Notebook: The Example of Norman Thomas

...Perhaps he should have been lax when he was firm and firm when he was lax...

...Then came the war which propelled Thomas out of his pulpit for good, and plunged him into pacifism and socialism, movements which that war almost certainly doomed to failure...

...He chose to embrace socialism and join a dissident little political party that had already seen its glory days...

...Most people who have known him have loved the man while eschewing his principles...

...They seem largely to have agreed with the H. L. Mencken of 1948 who declared that it was "a rare and exhilarating pleasure" to hear Thomas, the only presidential candidate that year to strike Mencken as being a "really intelligent and * Murray Seidler, Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel...

...The quips he made in '48 about Truman and Dewey (Truman asking his speech writers, "What's it going to be tonight...

...After Pearl Harbor Thomas adopted a position of "critical support" for the war—thereby shocking and losing pacifists without gaining any new adherents...

...There was never any prospect of his election—to office, that is...

...Was Thomas' incapacity to handle internal schisms responsible for all the bitterness of those years, the dissipation of energy, the scar tissue that would not heal...

...Success was not a goal in our family...

...On a stretcher," Thomas would add...

...Tocqueville contended that only with a multiplicity of such organizations could democracy be secured and preserved...

...This quality helps one understand that character which so many find very nearly exemplary...

...Yet this too reflects favorably on the man, for it is said that he too frequently allowed himself to be deceived by assuming that the integrity of others was as great as his own...

...Nevertheless, there is just enough poignant truth in his witticism to make it infinitely sad that through all these decades such a man should have been allowed to run for president, governor, senator, mayor and never win...

...Each faction thought it knew best how to attain the cherished goal...

...A majority of the delegates likewise endorsed that misbegotten manifesto...

...But he fails to explain why...

...Why did socialism fail to catch fire in the United States...

...But Thomas sympathized with their zeal, and felt that time and experience would tone down their leftwing dogmatism...

...Then, in 1914, all hell broke loose...

...Having learned the lesson that "our various reform efforts were, in the words of the familiar simile, like bailing out the tub while we kept the faucet running," Thomas was ripe for socialism...

...That there were many liberal isolationists willing to do likewise in no way absolves him of a cardinal blunder...

...in a quasi-clerical capacity, he was able to see much of Asia, and there, starting with a view of empire much like Kipling's, he learned to despise colonialism...

...And in Debs, Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger, American Socialism could claim an attractive group of leaders...

...As for the young men, far from being "admiring and uncritical" of Thomas, they were hypercritical— and usually on flimsy grounds...

...But in another year or two, with the Moscow Trials, Thomas took the full measure of Soviet totalitarianism— of which he became a principle scourge and to which he consistently offered a democratic alternative...

...Controversy swirled mainly around a resolution called "Declaration of Principles," drawn up by a Militant, some of whose passages appeared to be sounding a Bolshevik clarion call...

...His own passion for peace, based partly on a mistaken conviction that war would totalitarianize the United States, led him to his lowest fortunes...

...What is our democracy worth...

...For years Thomas appears to have known more about local conditions by maintaining direct ties with local activists than anyone else in the party...

...If so, then in helping to build the Civil Liberties Union, the League for Industrial Democracy, the Post-War World Council, the Workers Defense League, SANE, The American Committee on Africa, Spanish Refugee Aid, Inc., and many more —all intrinsically valuable—we begin to see the magnitude of his contribution...

...But how many of us see by his light...

...In the thirties, most of the older men in the Party were Old Guardists, who elevated inactivity to the dignity of a theory...

...Murray Seidler, the more scholarly and detached, if less intimate, of two biographers,* dubs Thomas a "respectable rebel," and sums him up as a "successful failure...

...Norman Thomas perpetuated this politically permissive attitude within his own family...

...Of those who remained some were pro-war, others anti-war...

...It seemed to them that the rest of their vision would also soon unfold, and that, with proper tactics, socialism was within their grasp...

...part socialist, part anarchist, part pacifist, part agnostic," went to prison under barbarous conditions, subsequently became chairman of the War Resisters' League, continued unremittingly to struggle for peace, and flirted with but never joined the Socialist Party...

...In his thirties Norman Thomas ceased to be the Reverend Thomas...

...Norman Thomas, in all his strenuous campaigning, never ran for office...

...Most of us agree that he was far more correct then than we were...

...So is the general collapse that followed...

...The vain effort to grapple with overwhelming social problems at a Settlement House level made many a pre-professional English or American social worker conclude that total change was necessary...

...socialists had reason to feel vindicated...

...The War and the Red scares of 1919-20 left their mark...

...He is "elect" in the way of Isaiah and Micah, a prophet among us to chide us when we do wrong and to show us the light...

...All the while he was reading widely, a habit with which he is still afflicted...

...The Thomas family crisis must have been very acute...

...It tore American socialism apart from 1930 to 1940...

...Here is Bryn J. Hovde, former president of The New School for Social Research, echoing many others on Thomas: His function in our public life has been that of planting doubt where other leaders thought they had implanted certainty, that of arousing controversy about alleged divine inspiration in economics, that of holding up, always with hands of glowing utterance, the shape of a better world than that we have...

...That a socialist should be excluded from the formal exercise of power, while being celebrated on all sides, is somewhat less puzzling than why this man should have become a socialist at all—for there can be little doubt that he could have made his mark in conventional politics...

...All the same, Thomas has been taken to task severely enough throughout most of his life, from left, right and center, outside and inside a party historically given over to factionalism —when not engaged in the more serious business of fratricidal warfare...

...That the powerful Socialists of Europe betrayed their principles and that Thomas stood by them, isolating himself from chauvinists of every stripe, is a matter of historical record...

...Well, both biographers assert that his otherwise superb speeches suffer from over-rapid delivery...

...How shall we make it apply to our social, industrial, and political problems...

...cratic centralism") have helped...

...With another World War in the offing, many interventionists dropped away (quietly, in deference to Thomas, as part of a "silent split...

...The conflict, further complicated by tension between foreign-born and native members, and sectional rivalries, as well as Thomas' determination not to be a mere figurehead, had been simmering for some time...

...Their soldier Brother Ralph wrote to Norman in February, 1918, "I am sorry we don't agree in this, the biggest affair of our lives, but you know I respect your courage of conviction and idealism...

...Thomas does not exaggerate when lie observes, "I entered the party just as everyone else was leaving...

...What causes someone with such a life history to invite trouble, indeed to court it by defying the gods of his society...

...There is now no reason to believe that it would...

...Thomas found himself in full sympathy with neither faction, and failing in strenuous efforts to reconcile them, finally sided with the Militants, an act symbolized by his vote in favor of their Declaration...

...Nor is there a breath of skepticism, let alone radicalism in the college student, Princeton-bred and insulated from hard realities, who does his stint as an old-fashioned social worker, becomes a seminarian and finally, a clergyman—albeit of the liberal persuasion...

...Not that Thomas is a saint...

...These contingents, subtly subdivided in ways that no longer bear recounting, made up the two big factions and produced the great split of 1936 which decimated the Socialist Party beyond hope of recovery...

...In 1907, shortly after graduation from Princeton, he took a trip around the world...

...Still a Republican, but greatly disturbed by the difference between life as he saw it and as he had been taught to see it, Thomas by 1912 had registered as a Bull Moose Progressive...

...Fortunately, it was a passing aberration...

...A solid substratum of tolerance, then, underlay all differences among the Thomases over several generations...

...Let us glance at some of the prevailing circumstances...

...This shamed them into re-electing him—without damping the fires of discord...

...The Socialist standard bearer really came to life only in discussing issues...

...And the Militants...

...It cannot be denied that Thomas was briefly, if not very seriously, mis taken about Bolshevism and Stalinism, nor that Louis Waldman and other representatives of the Old Guardists were, in this respect, right...

...Whereupon, the Old Guard withdrew...

...The list of reasons is a long one (the Russian Revolution, Fascism, the New Deal, the Second World War, the conservatism of American labor, its comparative well-being, and so on), but none was as profoundly shattering as the Great War...

...There were murmurings about that foreignborn New York Jew, which prompted Hillquit to tell the delegates: "I apologize for being born abroad, for being a Jew, and for living in New York...

...Norton...

...None of the usual cliches applies...

...It is hard to resist the conclusion that just those elements in his makeup which militated against election to office made it certain he could leave a great impact upon the nation...

...A biographer of Debs, David Karsner, intoned in 1924, "It becomes increasingly clear as the Socialist Party steps into the shadows, that it was a one-man organization a view interminably repeated since Thomas's formal assumption of leadership in 1928...

...Young Norman was an all-American boy, an animal lover, much interested in sports, outgoing, a booster...

...His brother and life-long soul mate, Evan, himself a pacifist, recalls, .. We were brought up to be good...

...The handful of Socialists who favored war stayed with their few confreres who were against it in a miniature of the "all-inclusive party" that Thomas had once dreamed of creating...

...To face it would be to recognize that he is not a prophet with premonitions of doom for mankind in some vague and indefinite future, but a man devoted to saving us from race suicide right now...

...A great naivete in personal relations is the commonest criticism one hears nowadays...

...The pamphleteering, the cruel in-fighting and the passionate speechifying that ensued have been amply documented from every poina of view...

...But there is a final fillip to the story that should not be forgotten...

...When Thomas insists in 1964 that the basic problems to which socialism ad• dressed itself remain unsolved, he is advancing an elementary truth which few Americans care to face...

...And yet, and yet — the party was hideously undone by factionalism...

...Lending his good name to America First and its bigots only demeaned him, for no cause could justify this unnatural alliance...

...it has dogged him throughout his career...

...We have to do with a complex paradox which tells us perhaps as much about ourselves as about Norman Thomas...

...We may say, in the jargon of social science, that Thomas' relatively late change is an example of radical, adult, but not entirely discontinuous "resocialization...

...Six times the presidential nominee of his party, Thomas has withheld his name from the ballot since 1948...

...The virtues everywhere ascribed to Thomas are in very short supply among politicians, and we have shamelessly wasted them...

...Thomas for the most part occupied a centrist postion between his party's left-wing and its right-wing...

...The canonization of Norman Thomas is no substitute for the fulfillment of his vision, and celebration of his character no substitute for acting upon his truth...

...The only pertinent question remains: would it have made any difference...

...Thus when he opposed American entry into the Second World War, it was not for doctrinal reasons...

...So the route was classically Fabian: from a privileged position, through "poverty, filth, and vice" in the metropolis, to Christian, or at least a greatly muted Marxist Socialism...

...With both wings gone, the Socialist Party could hardly be expected to soar...

...There is no end to the tributes, and no doubt about their accuracy...

...Democratic Socialism in 1914 missed a tremendous opportunity of a sort which never could return again...

...There is no ectoplasmic presence in anything Thomas ever says, for one reason because he cannot afford ghost writers, and for another, because he finds them morally offensive...

...If, twenty years later, the Liberal Establishment could be made to read those speeches and to compare them with the productions concocted for Roosevelt and Dewey, the effect would only be embarrassing, and just possibly, chastening...

...He has been taxed, notably by Daniel Bell, for not going along with the Old Guard (a few of whose remanants rejoined the Socialist Party in 1957) and mercilessly ridiculed as a phony socialist, notably by the Trotskyist intelligentsia that entered his party in bad faith in 1939, only to break off another chunk of the membership (and some of its remnants rejoined the Socialist Party in 1957...

...To this indictment, Fleischman offers a convincing rebuttal: To a certain extent, Bell's charge that Thomas preferred the company of younger men in the Party is correct...

...There were some Old Guard leaders, however, whom Thomas not only respected but warmly liked, such as B. Charney Vladeck and Abraham Shiplacoff...

...Seidler, by contrast, credits Thomas with reawakening the party through personal communication between various locals and national headquarters, and doing "yeoman service...

...Today, he views the campaign of 1944 as the most satisfy...

...As both Seidler and Fleischman make clear, the decisive experience took place over a period of ten years in the slums of New York City where Thomas and his bride—even less of a proletarian than he — devoted themselves to ameliorating the woe around them...

...It ought therefore to surprise no one that a socialist leader in America should be universally honored as an elder statesman...

...1964...

...At the National Convention of 1932, an attempt was made to oust Morris Hillquit as national chairman, and some of the grounds used by his opponents, at least by innuendo, smacked of anti-Semitism...

...It would seem that the role he played exacerbated a bad situation...

...he is dear to them, but they are no more heirs of his legacy than the public at large...

...Thomas could always laugh, not least at himself, and though often grim and stern, he has never been subject to fanaticism, the ideologue's occupational disease...

...As one of those youngsters, I can testify that Thomas was right about our development...

...Thus the hyperactive conscience, if not all its elements, did have roots in a specific background which, when coupled with later experience, flowered into the personality we know...

...he never sought to impose socialism on his children...

...But a middle-class Presbyterian reared in Marion, Ohio...

...and Dewey pictured as a candidate "clad each day in a pair of platitudes") apply as well to scores of political opponents Thomas has bested simply by speaking for himself...

...In the wreckage of World War I we may find the remains of socialism, a shriveled token of international brotherhood...

...The son and grandson of min isters, he too was destined for the cloth...

...Of the elder Thomas' four tall sons, two had no great scruples about military service, the other two conscientiously objected to it...

...I can hardly walk...

...Asked recently if he would run in 1964, he replied, "Run...

...First of all, a millennial spirit and an apocalyptic atmosphere...

...He is criticized both for his intransigence and for his latitudinarianism, and maybe each in its time was inappropriate...

...There is no recorded rebellion at adolescence, no tempestuous rejection of parental beliefs, neither of the religious orthodoxy nor the conservative Republicanism that Thomas imbibed as a boy...

...Torn many ways, the party nonetheless did unusually well in 1932, an electoral peak for Thomas which must have thrown a little scare into FDR, who appropriated some planks from the Socialist platform...

...Soon after war broke out, Thomas recalls, "Socialists were killing socialists as cheerfully, or docilely, as Christians were killing Christians...

...To proclaim that Soviet Russia, for all the liberals' renewed infatuation with it, was still a slave state...

...Surely not much...

...How should Thomas have comported himself in this whirlpool...

...Are we preparing well for national safety in peace or war when so many of our workers cannot even under favorable conditions make the proper living wage...

...He was a tireless and apparently effective fundraiser...

...The Old Guard no sooner deserted the Socialist Party than it joined the American Labor Party— which was dominated by the Communists, who never managed to infiltrate Norman Thomas' Socialist Party except as spies...

...Who else was there to excoriate the President for violating the tights of Japanese-American citizens when they were transported to our very own concentration camps...

...Debs had not long to go, his last years were clouded, and few thought the party could outlive him...

...Evan, accurately described by Seidler as "an eccentric blend...

...They considered themselves "more revolutionary" than Thomas and better theoreticians...

...He points to his own irascibility and impatience (if only to offset the many encomia which sound to him like premature obituaries...

...Later, with the professionalization of social work and the conversion of many "angels of mercy" into "snoopy civil servants," a narrower psychiatric emphasis took over...

...civilized man...

...Syracuse U. Press...

...With the depression, there was a big spurt in membership, which increased the distance between hotheads and coolheads...

...Most of them objected to Thomas' moderation—until they drifted to the New Deal, and shyly or ardently espoused it...

...And hardly a moment too soon...

...Even his loyal campaign manager in 1944 and 1948, Harry Fleischman, scores Thomas for having been bored by organizational details...

...He who had spurned common action with the Communists, for a brief time consented to common action with the America First Committee...

...Harry Fleischman, Norman Thomas: A Biography...

...What else is wrong with Thomas...

...In a class letter he wrote: With all my love for Princeton, 1 sometimes think, unjustly of course, that my education really began when I left there and that not the smallest part of it has been the life here in this district...

...Such is the fate of Norman Thomas, and not just now as he approaches his eightieth birthday...

...In the thirties capitalism was actually crumbling...

...He was elected to be sure, or to use the language of his profession "elect," to serve greater purposes than administration...

...Would another stance (short of Lenin's disastrous "demo...

...The labels fit...

...That unconditional surrender was an insane policy...

...Roosevelt carried it out," New Dealers used to say...

...Our pride in him stems very largely from his avoidance of pitfalls constantly trapping liberals...

...Even when leavened by charisma within a big opportunistic party (say, by an Adlai Stevenson), intelligence and urbanity are not conducive to victory at the polls...

...In public speeches, he would stir his audience and then all too often forget to urge them to join the Socialist Party...

...Bernard Kops has said: "Take one Jew and already you have an opposition party...

...newcomers, keen on innovation and bristling with verbal radicalism, pitted against a more conservative Old Guard that had long controlled party policy and machinery...

...ing of his career...

...Take one, and already you probably have a more famous Marionite: Warren G. Harding, the cipher who played at being President...

...In a monograph on American Socialism, Bell pinpointed two grave flaws in Thomas as a party leader: he distrusted his own generation and surrounded himself with younger men who allegedly stood in an admiring and uncritical relation to him...

...Not, surely, on account of the votes cast for him, a paltry 80,518, but because of the sensible message he alone carried to the people...

...After the First World War, Thomas emerged as leader of a Socialist Party in the doldrums...

...Ferment in the party did not abate...

...on a strictly organizational level...

...A second factor, which Seidler and others have emphasized, was generational conflict: younger people in the party versus older people...

...Actually, he continues to walk at rather a brisk pace, on and off picket lines, and from one platform to another, still alert, still responsive, still animated by an irresistible spirit of gaiety...

...It is a sort of school which sets hard lessons and asks some difficult questions...

...Thomas had abandoned absolute pacifism by backing the Loyalist cause in Spain...

...The year Thomas voted for Teddy Roosevelt, Debs polled nearly a million votes, and in this same year, Seidler reminds us, the Party was able to boast that 1,039 of its members were public officeholders, including 56 mayors, more than 300 aldermen, some state legislators, and a member of Congress...

...He speaks and he speaks, not only through his miniscule political party, but through the many voluntary organizations he has had a hand in founding...

...In the forties, it nearly perished of blows more crushing than those that had already been absorbed...

...Seidler attributes this oratorical weakness to Thomas' habit of talking fast into the telephone during the period when A. Mitchell Palmer's boys might be listening, and Fleischman to the Party's penury which required Thomas to cover everything over the radio in a breathless fifteen minutes...

...As an organization man, it is gener ally admitted, Thomas was no great shakes...

...That war, to which most Americans rallied with a romantic enthusiasm such as they were never again to know, caused widespread departures from the Socialist Party...

...Still able to exhilarate and even electrify an audience as spokesman for a minority party, Thomas has naturally never held public office...

...The Thomas of 1936 was a trifle "soft on Communism," although not soft enough to satisfy those of his comrades in the Socialist International who would have liked to support the Popular Front...

...And if the issue is not just tactical but moral, then Thomas' stature is not diminished, while that of his critics is...

...1961...

...Whereupon, most of them went out to vote for a Republican or a Democrat, too often neither intelligent nor civilized...

...If Thomas hit bottom in 1940, he may well have reached his high point four years later...

...The party had a vigorous youth movement, thirteen daily newspapers, 232 English and 36 foreignlanguage weeklies, twelve monthlies, a copious flow of pamphlets, growing strength among students and in organized labor where the Socialist Max Hayes gave Gompers a real run for the AFL presidency...

...Perhaps...

...Those who at the time squabbled over esoteric dogma can scarcely remember what it signified, but all are agreed that their faction-fighting bordered on savagery...

...It had grown steadily and flourished from 1901 to 1912...

...Three factions, "Thomasites," young Militants and Old Guardists crystallized as they moved toward a painful showdown in the national convention of 1936...

...To an extraordinary degree, he has become what his campaign literature always claimed for him: the incorruptible watchdog of American society...