He was born in Normandy, Bedford County, Tennessee[3] to successful businessman and distiller McClin H. Davis, who is credited with perfecting the recipe for Cascade Whisky, which is now known as George Dickel. Davis was prepared at the prestigious Webb School in Bell Buckle, TN, and studied at both Stanford and Vanderbilt. Davis briefly ran the Cascade Distillery following his father's death in 1898, but was forced to sell his share of the distillery to the operation's majority owners.[4][5]
Davis headed a commission of the League of Nations that negotiated the Klaipėda Convention in 1924. He was a delegate to the first General Conference for the Limitation and Reduction of Armaments at Geneva that opened in February, 1932. Shortly after the Disarmament Conference resumed in the spring of 1933, he arrived in Geneva, and began serving as chairman of the American delegation with the rank of ambassador, having been appointed to that position by the incoming Roosevelt administration.[8][9][10]
In a May 22, 1933 address to the Disarmament Conference at Geneva Davis said, "We feel the ultimate objective should be to reduce armaments... through successive stages down to the level of a domestic police force."[11] 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. He was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors from 1940 to 1942.[12]
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 joined the State Department's committee on overseas war measures, the fifteen-member Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations.
^Hugh Wilson, Diplomat Between Wars (1941), pp. 263, 270, 284-285
^Arnold A. Offner, American Appeasement (1976), 21
^Department of State, Peace and War United States Foreign Policy 1931 -1941, (2003 by University Press of the Pacific, Reprinted from the 1942 edition), pp. 9-12
^New York Times, May 23, 1933, "Peace and Arms Pledges of the United States Given to World Disarmament Parley By Davis." (For details regarding the Disarmament Conference at Geneva See: Foreign Relations of the United States diplomatic papers, 1933, general, The conference for the reduction and limitation of armaments, Geneva, 1933, pp. 1–355, note that U.S. diplomatic papers often cited as FRUS, are available through the University of Wisconsin digital collections.)
