Norman Davis

Who was Norman Davis?

Norman H. Davis, was a U.S. diplomat. He served as President Wilson's Assistant Secretary of Treasury and later as Undersecretary of State.

He was born in Bedford, Tennessee to a successful businessman McClin H. Davis. Norman made millions of dollars from his financial dealings in Cuba from 1902 to 1917, where he was the President of the Trust Company of Cuba. While working in the financial industry, he built close friendships with Henry P. Davison, an influential partner with J.P. Morgan & Co. and Chairman of the American Red Cross, and Richard M. Bissell, president of Hartford Fire Insurance and a member of the National Defense Commission. Through these connections, he was able to get appointed as a financial adviser to the Secretary of Treasury on foreign loans during World War I.

Davis headed a commission of the League of Nations that negotiated the Klaipėda Convention in 1924. He was a delegate to a General Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1931. He was chairman of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies from 1938 to 1944 and president of the Council on Foreign Relations 1936–1944.

In 1939, following the outbreak of war in Europe, Davis chaired the steering committee of the Council on Foreign Relations' War and Peace Studies project, created to advise the U.S. Government on wartime policy. He would also join the State Department's committee on overseas war measures, the fifteen-member Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations.