism of British and European Marxist intellectuals: Christopher Caudwell’s Illusion and Reality¹³ and Georg Lukács’s writings on the novel.¹⁴ They suggested ways to fit literary creations together with social life.

DC: Didn’t the time at which you were reading these authors coincide with a certain hardening of your own political commitments?

NZD: Hardening? I don’t know that “hardening” is the word I’d use. Acquiring political commitments might be more like it. We were busy handing out pamphlets against racism, including in everyday matters. Any time we got onto a bus, we would always try to find a seat next to a black person. (By “we,” I’m speaking here of the white progressives at Smith, though we did have one woman of color among us.) We campaigned against the atom bomb and for the international control of atomic energy. We spoke out against the Marshall Plan—that will seem to you really strange today, since the plan worked to rebuild Europe and was also so much more benign than America’s other foreign adventures over the years. We were not at all hostile to foreign aid to help Europe, but at the time, the cold war was beginning, and we campaigned for the granting of such aid through the United Nations. Now I see that period with a more realistic eye, more cognizant of both Soviet and U.S. hidden agendas. A few years ago, when I was working on my book on The Gift, I was very struck by how your French Georges Bataille¹⁵ interpreted the “gifts” of the U.S. Marshall plan when it was first being developed: he was glad of the cold-war opposition of the Soviet Union because it would keep the American gifts coming, but at the same time prevent them from being overly “warped in the direction of American interest.” A very shrewd point. But as for us in those days, we wanted the world to be united to reconstruct Europe.

DC: Did these militant groups attract a lot of students or only a small number?

NZD: We were only a handful on the Marxist or “progressive left,” as it was called then. There were one or two Trotskyists in our class. The liberal or social democratic group was larger—I had friends in all these camps.¹⁶ As for me, I was doing my usual number of being active in two arenas: at the center, serving on some of the student government councils, and on the margins in leftist activities. I also wrote the words for a number of college songs while I was there.

DC: Much like the so-called Lutherans between 1530 and 1550, with their “spiritual songs” that denounced the pope as a corrupt man who offended God, Satan’s agent to pervert the faith, and that sang about the glory of God by appropriating secular melodies. The Calvinists did the same thing in the 1550s when they poked fun at the Roman Church in their satires. Isn’t it curious to note that you lived through comparable experiences before you took up the study of these militant decades of the French Reformation?

NZD: The songs we lefties sang in those days were from the time of the Spanish Civil War, such as “Los cuatro generales,” and from the 1930s U.S. labor movement, “Joe Hill” and “Solidarity Forever,” and the “Peatbog Soldiers Song” from the refugees from the Nazis.¹⁷ And I surely did remember this when I came upon the printing workers of Lyon in the 1550s brazenly singing the Psalms in French in the streets so that all the priests could hear.

But the songs I myself wrote were of a different kind—class songs, college songs. One that I wrote for our annual Rally Day became something of a college favorite over the years, despite its problematic words for the later feminist movement. I wrote it to the music of “You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun,” a well-known song from the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun.¹⁸ Mine was a takeoff: “You Can’t Get a Man with Your Brains.” It was really quite funny, and I even snuck in some of my political ideas in one of the verses: “You know the futility / Of marginal utility / That our enterprise is free / But that’s all irrespective / For love’s a thing collective, / Oh you can’t get a man with your brains.” I really have to laugh that I wrote that song not too long before I met my husband. And to think of me, the feminist, writing this song sung by generations of Smith students. [laughter] And yet the song was ironic about the relations between men and women, and I think there was something true about the line “you can’t cram for a man / as you can an exam.” Bookish relations are quite different from human relations.

DC: You introduce us here to one of the key dates in your biography, when you met Chandler Davis, an encounter that seems well to symbolize, yet again, this mix of rigor and romanticism, of the serious and the joyful that so characterizes both you and your work. Did you meet at Harvard?

NZD: Yes. At the end of my third year at Smith, I went to Harvard summer school to take a course in the history of science, a topic not then covered at Smith. It was the summer of 1948, the summer before the presidential elections. I had been active at Smith in support of the new third party, the Progressive Party, which put up Henry Wallace, the former vice president, as its candidate.¹⁹ Of course, I attended the Students for Wallace meetings at Harvard, and there I saw Chandler Davis, good-looking, intelligent, interesting—and he had a Ping-Pong paddle under his arm. Now I come from a sporting family, as I mentioned, and I always liked sports, especially tennis and Ping-Pong. I said to myself, “There’s a young man on the left, who is handsome, intelligent, and he likes sports.” By which I meant he’s more “normal” than other young men I often saw at such gatherings. So I asked him if he’d like to play Ping-Pong with me. He said “Yes.” Six weeks later, we eloped.

DC: A sudden elopement just like in the sixteenth century, only this time without abduction! But why so hush-hush, especially since, as you’ve already told me, this kind of furtiveness had made you so wary when seeing it in your own relatives? Was it because you feared your family’s reactions?

NZD: Oh, yes! The major problem was that Chandler was not Jewish. I think if he had been Jewish, we would perhaps not have thought of eloping. He did not consider himself a Christian in any sense and was not even a believer in the supernatural, but he came from an old American family: some of his ancestors had arrived on The Mayflower. The family traditions were a mixture of liberal Protestantism. There were the Quaker Hallowells—pacifists, abolitionists, and even some early feminists among them.²⁰ Other ancestors were Unitarians; his great-great-great-grandfather Aaron Bancroft had been one of the founders of American Unitarianism.²¹ His maternal grandmother had worked at Hull House.²² Chandler’s parents were on the left, and Jews were among their closest friends, especially refugees from Nazi Germany. Chan himself had had a Jewish girlfriend before he met me. So for him, there was no issue in marrying a Jew. If anything, he was favorable to Jews. He was a graduate student in mathematics and many of his fellow students were Jewish. And he and I shared our political ideals. I must say that if Chandler had been a believing Christian, there’s no way I would have married him. As it was, he was completely at home with Jewish people, and such a marriage was not shocking for his parents.

As for a secret marriage, remember this was 1948. Today many young people might just move in together. But that was unthinkable for us. We had our ideals for a life together, married equality, and we thought that my parents would gradually accept us as a couple.

DC: Did you each give your parents any forewarning?

NZD: Not that we were planning to marry. One of Chan’s cousins and her husband were our witnesses. Chan’s parents took the news in stride. They had lived in Greenwich Village for a time when they were young and had somewhat bohemian friends in their circle of acquaintances. They were very warm and welcoming.

But it was quite otherwise with my parents, especially with my mother. I may not even have been the first member of her family to marry a goy; I think there was another family secret hidden away here. My mother was beside herself when she learned of our marriage; my father was upset, but less so, and he got over it fairly soon. In retrospect, I’ve wondered whether the strength of my mother’s reaction may not have been partly fueled by her guilt toward her own mother for having stopped keeping a kosher household. It was my father’s initiative, but she did it. And then I went farther yet…

DC: What happened with your mother? Did she refuse to see you? Could you tell me a bit more about your relationship with her?

NZD: My mother did not want to see me or even talk to me on the phone for several years. My marriage was so sudden for her. I was only nineteen, Chandler had just turned twenty-two. She didn’t like the idea of my being married to a future professor—she wished for a businessman or a lawyer or a physician. She did not approve of my having a professional career: had her family come to America so that women would have to work? But the most serious thing was a marriage with a non-Jew, a profound rupture and act of disobedience. All this was very difficult for me—and most assuredly for her as well. My father and my brother, who was then a college student, continued to see us, as did my aunt Gertrude, my father’s sister, who was preparing her doctorate, and even one of my cousins on the Lamport side. My mother finally came to visit me some weeks before the birth of our first child. During the next few years, she became involved in trying to market a silverware caddy that she’d designed—so she entered the business world after all. And she was pleased, I think, when my first book was published, but we never came to understand each other very well. Later when I came to write about clandestine marriages in sixteenth-century France and the family quarrels and state intervention that they aroused, I thought back to my own experience. Later still, I was able to tell my aunt Anna that I was writing about Jewish Glikl Hamel. “Such a pious lady,” she commented.

DC: Didn’t socialism at that time enable people to transcend religious differences, to go beyond the habits of thoughts passed down through families? Wasn’t this an ideal occasion to go beyond them?

NZD: Chandler and I were united by common values, though this never effaced my Jewish identity, which I held onto. We were in agreement on our political values and our life project: we would be equals, we would both work, we would have children, and we’d organize our life around these goals. We didn’t think we were going to save the world by mathematics and history—we sorted out our intellectual commitments from our politics. I thought our marriage could succeed despite our differences, and the social ones loomed much larger than the religious. That is, Chandler was from a family with an old American lineage, his father had a doctorate, his mother almost had one. They were college professors, albeit with modest posts. Chandler was marrying a young woman from a prosperous bourgeois family. We thought we could simply erase these differences, that they’d have no consequence for how we lived. We managed to do it, but we were naïve, I have to say…

DC: Do you still consider yourself Jewish or do you affirm a kind of mixed creed, one in which this dream of overcoming all such differences is finally realized?

NZD: Certainly I consider myself Jewish, and I never for a moment stopped having that as a part of my identity. What it means to me to be Jewish has been deepened by my personal and political experiences and by my later plunging into Jewish history. But no matter what, I’ve always held to the belief I had since my girlhood: being Jewish meant being distanced from worldly idols and being obliged to speak against injustice, suffering, and wrongdoing.

As for Chandler, I wouldn’t talk so much about a “mixed creed” as an expansion of our family culture—expansion for both of us. I was glad to acquire through him and his relatives and their memories a link with American traditions, especially those of the American Revolution, abolitionism, the pacifist Quakers, and the movement for women’s suffrage. Through my marriage, I was connected to another past. And Chandler felt the same way. When asked whether he’s Jewish, he answers, “I married into a Jewish family” or “None of my ancestors are Jewish, but all my descendants are Jewish.”

DC: And your children?

NZD: We have three children, a son and two daughters. We tried to suggest the mixture in their backgrounds by the names we gave them. So our son is Aaron Bancroft. Aaron is a Jewish name, but also an old New England name: Aaron Bancroft was one of the early Unitarians I mentioned, Chandler’s ancestor. Our older daughter was Hannah Penrose, Hannah a clearly Jewish name, but also New England Quaker: Hannah Penrose was the mother of Chandler’s abolitionist great-grandfather. Our younger daughter is Simone Weil. I wanted a name that could link the Jewish and French parts of my life. “Simone” is a version of my maiden name, Zemon, itself a version of Simon. Simone Weil came from a Jewish family, and Chandler and I much admired her courage, her empathy with suffering, and her moral vision during the 1930s and World War II. I must say, now that I think of it, that it was a heavy name to lay on a child. [laughter] Our Simone said to us one day when she was fourteen, “Couldn’t you have named me Simone de Beauvoir?” Later, though, she became interested in Simone Weil’s life and writings. On the whole, I think these names were more important for us than for our children.

DC: Did you give them a religious upbringing or did you allow them to make their own choices?

NZD: As we were not believers in a supernatural deity, the main link with our religious identities was through holidays, and we entwined the traditions. We celebrated the Jewish Passover and Hanukkah, and Christian holidays like Christmas, but with no reference to a divine Jesus or to God, as Chandler always insisted firmly that he was not Christian. He was not a religious believer, he was a man of science. Over the years, with all he heard from me about the history and anthropology of religion, he softened his attitude toward religious performance and he presided very nicely over our Passover seders. We actually composed our own Haggadah,²³ which linked the themes of Passover to our own ideals.

In retrospect, I wish we’d had more contact with other families like ourselves, left-wing or liberal Jews or mixed families, with whom we could have shared these holidays. We were rather isolated when our children were little because of the Red hunt—I can tell you about this later—and when we moved to Toronto, our time was very taken up with our intellectual work and our own household. So though Chandler and I had friends, we didn’t belong to a network of families; we somehow didn’t hear about the Winchevsky Centre, an old-time secular Jewish center in Toronto;²⁴ the various egalitarian synagogues of today may not have even existed in the 1960s, or if so, we knew nothing about them. And by accident, we had ended up in a Toronto neighborhood with few Jews. Hannah got the impression when she was a little girl that a seder was a special ceremony of the Davis family!

Now they’re all grown up and with families of their own. They all three think of themselves as Jewish and welcome their mixed ancestry. Hannah’s husband is from an ancient Jewish family of Tunisia, so there the mixture is spread in another direction. One of our Toronto grandsons has already had a humanist bar mitzvah at the Winchevsky Centre; the other is studying Hebrew for a more traditional rite of passage. All three of our children have done much better than we in creating family networks with people of different origins.

I must say that the whole question of creating families where different backgrounds and values are given their due is fascinating and challenging. I hope we did a good job. In any case, I’m thinking a lot about culture crossings in my current work on al-Wazzn.

DC: After your elopement, you followed your husband as he pursued his career while at the same time you also began your doctorate, right?

NZD: First I finished up my last year at Smith, and then moved to Harvard, where Chandler was writing his doctoral thesis in mathematics. There I took seminars with Myron Gilmore²⁵ on humanism—that’s when I did the essay on Guillaume Budé—and got my first real introduction to social history in studying with W. K. Jordan.²⁶ In his seminar I wrote papers on artisanal movements in sixteenth-century Norwich and Ket’s Rebellion in Norfolk in 1549.²⁷ Many archival sources were available in printed form in the Harvard library: Chandler helped me lug them home from Widener. What a discovery this was for me! Chandler finished his thesis that year and got his first job at the University of Michigan. So I switched to the University of Michigan graduate program. That’s where I studied with Professor Throop and wrote on Christine de Pizan, and that’s where I found in the library Henri Hauser’s book on the workers of Lyon and his essays on the Reformation there. I now had the perfect case I could use to examine the question of the social sources of the Reformation. But at the very same moment, we were confronted with the cold war and Red hunt—and they had unexpected consequences for the direction of my research.

DC: But weren’t you able to go to France before?

NZD: I went in the midst of all this troubling excitement. Let me go back a bit. The first postwar meetings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)²⁸ took place before I met my husband. I was distributing pamphlets at Smith in the fall of 1947 protesting HUAC’s attack on the Hollywood Ten, the screenwriters and filmmakers accused of communism. Little did I know that I’d one day be in a similar predicament! [laughter] Chandler and I were married just as the Red hunt was beginning. By the beginning of 1952, HUAC announced it was planning to have hearings in Michigan, with all the attendant publicity in the newspapers and on the radio that they whipped up. So I did research and drafted a pamphlet on the actual operation and goals of the committee; a wonderful friend of mine, Elizabeth Douvan,²⁹ a graduate student in social psychology, reviewed it with me for the final version. We called it Operation Mind.³⁰ We had it duplicated in photo-offset and it was distributed by two campus organizations, one of them a progressive faculty group, the Council of the Arts, Sciences and Professions. Nonetheless, Chandler and I both got our passports. The pamphlet appeared not long before our departures for France…

DC: You thus left for France in 1952, where you began your archival research in Lyon for six months before returning to the U.S. Did these troubles begin then?

NZD: In September 1952, I returned from Lyon pregnant. That was another benefit that I received from France. We had always planned to have a family, but didn’t know when we’d start. Then at Lyon I saw for the first time in my life students who were mothers, women who were biking around the university and the student residences with babies on the back of their bicycles. So I said to Chan, “Okay, why don’t we start now?’” I was twenty-three, and we figured we could begin our family while I was continuing the work on my doctoral thesis.

But a surprise awaited us upon our return to Ann Arbor: two agents from the State Department, prompted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, came to withdraw our passports, with the accusation of communism, but especially because of Operation Mind.

DC: A pamphlet dated six months earlier…Tell me, what do you now think about this imputation of communism? What did you and Chandler feel at the time? What was so disturbing or radical about Operation Mind?

NZD: In fact, I was not a Communist, but we felt a solidarity with the men and women who were being attacked—Communists and non-Communists—in the witch hunt, and we were very troubled by the mood in the universities and across America: fear, suspicion, self-censorship, the shrinking of vision and thought. Operation Mind showed that the questions being posed by HUAC to the subpoenaed witnesses had nothing to do with the supposed charge of the committee, which was to uncover a plot to overthrow the government of the United States by force and violence. In the sessions with the Hollywood filmmakers and screenwriters, the questions put to them concerned the themes of their movies, the representation of the rich and the poor, for example, and had nothing to do with any illegal act they’d committed. The pamphlet pointed out the range of the people accused: many distinguished professors, including recipients of the Nobel Prize, rabbis, pastors—that is, people of diverse political views, ordinarily on the left but not necessarily Communists. We talked of the consequences for the employment and the lives of the people attacked—their pictures plastered all over the newspapers, fired from their jobs, and so on. And we insisted on the importance for teaching of an open atmosphere, as we put it in the pamphlet: “There is no area of human endeavor which needs more the assurance of freedom from fear and intimidation than the instruction of young people in the pursuit of knowledge.” A very troublesome idea for the members of HUAC!

DC: I imagine this was the beginning of a very upsetting time for you.

NZD: I felt very sad about the loss of my passport. I was without it for eight years. I finally got it back in 1960—I might have retrieved it if I’d tried the year before. What a frustration for a historian so oriented toward the French archives! I’d collected quite a lot in Lyon, but I’d been there only six months. I had been counting on a second research trip and now I had to give it up. The positive side to all this was that I turned toward the riches of the American rare book collections.

DC: All printed documents?

NZD: Yes, sixteenth-century books printed at Lyon. Publications from Lyon are found in abundance in the American rare book libraries.

DC: Did your interest in the book start at this time, not only for its textual content as a historical or literary expression, but also as a source of information on the networks and the modes of distribution and expansion of ideologies, on the implications or sociocultural determinants of working in print shops?

NZD: Yes, it helped me enormously in understanding what it meant to be a printer in sixteenth-century Lyon to have the actual books they’d made in my hands. In regard to the journeymen printers, I could understand so much better what it meant to create a book. I could have a stronger sense of the pride in the products of their labor that they expressed in their strike pamphlets, that dignity, that claim to be as much printers as their masters. Having the objects they had made in my hands gave me many new ideas.

DC: Can we rediscover the socioreligious or sociopolitical experience even in the production of an object, in its very form, in its distinguishing characteristics, its typographical organization, its diverse modes of expressions, as in a poster, a science book, or a religious polemic?

NZD: Both the content and the form were important. I came across popular religious literature and tracts not known before. And I discovered all kinds of things by examining dedications, images, accompanying material, author portraits, and the like. In 1956 I published a paper on the “Catholic” and the “Protestant” editions of Holbein’s Pictures of Death; the same pictures and verses were given a different frame by the religious tracts that different printers placed in the edition. The Sorbonne doctors of theology noticed it, and put the “heretical” editions on their list of prohibited books. But I could never have observed this without having the actual books before my eyes.

And I took time out from my doctoral dissertation to work on the history of mathematics. I had taken a minor field in the history of science at the University of Michigan and, of course, my husband was a mathematician! Columbia University possessed very great collections of books in the history of mathematics and accounting, and there I came upon commercial arithmetics published in sixteenth-century Lyon and elsewhere. The dedications and introductory poems of some of them presented commercial arithmetic as if it were a noble and distinguished activity. I said to myself, “That’s strange. I always thought commerce was looked down upon as demeaning [dérogeant] in early modern France, and here so much fuss is being made about it.” I followed this path in several directions and ended up publishing an essay on “Sixteenth-Century French Arithmetics on the Business Life.” I never would have done this if I hadn’t had the books as objects, a compensation…

DC: Compensation for the fact that you couldn’t go to France!

NZD: Exactly. But those were also challenging years in other ways because my husband got subpoenaed by HUAC.

DC: Didn’t he cover up for you, especially because even he in the end didn’t know about the editing of this loose-leaf pamphlet, Operation Mind?

NZD: Actually, Chandler’s political engagement had been much more important and longer standing than mine. The FBI knew only a little bit about him. Some of their agents had visited a historian who had been a Communist during his student days at Harvard. They had shown him a list of persons who they said had been Communist students there and asked for his confirmation. Chan’s name was on the list, and he confirmed Chan had been a Communist. We learned of this only thirty years later from a third person to whom the historian told the story, assuring her that he confirmed Chan’s name only because it was already there, that he would never have volunteered it, and that he was sorry. Chan had no memory of ever meeting him at any political event, though perhaps their paths had in fact crossed. But I knew the historian. He was afraid. I pardoned him for that reason, when I heard the story, and because he expressed his regrets. I never saw him again, but I pardoned him totally in my mind.

As for HUAC, it was woefully ill informed about Chan’s political actions; he was almost insulted. Its main recent evidence concerned the pamphlet Operation Mind. He had been treasurer of the University of Michigan Council of the Arts, Sciences, and Professions, which had distributed the pamphlet, and had signed the check for the printing. When the FBI came to the printer to inquire, he obliged with Chandler’s name and this information was given to HUAC. (It’s amusing to think that all this was going on while I was following clandestine printing and repression in sixteenth-century Lyon!) Then HUAC sent its agents to the president of the University of Michigan and presented him with a rather long list of alleged Communists whom it was planning to subpoena.

DC: Whatever might be said, there was cowardice on the part of your colleagues, and it’s very important to see here that the university world can very quickly become divided, lose all sense of unity because academics, while apparently always very proud of their training, are often more easily frightened and cowed than others.

NZD: Let me describe in more detail what happened. The HUAC agents met privately with the president of the university, Harlan Hatcher,³¹ and presented him with a list of fifteen persons they planned to subpoena, most of them professors. Hatcher himself decided which ones he wanted to protect and which ones he would get rid of—because they were young or otherwise dispensable. Chan was the youngest of the professors; he was then twenty-seven and without tenure; he was very brilliant and had publications, but he was early in his career. Hatcher selected four professors who he was sure would not cooperate with HUAC and whom he promised to fire after their testimony. Chan was one, the other three were older: a distinguished mathematician and two brilliant physiologists. For the others, special arrangements were made, testimony in camera where they may have been “friendly witnesses” or some other accommodation.

I tell this story because even though Chandler got a warning ahead of time from President Hatcher or the vice president that he would be fired, I didn’t assimilate that at the time. I didn’t want to think of our fate, of the outcome of our difficulties, as predetermined at a private meeting of three or four individuals. I wanted to think about it the way I thought about historical events, as the product of social movements and with diverse causes. I was waiting for the resistance from our colleagues and the students. I wanted to see us as in a situation that had not been determined, subject to the contingent, the possible.

DC: You thus don’t separate your experience even from history, the small incident of Chan’s appearance before a congressional committee, from the way in which you then conducted your close analysis of history? You have this sense of certainty, shared among historians, that an event is not reducible to the individual actions of particular people, but to a congeries of structural factors, long-term and medium range, that intervene more or less clearly.

NZD: I think that the individual actions of particular people have consequence, but always in conjunction with other movements and variables. That’s the way I’ve viewed the past in my decades of pursuing the historian’s craft. For example, I’ve never accepted the explanation of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre as simply the result of the decision of Catherine de Médicis, Charles IX, and their counselors. Their decision had a role, but more interesting to me were all the variables, all the feelings, beliefs, sensibilities, rituals of violence (to go back to my own essay), which came together in Paris in the events of the night of August 24, 1572, and in other towns in the next days. The Holocaust has aroused the same debate. Was it simply Hitler’s project? Did it take place following exactly his plan? Were there other real possibilities—expulsion rather than mass murder? Was improvisation part of the story? How essential was the initiative of local people? And so on. My preference in interpretation would be for complexity. There was Hitler, but also more than Hitler.

I want to make a chronological jump for a moment here in my own story. In 1989, a group of undergraduates at the University of Michigan decided to make a film about the professors who were fired in 1954 after the HUAC hearings.³² In fact, only two of the four were finally fired, Chan and Mark Nickerson,³³ one of the physiologists; the older mathematician³⁴ was so very ill that he was able to avoid the HUAC hearings, the other physiologist was kept on partly because of faculty and student resistance—so we had a victory of a kind. The former president, Harlan Hatcher, was still alive in 1989—ninety years old or more; so was the vice president. The students interviewed the actors on all sides. Watching the film, I was shocked in listening to Harlan Hatcher, still very righteous about his actions: he had decided that we would be excluded. He had made a decision about us, a decision that affected us deeply. I was very unsettled, but I laughed and made fun of myself: “Natalie Davis, you’ve always been dismissive or at least suspicious of conspiracy theories in history as inadequate. You’ve always thought of history as complex. And now it turns out that the fix was in—you and especially Chandler were simply living out a decision already made by a few people behind closed doors.”

This experience has not profoundly modified my practice as a historian, but I’ve chuckled over the irony—that a single person could seem to have such an impact on our lives. As I thought about it, I realized how impersonal it was for Hatcher. He hardly knew Chandler; Chandler was just available for being disposed of. And Hatcher did not get everything his way. He was finally prevented from firing one of the professors. And as for us, he didn’t ruin us as scholars. Chan got huge support from his mathematical colleagues at the time and in later decades was invited back to Ann Arbor to give math colloquia. There’s now an annual Academic Freedom lecture at the University of Michigan, sponsored by the Faculty Senate, to mark the wrongful firings of 1954.

DC: Doesn’t this lead us back to history’s mutually contradictory nature as simple and complex at the same time? That’s because not only sources can be convoluted and slanted, but because the agents behind an event rendered them both simple and complex through the very systems of representation they used? If there’s a self-fashioning of the individual due to the nexus of contingencies of a specific moment, it’s the same for a historical event. Indeed, historical events go through a kind of self-fashioning before which the historian must avoid succumbing to positivist understanding.

If we consider the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, it’s striking to note that, contrary to theories about its premeditation or of Catherine de Médicis’s Machiavellianism, contrary to the idea of a Guisard putsch, we can instead accept the notion that everything occurred as a kind of fevered frenzy, all very rapidly, during all the different meetings with the king during the evening and night of August 23 and 24. Several counselors, the Queen Mother, and no doubt the king readied a plan to kill the main Huguenot leaders in Paris to celebrate the royal marriage. The event, beyond the less immediate and long-term factors involved in it, was a human event, a decision that, even if it’s a complex one only further complicated by other related incidents, even if there were attempts to cover it up, still in the end depended on a handful of individuals acting under pressure. Pressures such as the anger felt by Huguenot captains following the attempt on Admiral Coligny’s life on August 22 and their desire to transform a recent political setback—the failure to gain royal support for the war in the Low Countries—into an accusation against the Guises. Pressures of the Catholic faction that did not accept the mixed marriage between the Protestant Henry of Navarre and the Catholic Marguerite of Valois and that hoped for some spectacular eradication of God’s enemies, the Huguenots. Pressures in which, from one side to the other, politics and religion became intermingled in such a way as to undermine the viability of the monarchy’s efforts to maintain political order and render the elimination of the Huguenot leadership—some sixty men in all—as the lesser evil to solve an otherwise impossible dilemma and thus escape a political crisis that targeted the monarchy. We can then think that the crime, even if Charles IX and his mother tried thereafter to cover it up, sprang from their initiative, from an action they took only under extreme duress. The entire problem arose from the loss of control around seven or eight o’clock in the morning when the massacre escalated into a huge orgy of sacral violence that killed at least two or three thousand Huguenots and pushed the crown, in order not to lose total control of the panic-stricken capital, to cast about for justification. But the original crime began in effect as a conspiracy, a “ploy” [pratique] to use contemporary parlance, cunningly improvised by a small group of counselors who set it in motion…Men who were probably then responsible for the sudden disjointed explanation that left open any number of possible histories, that better rendered history ever malleable and subject to change due to the unstable course of destiny…

What I’d like to say here about events from the sixteenth century is that we must always be careful and modest in our claims. When history eludes our ability to analyze it with any assurance or sense of control, it isn’t by chance. It rather reflects a political culture that fashioned the present—in a world marked by transience, the uncertainty of individuals, dissimulation or duplicity, or both—as a moment open to any number of possibilities. In this way, history can ceaselessly be shaped and reshaped. If we don’t truly know what happened on the night of August 23 to 24, it’s also because the idea and practice of history by the groups involved wanted a level of uncertainty to persist, or rather these uncertainties persisted even beyond the words that were spoken.

But I stray from our conversation. I only went off on this tangent when hearing you describe the insight that came to you that actual life and the theory of history don’t necessarily coincide, that what we can personally realize from history becomes revealed as a result of other possibilities or scenarios than the ones we plan for the past lives of other people.

After Chan was expelled, how did you live since he was without work? Did it take you long to find alternative solutions?

NZD: There was more at stake than his firing from the University of Michigan. Chandler had decided in his testimony before HUAC to plead the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, and not the Fifth. The Fifth Amendment allows silence only because you fear a criminal charge might ensue. The First Amendment forbids Congress to interfere with freedom of expression. So by pleading it, as had the Hollywood Ten years before, Chandler was inviting once again a test case of HUAC. He was then duly indicted by the Department of Justice for contempt of Congress, but don’t feel sorry for us because of that—he had sought the test case and we were in agreement on it. But the case dragged on for years…

DC: You must have had the impression that it would never finish, didn’t you?

NZD: Yes, he was subpoenaed in 1953, testified before HUAC, and was fired in 1954, and then his First-Amendment case was in the courts till the end of 1959. It went up to the Supreme Court. After Chan’s appearance before HUAC, a friend of ours—a professor of psychology at Vassar—read his testimony and decided to take the same position when he was subpoenaed, and his test case happened to get to the Supreme Court before Chan’s.³⁵ The Court denied his appeal in a split decision. When Chan’s similar appeal came up not long afterward in late 1959, the Court declined to hear it—though even then two judges, Justices Black³⁶ and Douglas,³⁷ would have liked to hear argument. So in January 1960, Chandler went off to prison to serve his sentence for a misdemeanor.

DC: How long did he spend in prison?

NZD: Five months. He was sentenced to six months, but given one month off for good behavior.

DC: Which prison was it?

NZD: Danbury Federal Correctional Institution—a relatively “privileged” prison. Men who have been incarcerated elsewhere, but have been good prisoners, get transferred there for the last years of their sentence. U.S. Senators and wealthy people convicted of corruption serve their time there. An amusing irony—J. Parnell Thomas,³⁸ the head of HUAC during the days of Hollywood Ten,³⁹ was convicted of corruption and was imprisoned at Danbury a few years before Chan walked through its gates. [laughter] Chan was a fellow-con with businessmen who had cheated on their business accounts…If the Enron directors are ever convicted, no doubt they’ll go to a prison like Danbury.⁴⁰

DC: But Chan was a bit of an odd duck among this set of distinguished prisoners!

NZD: The prison population at Danbury was much more varied than that. Two other First-Amendments challengers were there, our friend from Vassar and another professor, and also one or two men who had passed secrets to the Soviet Union. Apart from the white businessmen and small-scale traders, there were many black people and Hispanics who had been involved, say, in stealing government checks. They were impressed when Chan said he was in for contempt of Congress, which sounded like a big deal, and also congratulated him on exercising with the weights after all those years of exercising his brain. One Saturday toward the end of his time, he was listening to the allowed jazz program from New York on the prison radio when it was suddenly preempted by live coverage of the huge demonstration against HUAC in San Francisco. He knew it was the beginning of the end for HUAC—and he was right!

As for the six years in the 1950s while his case was in the courts, Chan’s situation was unstable. To keep our heads above water financially, he worked for about two years for an advertising agency in New York, which for its own reasons wanted to have a mathematician with a doctorate on its staff. He kept doing mathematics and publishing, but he couldn’t get a regular university post: each time a mathematics department recommended his being hired, the FBI and/or someone in the administration would intervene and the offer would be dropped. He did give courses at the School of General Studies at Columbia and also at the New School, which had received so many refugees from Germany and France in the 1930s—and they deserve credit for being willing to give him something. Then the American Mathematical Society came to his aid, and invited him to be one of the editors for its reviewing journal in Providence, Rhode Island.

DC: How did you put up with all this?

NZD: Let me say first of all that there were wonderful things in those years: our three children. Our son Aaron was born in 1953, several months after our passports were lifted, and Chan was subpoenaed later that year. Then in 1954 and 1957 we had our daughters, Hannah and Simone. The children were a total joy, completely overshadowing the challenges with Chan’s case. And then I was working on my dissertation, using the marvelous libraries in New York, especially the New York Public Library and Columbia, and doing the other research I mentioned. I even taught a night course one term at Columbia’s School of General Studies. So we survived, though we didn’t have much of a social life.

DC: Was this the time when people you knew stopped wanting to see you due to these same political reasons?

NZD: Yes, there were some who did not want to see us. We were a little bit pariahs. But, you know, I was already somewhat hardened to this because of the conflict with my mother over our marriage. And my father and brother continued to visit us and some other dear friends. I went to history conferences to try to stay in touch. I especially remember one of the early meetings of the new Society for French Historical Studies. Two people whom I had known and cared about brushed by and would scarcely greet me. I was sitting by myself in dismay, when Father Moody—Monsignor Joseph Moody, a stalwart of the society—came up and started chatting with me.⁴¹ I never forgot his kindness, and have taken him as a model when I go to professional meetings.

So there were times when I did feel alone. But I had the presence of the people from the past, whose history I was studying. And one or two friends: Rosalie Colie, then teaching literature at Barnard, would give me supper before I taught my night school classes. My friendship and correspondence about French history with Nancy Roelker was precious. And Chandler and I had the children and each other. I said to myself after those years that if we’d had a more normal path, we might have had other kinds of anxieties: “Am I going to get tenure at my university? Am I as important as the other assistant professors? Have I published enough? Am I doing the kind of scholarship that will get me promoted?” I would have been submitted to the pressure and the competitive system that I had found disagreeable since my girlhood. I might have been worried about what people would say if I went in new directions with my work, I might have been less willing to take risks. As it was, I was somewhat isolated, but at least I was not in the “success” struggle.

DC: How do you feel today? You have, despite everything, managed to overcome these difficulties, but don’t you still feel some indignation about it all?

NZD: I decided long ago that it wasn’t worth the trouble to be bitter about what happened. I won’t say I pardoned everyone—I certainly felt angry at Harlan Hatcher when I heard him telling his story with such pride in the students’ film—but on the whole I look back at that period without resentment. It’s not as though Chandler were in a Nazi or Soviet prison or as if we had been dragged off to a concentration camp in Germany or to the Gulag.

DC: Was the decision to leave the United States to go live in Canada a political act, a kind of temporary rejection of the United States that arose from a sense of injustice?

NZD: No, not at all.

DC: Was it fate yet again? Was it against your will?

NZD: Colleagues at the University of Toronto were very ready to hire Chan. We would not have thought of turning to Canada while his case was still in the U.S. courts. The initiative to bring him to Toronto was taken by a very great mathematician, Donald Coxeter,⁴² a remarkable man, who has just passed away at ninety-five years of age. Chandler went to the University of Toronto in 1962, and that’s been the base for his professional life ever since. There have been times when he’s disagreed strongly with some university policy, but it’s always been within the limits of a “loyal opposition.” The University of Toronto is his university—it welcomed him when he could not get a university post in the United States; he cares a great deal about it. But he was not rejecting the United States as such and has been very active in both the professional and political life there over the decades.

DC: When did you receive your PhD? Was it before you left for Canada?

NZD: I finished my dissertation on “Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyon” in 1959, and mailed it to the University of Michigan from Providence, Rhode Island, where we were then living. My daughter Simone was two years old. Several months later Chan got a leave from his job as mathematical editor and went off to Danbury federal prison to serve his sentence. As for me, I taught for three years at Brown University, where I had students I much enjoyed. I’m still in touch with some of them. I gave courses on the Reformation and participated in the introductory history courses, one of them organized around primary texts and quite experimental and interesting. Barbara Lewalski,⁴³ just beginning the career that was to make her one of our greatest Miltonists, was a very special friend, as was her husband, the historian Kenneth Lewalski.⁴⁴ They were staunch friends, as were others in Providence as well, when my husband was in prison. And there was the John Carter Brown Library, one of the great libraries of the world for travel and geographical literature; that’s where I first came upon the beautiful 1556 French edition of Leo Africanus’s Description de l’Afrique. So the social and cultural resources of the place one happens to live can turn one in new directions.

In 1962, I followed Chandler to Toronto. There were some years where I had difficulty in getting a regular post in a history department. For a year I taught in a Great Books course in humanities at the recently founded York University, and finally became part of the Political Economy Department at the University of Toronto. This was a very interesting department, which put together politics, economics, and economic history—really in the grand tradition of the early twentieth century. For several years I taught economic history, rather like your great-grandfather Henri Hauser. I’m glad I had this chance. My publications from that period on “A Trade Union in Sixteenth-Century France” and on welfare reform in Lyon didn’t just grow out of my doctoral dissertation, they were nourished by this milieu. And in my undergraduate lectures I was able to introduce material on women’s work and early trade unions into the traditional narrative of the Industrial Revolution. But the field of economic history was starting to become very mathematical. That was not my direction—I was moving toward the anthropological and the cultural—and I knew I’d never have graduate students in economics wanting to work with me.

DC: What happened then and who decided upon this new course?

NZD: I was invited to Berkeley to be a visiting professor of history in 1968. When the Department of History at the University of Toronto learned that Berkeley was interested in me and took seriously my publications, they decided to offer me a post. After my months in California, I taught three years in the UT history department. I had some very exciting graduate students—we read Foucault’s Madness and Civilization together and Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood and various Annales historians and lots of sixteenth-century sources—and Jill Conway and I started our course in Society and the Sexes. Then Berkeley invited me to join the Department of History as a tenured professor. Chan and I talked it over for quite some time: his job was in Toronto and, if Aaron and Hannah were already in their midteens, Simone still had high school ahead of her. In January 1972, I started teaching at Berkeley…

DC: Did you actually participate in the great sit-ins in Berkeley, in the demonstrations, and did all this give you some sense of what the seditions and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century must have been like?

NZD: The great Free Speech sit-ins at Berkeley were back in 1964, but the anti-Vietnam War movement was going strong when I visited there in 1968.⁴⁵ I took part in a number of demonstrations; at one point I felt my graduate seminar was meeting on antiwar marches. [laughter] One of my sharpest memories is of witnessing David Harris,⁴⁶ then the husband of Joan Baez,⁴⁷ burn his draft card in front of the Oakland Army Induction Center. We had all gathered very early in the morning, before sunrise. I immediately thought of the Protestant artisan in Lyon, imprisoned in 1534 for having distributed heretical works and who from his prison cell had mocked the great cathedral of Saint Jean: “It’s only a piece of stone. Heaven is our church.” Though I know history never repeats itself exactly, I had this sense of connection: our little band of demonstrators, this man with his draft card burst into flames, and the severe stone military building.

DC: Wasn’t your commitment to opposing the Vietnam War linked to your long-standing pacifism, to your long-standing hostility to American interventionism?

NZD: I considered the Vietnam War an unjust war. I have never been an absolute pacifist. My strong preferences have always been for diplomatic solutions, solutions through negotiation, arbitration, compromise when possible. But despite the war crimes committed by all parties along the way (the Germans, the Japanese, the Soviets, the British bombing of Hamburg and Dresden, the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), despite that, World War II was a just war to stop the Nazi murders, the German conquest of Europe, and Japanese aggression. In Vietnam, no, the U.S. invasion of Vietnam was not a just war.

DC: You rediscover here the rhetoric of the sixteenth century and the debates over just and unjust war, for war could not be just for a number of Erasmian humanists, for example, unless it was a war of self-defense against a foreign invader.

NZD: True. And, of course, this reflection has surfaced once again in debate over the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and now the invasion of Iraq.