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Melville Jacobs (July 3, 1902 – July 31, 1971) was an American anthropologist and Folklore studies known for his work preserving indigenous cultures and Linguistics of the Pacific Northwest United States. Jacobs was a doctoral student of Franz Boas, a German Americans anthropologist and Ethnomusicology who did fieldwork with the Chinookan Peoples. After his time in the field, Jacobs became member of the faculty of the University of Washington in 1928 and remained there until his death in 1971. During the McCarthyism, Jacobs was targeted for his progressive Activism and his association with the Communist Party USA.
During his years of study, Jacobs met Elizabeth Derr and would go on to marry her on the 3rd of January 1931. He mentored her in the field of anthropology and she went on to do her own work with the Tillamook people people after accompanying Melville on his research trips in 1933.
Jacobs was a fellow of the American Anthropological Association and an associate editor of the American Anthropologist under Ralph Linton from 1939-1944. He was president of the American Folklore Society from 1963-1964 and served as their delegate to the American Council of Learned Societies from 1966-1968.
Jacobs died of cancer a year short of retirement, several weeks after his 69th birthday on the 31st of July, 1971 in Seattle.
Jacobs met with a number of last speakers of indigenous languages and worked extensively to preserve as much of these dying languages as possible for future study. Jacobs recorded audio on wax cylinders, in the earlier years, and on acetate records using a custom-built portable phonograph recorder which he took into the field. After completing his fieldwork in 1939, the latter part of Jacobs' career was spent transcribing and translating his recordings and research notes.
Jacobs had been a member of the American Communist Party from 1935 to 1945 and was involved in a variety of progressive activities. He, as well as Franz Boas, sat on board of the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born in the early 1940s. He was also engaged in effort to block the Hobbs "Concentration Camp" Bill of 1941. When approached by the Washington State Committee on un-American Activities and asked to give the names of other University of Washington faculty who were present at Communist Party meetings, he refused to do so and stated unequivocally that the people in question had broken no laws and were loyal Americans as well as his friends. Jacobs' wife Elizabeth was a Party member and was known to the FBI for some time before these events took place. Ultimately, Jacobs would never lose his job at the University of Washington and, after surviving a two year probationary period from 1949 to 1951, he remained at the university until his death in 1971.
Efforts to publish an edited collection of anthropology articles with Bernhard Stern, a Marxism social anthropologist from Columbia University, were frustrated by political troubles and possible interference from more conservative contemporaries in the anthropology community. In the next three years, Stern would be brought before the Senate Subcommittee on International Security and the Committee on Government Operations during the McCarthy era due to his involvement with groups, such as the American Communist Party, whose members were deemed threats to national security during the Cold War. The pair would never find a publisher for their book as a result of these setbacks.
In 2019, the "Melville Jacobs Collection of Native Americans of the American Northwest (1929-1939)" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
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