Norman Thomas

American political reformer

• Born: November 20, 1884
• Birthplace: Marion, Ohio
• Died: December 19, 1968
• Place of death: Huntington, New York

Often called “the conscience of America,” Thomas ran six times for president on the Socialist Party ticket and became one of the greatest critic-reformers of politics in the United States.

Early Life

Norman Thomas was born in Marion, Ohio, the home of U.S. president Warren G. Harding, where he earned pocket money by delivering the Marion Star. He was the eldest of six children of the Reverend Welling Thomas, a Presbyterian minister whose father, also a Presbyterian minister, had been born in Wales. Norman’s mother, Emma Mattoon, was also the child of a Presbyterian clergyman. The Thomas household was Republican in politics, devout in religion, and conservative in conduct, opposed to dancing, cardplaying, and Sunday merrymaking. Emma Thomas was acknowledged by the family as its dominant force, emphasizing a keen sense of personal and social responsibility that her firstborn practiced all of his life.

After his 1905 graduation from Princeton University as valedictorian of his class, Thomas took his first full-time job as a social worker at New York City’s Spring Street Presbyterian Church and Settlement House, located in a poverty-stricken area. In 1907, he became assistant to the pastor of Christ Church in Manhattan. There he met Frances Violet Stewart, active in Christian social service and born into a moderately wealthy family of financiers. They were married September 1, 1910, and led a notably happy marital life, in their turn having six children and fifteen grandchildren.

From 1910 to 1911, Thomas attended the heterodox Union Theological Seminary. There he was most impressed by the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, one of the leading figures of the Social Gospel movement, who argued that the ethical precepts of Jesus did not harmonize with the selfish materialism of a capitalist society. Thirty years later, Thomas wrote, “Insofar as any one man . . . made me a Socialist, it was probably Walter Rauschenbusch.” Ordained in 1911, Thomas became pastor of the East Harlem Presbyterian Church and chair of the American Parish, a federation of Presbyterian churches and social agencies located in immigrant neighborhoods. In 1912, he declared, “The Christian Church faces no more burning question than the problem of making brotherhood real.”

Life’s Work

The agonies of World War I crystallized Thomas’s social radicalism. He came to consider the war an immoral conflict between competing imperial powers, and in January, 1917, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a religious pacifist group with a commitment to drastic social reform. Thomas came to regard resistance to the war as a clear choice of individual conscience over the dictates of an amoral state. His uncompromising pacifism led him to support Morris Hillquit, the socialist candidate, who ran on an antiwar platform in the 1917 New York City mayoral race.

Thomas joined another pacifist, Roger Baldwin, in the 1917 establishment of the Civil Liberties Union, later renamed the American Civil Liberties Union . In the spring of 1918, he resigned from his church and the parish, aware that his radicalism was jeopardizing these institutions’ chances for outside financial assistance. In October, 1918, he applied for membership in the American Socialist Party; he was motivated, he recalled later, by “grotesque inequalities, conspicuous waste, gross exploitation, and unnecessary poverty all around me.”

The party was led by three talented people: Victor Berger, Morris Hillquit, and Eugene V. Debs. The first two were its theoreticians and tacticians, but it was the populist, pragmatic Debs (1855-1926) who became American Socialism’s greatest leader until Thomas’s ascendancy. Debs grounded his convictions on emotional rather than philosophic premises: He had an evangelical devotion to social justice, a generous and sensitive temperament, sincerity, warmth, and an intuitive understanding of popular opinion.

In the 1920 election, Debs received 920,000 votes, but they were largely a tribute to his courage for having chosen imprisonment (from 1918 to 1921) to dramatize his pacifism; membership in the Socialist Party was down that year, from a 1912 peak of 108,000 to 27,000. During the 1920’s several conditions combined to keep the American Socialist Party’s numbers and influence low: a dominant mood among the electorate of economic conservatism and intense nativism; hostility to organized labor by all three branches of government; a number of failed strikes; and the 1919-1920 Red Scare mass arrests of radicals and labor leaders by the Department of Justice under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. When Senator Robert M. La Follette campaigned for the presidency in 1924, he refused to run solely as the socialist candidate, preferring to call himself a Progressive. Nevertheless, the Socialist Party energetically supported his campaign; 855,000 of La Follette’s 3,800,000 votes were cast on socialist levers.

Thomas began his long career of seeking public office in 1924, running as a New York gubernatorial candidate on both the socialist and Progressive tickets. Ironically, he had risen to socialist leadership at a time when many people were leaving the party. More ironically, the income his wife inherited from her conservative father enabled him to crusade for his causes on a full-time basis. He admitted that in this instance, “the critic of capitalism was its beneficiary.”

By the mid-1920’s, Thomas was the consensual choice to succeed Debs who had never regained his health after his three-year imprisonment, and who died in 1926 as the leader of American Socialism. In 1928, he was chosen the party’s presidential candidate the first of six such nominations; he received 267,000 votes. In 1932 he was to poll 885,000; in 1936, 187,000; in 1940, 100,000; in 1944, 80,000; in 1948, 140,000.

Thomas attracted the deep affection and admiration of many people, often including ideological opponents. His physical appearance was impressive: He stood over six feet two, had strongly marked patrician features, vibrant blue eyes, good manners, and an air of genteel self-confidence. Although a man of dignity, he could communicate warmth and cordiality to a wide range of people. His physical energy was phenomenal until his late seventies, when failing eyesight and disabling arthritis began to plague him. Since he had no hobbies, he focused his unflagging pace not only on campaigning but also on writing sixteen books and scores of pamphlets, maintaining an enormous correspondence, attending countless conventions and committee meetings, and delivering thousands of speeches. Perhaps his only flaw as a leader was his remoteness in contrast to Debs from the rough-and-tumble realities of the American political panorama. When it came to conflicting interests, he was by temperament an educator, moralist, and intellectual rather than an accommodating pragmatist. Since he had no solid prospect of winning public office, he could afford to maintain an incorruptible integrity and the noblest of principles.

Thomas’s virtuosity as a public speaker was his outstanding leadership asset. He was a masterful humorist, firing quick barbs at his targets. In 1932 he asked his listeners not to fix on Herbert Hoover as the person solely responsible for their economic suffering, since “such a little man could not have made so big a Depression.” As for Harry S. Truman, he “proves the old adage that any man can become President of the United States.” Perhaps the best-known Thomas anecdote recounts a meeting he had with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. When Thomas complained to Roosevelt about a particular New Deal measure, the president retorted, “Norman, I’m a damn sight better politician than you.” Responded Thomas, “Certainly, Mr. President, you’re on that side of the desk and I’m on this.”

In 1932, with the country deeply mired in the Great Depression and capitalism seriously shaken, the Socialist Party hoped for a presidential vote of more than two million. The socialist platform anticipated New Deal programs on many issues, demanding federal appropriations for public works, reforestation, and slum clearance, increased public housing, a six-hour day and five-day working week, old-age pensions, health and maternity insurance, improved workmen’s compensation and accident insurance, adequate minimum wage laws, and a compulsory system of unemployment compensation with adequate benefits derived from both government and employer contributions.

Contrary to socialist expectations, the combined popular vote for all minority party candidates in 1932 barely exceeded one million, and Roosevelt embarked on an ambitious program to save capitalism by implementing a vast amount of social welfare legislation. Thomas consistently chided the New Deal for what he regarded as its lack of any consistent underlying philosophy, for its opportunistic, helter-skelter improvisation and experimentation. This very pragmatism and daring, however, endeared Roosevelt to the majority of the electorate much to Thomas’s frustration. In his The Politics of Upheaval (1979), the historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., considers that in the 1930’s Thomas’s “essential contribution . . . was to keep moral issues alive at a moment when the central emphasis was on meeting economic emergencies. At his best, Thomas gave moving expression to an ethical urgency badly needed in politics. . . .”

The 1930’s witnessed an increasingly dangerous world situation, with Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Benito Mussolini’s Italy, and, late in the decade, Francisco Franco’s Spain threatening the peace. Under the guise of opposing fascism, communists in both Europe and the United States wooed liberals and radicals to form a united, “popular front.” Thomas temporarily flirted with the notion of such international solidarity in his 1934 book, The Choice Before Us . A 1937 trip he took to Europe, however, during which he witnessed communist attempts to control Spain’s Loyalist government through shabby betrayals and observed Stalin’s purge trials of his former comrades, reaffirmed Thomas’s mistrust of totalitarian communism and his conviction of its basic incompatibility with democratic socialism. The Moscow-Berlin Pact of August, 1939, outraged him as “a piece of infamy.” Thomas made certain that, from 1939 on, the United States Socialist Party would vigorously oppose communism, even when the Soviet Union was America’s ally during World War II.

In the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, Thomas’s lifelong pacifist sentiments were in agonizing conflict with his detestation of fascism and strong sympathy for the Spanish Republicans locked in civil warfare with Franco’s Falangists. Thomas tried to solve this dilemma by backing aid for the Spanish government while opposing direct United States intervention on behalf of Great Britain and France after World War II had erupted in September, 1939. By late 1941, the Socialist Party’s noninterventionist foreign policy, combined with Thomas’s often acerbic criticism of the New Deal’s socioeconomic program, had alienated many former members and well-wishers. Even though the party fielded presidential tickets through 1956, it was never to recover its health from these losses. By the 1944 presidential campaign, Thomas’s insistence on maintaining the fullest measure of civil liberties even amid a world war, and his opposition to the Allied demand on Germany and Japan for unconditional surrender had cost him much of his previous popularity: His vote total proved the lowest of his six national appeals.

In the 1948 presidential election, Thomas’s main target was former vice president Henry Wallace, who had left the Democratic Party to run as an antimilitarist, radical candidate for president on the Progressive ticket. Thomas became convinced that the Progressive Party was controlled by communists, with Wallace serving as a naïve front man capable of such self-damning errors as describing the Soviet Union as a “directed democracy.” When Thomas received less than 100,000 votes despite a spirited campaign, he became convinced of the futility of socialist attempts to attract nationwide electoral support, and renounced further office seeking. In 1952 and 1956, the party ran a Pennsylvania state legislator, Darlington Hoopes, for the presidency. He received twenty thousand votes in 1952, two thousand in 1956; no socialist has since sought the presidency.

With his buoyant energy and sparkling mind, Thomas remained dynamically active through the 1950’s and early 1960’s. He resigned from various official posts in the Socialist Party in 1955, at the age of seventy-one, but remained its most magnetic advocate. The major party candidate to whom Thomas was most sympathetic during this period was Adlai E. Stevenson, with whom he shared a Princeton background and eloquent speech making. The American statesman with whom he disagreed most vehemently was John Foster Dulles, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, also a fellow Princetonian as well as fellow Presbyterian. Thomas scorned Dulles’s appeasement of demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy; the bellicosity of his opposition to mainland China; his dismissal of Eleanor Roosevelt from the United States delegation to the United Nations; and his discharge of liberals and socialists, no matter how talented, from foreign service posts.

Thomas remained a morally consistent critic-commentator on American politics to the end of his life. He voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, but with little enthusiasm for either candidate. In the former year, his favorite was an old friend, Hubert H. Humphrey, who lost the Democratic nomination to Kennedy. The Bay of Pigs fiasco shocked Thomas into an outraged telegram of protest, and thereafter he remained lukewarm through Kennedy’s one thousand White House days, favoring the president’s graceful style and careful separation of state from church, but worried about the moderate, cautious nature of Kennedy’s liberalism. He voted for Johnson mainly to vote against the right-wing Barry Goldwater.

Though plagued by arthritic legs and a minor heart ailment, Thomas maintained a strenuous lecturing, debating, and writing schedule in the early 1960’s, keeping in the fast lane of what his friends called the “Thomas Track Meet.” The only debating opponent who succeeded in spoiling his usually good temper was William F. Buckley, Jr., whom he regarded as a cold-blooded imperialist and self-righteous reactionary. Thomas’s preferred activity during his last years was spending several consecutive days as guest-in-residence on a college or university campus, not only lecturing but also making himself available as casual participant in bull sessions with students and faculty. On lecture platforms he would sometimes limp slowly to the podium, leaning on his cane, then address his audience with the opening line, “Creeping Socialism!”

By his eightieth birthday in late 1964, Thomas was cast in the role of Grand Old Man, admired and loved for his integrity, dignity, intelligence, and wit, given standing ovations at his appearances. When he returned to his birthplace for a birthday tribute, the local paper printed one letter critical of Thomas’s opposition to American military involvement in Vietnam. He was relieved, saying, “I feel better not to be too respectable.” In 1966, he shocked his oldest grandson, a pastor, by permitting Playboy to interview him at considerable length. Thomas expressed a frequent regret of his old age: that he had seen the American working class becoming increasingly middle-class in its materialism; this “dilution of labor’s down-the-line militancy has been one of the greatest disappointments in my life.” In 1965, ophthalmologists diagnosed his retinal arteriosclerosis; by 1966 he was legally blind, bent by his arthritis, and in pain much of the time. He never complained, however, and his voice retained its booming roar. He finished dictating his twenty-first book, The Choices, four weeks before his death in a nursing home a month after his eighty-fourth birthday.

Significance

Thomas devoted a long, honorable life to urging a largely uninterested American public to share his vision of Democratic Socialism as a solution to social inequities and injustices. He served as a goad and gadfly in the Socratic tradition of appealing to his country’s good sense and conscience. Some of the social welfare and civil rights legislation he sought was enacted into law during the administrations of Roosevelt and Johnson with Thomas given no or scant credit for having championed it. His great hope of building a strong socialist movement in the United States was never realized, and he left his party, under circumstances beyond his control, weaker at his death than when he had joined it in young adulthood.

However, Norman Thomas’s life can justly be called an extraordinary success story. He was a patrician moralist who maintained an unswerving passion for social justice, devotion to civil liberties, sympathy for the poor, deprived, and disabled, hatred of war’s wasteful slaughter, and faith in the ultimate wisdom of a free people. Profoundly reasonable and fair in temperament, he found expression for his evolving views first in humanitarian Christianity, then in a muted, non-Marxist Socialism. The personal esteem he gained was extraordinary: Thomas became not simply an adornment to hundreds of liberal and left-democratic causes but also an admirable member of the pantheon of great American dissenters that includes Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Debs, La Follette, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bibliography

Bell, Daniel. Socialism and American Life. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952. An incisive, lucidly written historical and sociological analysis, particularly useful for describing the background and development of Marxist socialism in the United States.

Duram, James C. Norman Thomas. Boston: Twayne, 1974. A concise study of Thomas’s books and pamphlets, with comprehensive notes and references.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Norman Thomas as Presidential Conscience.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 20, no. 3 (Summer, 1990): 581-590. Duram offers another look at Thomas’s significance in the realm of American politics, specifically the presidency.

Harrington, Michael. Review of two Thomas biographies in The Reporter 25 (November 9, 1961): 64-66. A leading young socialist whom Thomas befriended portrays him as a representative of the American Protestant drive for social justice and moral improvement.

Kutulas, Judy. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Making of Modern Liberalism, 1930-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. This history of the formative years of the American Civil Liberties Union also discusses Thomas’s work with the organization.

Rosenberg, Bernard. “The Example of Norman Thomas.” Dissent 11 (Fall, 1964): 415-422. A review of two Thomas biographies. Rosenberg cogently analyzes Thomas’s place in contemporary American society and urges fulfillment of Thomas’s vision of a better world.

Seidler, Murray B. Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1967. A scholarly biographical-critical study that focuses on Thomas’s successes and failures as leader of the Socialist Party.

Swanberg, W. A. Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976. A vivid, well-written biography that emphasizes the warmth and courage of Thomas’s character. Includes many illustrative photographs, but often gets so immersed in details that it loses sight of the larger ideological terrain.

Thomas, Norman. “When Cruelty Becomes Pleasurable.” In Hiroshima’s Shadow, edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz. Stony Creek, Conn.: Pamphleteer’s Press, 1998. Thomas’s essay is included in this anthology of literature critical of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.

Walker, Samuel. In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU. 2d ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. This history of the American Civil Liberties Union explores Thomas’s role in the organization’s development and mission.