Synopsis
Natalie Zemon Davis and Elizabeth Douvan’s Operation Mind is a body of evidence, a prophetic warning, and a call to action about the urgency of doing all we can to prevent thought control in America. In 1952, this meticulously researched pamphlet documented the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ attacks and impact. The HUAC abused its charge to intimidate and silence academics, union members, social critics, scientists, artists, teachers, political opponents, rabbis and other religious leaders, to make them appear suspect and “un-American” in the eyes of the American people.
The 2025 reprint of Operation Mind offers a foreword by comparatist Silke-Maria Weineck, an essay by historian Alan Wald connecting Operation Mind’s history of McCarthyism with present-day attacks on academic freedom, and a new (2023) introduction to the text by Natalie Zemon Davis.
About the Author
Natalie Zemon Davis was a foremost historian of early modern Europe. Her first works focused on France, plumbing the archives for records that elucidate the lives of ordinary people, especially marginalized groups and women. She is best known for The Return of Martin Guerre (1983), a work that uncovered the case of a sixteenth-century imposter and was later made into a highly acclaimed film. Davis’s later scholarship focused on the daily interactions of Christians, Jews, and Muslims and on slaves and slaveholders, with a particular interest in their social encounters and cultural exchanges.
Davis grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Detroit, Michigan. She attended the Kingswood School for Girls, where she was one of only a few Jewish students. Her interest in history, as well as her leftist political allegiances, began to develop in high school and grew stronger in her college years. As a student at Smith College in the late 1940s, Davis participated in several political organizations, ranging from Marxist discussion groups to campaigns against racial discrimination.
Natalie and Chandler Davis remained politically active, and both suffered the repercussions of the 1950s anticommunist backlash. Chandler Davis refused to sign the university’s required anticommunist oath, and in 1953 he was brought to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. His refusal to cooperate in the government witch-hunts resulted in his being dismissed from the faculty, blacklisted within the profession, and briefly imprisoned. Shortly before her husband’s firing, Davis had spent several months in France, a period she described as initiating her “lifelong love affair with the archives.” After returning from Europe, the government confiscated both the Davises’ passports, making it impossible for her to continue any research abroad. Forced by circumstance to revamp her research agenda, Davis turned her attention to rare book collections in the United States. Throughout her career, Davis continually broadened the intellectual scope of her work, examining the categories of class, gender, and religion, and employing the methodological tools of history, anthropology, and literature within her scholarly repertoire.
Elizabeth Douvan’s pioneering research on the social and psychological condition of Americans before and after the changes that swept the country in the 1960s painted an intriguing portrait of shifts in American mental health, family life, the roles and status of women, and adolescent development and behavior. The co-author with Joseph Veroff and Richard Kulka of “The Inner American” and “Mental Health in America,” published by Basic Books in 1981, Douvan was also the co-author with historian Natalie Zemon Davis of “Operation Mind,” a 1952 pamphlet that attacked the activities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
“In ‘The Inner American,’ Libby Douvan brilliantly traced the historical changes in men and women’s sense of self over the second half of the 20th century, as American society moved from an emphasis on community connections to an emphasis on intimate relationships,” says Veroff. “It was within marital life that she saw a major support for psychological well-being, and as a result, spent many of her later years doing research on the marital stability of couples.” Her last book, “Marital Instability,” co-authored with Veroff and Shirley Hatchett, points to the different ways that African-American and white marriages founder. Douvan, who directed the Family and Sex Role Program at the ISR, had a particular interest in the development and changing roles of women and was instrumental in establishing one of the nation’s first women’s studies programs in the early 1970s at Michigan.
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