Background
William Hammatt Davis was born on August 29, 1879 in Bangor, Maine. He was the son of Owen Warren Davis, an engineer and businessman, and of Abigail Gould.
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William Hammatt Davis
Edit ProfileEducation
Davis graduated from high school in Bangor in 1896. Davis attended the Corcoran Scientific School and the George Washington University Law School, from which he graduated in 1901.
Career
After graduation Davis worked for his brother, A. G. Davis, who headed the patent department of General Electric in the District of Columbia.
After a year as an examiner in the U. S. Patent Office (1902 - 1903), Davis joined Betts, Betts, Sheffield and Betts, the premier patent lawfirm in New York City. He remained there until 1906, when he joined Pennie and Goldsborough (later Pennie, Davis, Marvin and Edmonds), with which he remained affiliated for thirty-nine years, becoming a senior partner responsible for many large corporate accounts.
Davis was elected president of the New York Patent Law Association in 1932. Davis entered government service in World War I as head of the contract section of the War Department's Planning Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic (1917). In 1918-1919 he was legal adviser to the War Department's Claims Board. In these posts Davis, a Democrat, came to know many of the administrative liberals with whom he would be closely associated in the New Deal era.
He became a close personal friend of Frances Perkins in the late 1920's and developed a warm regard for labor leader Sidney Hillman in the early 1930's. After Franklin Roosevelt's election as president, Davis returned to Washington as deputyadministrator for the National Recovery Administration (NRA), where he helped write the ship-building and retail coal codes, and then as NRA compliance director (1933 — 1934).
Although he found NRA work administratively frustrating, the experience reinforced his belief that the government could play an active role in resolving social conflict through mechanisms involving labor, management, and public representatives. He thought strong, stable trade unions essential to this process.
From 1937 to 1940, Davis chaired the New York State Mediation Board, on which he won the confidence of important sections of the union movement and built a national reputation as a resourceful labor mediator. After the National Labor Relations Board came under attack by conservative forces in 1938, President Roosevelt appointed Davis to the commission of business, civic, and labor leaders who investigated industrial conditions in Great Britain and Sweden, where unions were well established. He chaired the Twentieth Century Fund's Labor Committee, which in the late 1930's and early 1940's backed the Wagner Act.
Davis used his considerable personal prestige and that of the government to end several work stoppages in April and May. A turning point came in early June 1941, by which time Davis had become chairman of the NDMB, when a United Automobile Workers local in southern California struck North American Aviation in defiance of the NDMB's authority. Davis persuaded the Army to delay the deployment of troops to break the strike until CIO leaders declared the walkout an unauthorized wildcat strike instigated by Communists.
After the Army moved in on June 9, Davis cooperated closely with Hillman and the CIO to assure that a reorganized "responsible" UAW local at North American would win favorable NDMB adjudication of its bargaining demands. His deft handling of this difficult situation transformed the NDMB into a virtual arbitrator of industrial relations, while retaining the cooperation of most trade unionists with the government's growing system of economiccontrols. After Pearl Harbor, Davis faced a new challenge as chairman of the National War Labor Board (NWLB). A series of mine strikes over the union shop had virtually destroyed the effectiveness of the old NDMB in late 1941.
Under the leadership of John L. Lewis, the United Mine Workers of America had made the union shop a major industrial relations issue in the months immediately preceding Pearl Harbor, and Davis found the problem a "crying baby on the doorstep" when the new NWLB began work in January 1942. Union leaders feared that the traditional web of loyalties that bound workers to their unions might unravel when labor ceased to exercise the strike weapon and when wages were held in check by government fiat. They therefore demanded "union security" for the duration of the war.
Davis steered the NWLB toward implementation of a modified union shop--maintenance of membership--that allayed business fears of "compulsory union membership" while assuring union leaders of organizational stability and membership growth in the booming wartime industries.
He favored a flexible interpretation of the NWLB's "Little Steel" wage formula (July 1942) that would boost substandard and inequitable rates of pay.
Davis battled within the Roosevelt administration against a hard wage line while resisting the pressures generated by wildcat strikers and combating the 1943 campaign by United Mine Workers' President John L. Lewis to destroy the NWLB's authority to set a general pay standard.
During this era he helped set the pattern for postwar collective bargaining by encouraging labor unions to seek nonmonetary fringe benefits as a means of leasing some of the pressure for direct wage increases that the NWLB could not allow. This task was made more difficult by the NWLB's gradual loss of authority in the latter half of the war; in March 1945, President Roosevelt averted serious labor disaffection only by appointing Davis to the more powerful Office of Economic Stabilization.
As the war came to an end, Davis favored a reformulation of government wage-price guidelines that would assure workers a substantial increase in real pay, but his efforts to implement a smooth postwar transition were undercut by the rapid dismantling of the wartime controls.
Davis founded the New York City law firm of Davis, Hoxie, Faithfull and Hapgood in 1945, after failing to reach a financial agreement with his former associates over the basis on which he would resume an active part in the affairs of the firm.
During the next decade he took on a number of public serviceassignments. As a commissioner of the New York City Board of Transportation in 1946 and 1947, he helped resolve difficult labor relations problems of the subway system. In the late 1940's and early 1950's he was a member of the patent advisory panel of the Atomic Energy Commission (1947 - 1957), and chairman of the President's Commission on Labor Relations in Atomic Installations (1948 - 1949) and of the Atomic Energy Labor Relations Panel (1949 - 1953). Davis was chairman of the board of trustees of the New School for Social Research from 1950 to 1957.
Achievements
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Membership
In March 1941, at Sidney Hillman's suggestion, Roosevelt appointed Davis a member of the National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB). Militant unions, many affiliated with the aggressive Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), were conducting organizing campaigns that threatened to slow defense production.
In the late 1940's and early 1950's he was a member of the patent advisory panel of the Atomic Energy Commission (1947 - 1957), and chairman of the President's Commission on Labor Relations in Atomic Installations (1948 - 1949) and of the Atomic Energy Labor Relations Panel (1949 - 1953).
Personality
A short, sloppily dressed man with a wild mop of sandy hair, Davis enjoyed the confidence of George Meany, Philip Murray, and other trade-union leaders.
Connections
On June 23, 1906, Davis married Grace Greenwood Colyer; they had three children.
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Born
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Died
August 13, 1964 (aged 84) -
Nationality
American -
Political Party
Democrat