THE EXAMPLE OF NORMAN THOMAS

...What is our democracy worth...

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

...Take one, and already you probably have a more famous Marionite: Warren G. Harding, the cipher who played 228 at being President...

...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's Socialist party except as spies...

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

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

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

...In the '30s capitalism was actually crumbling...

...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...

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

...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...

...The only pertinent question remains, Would it have made any difference...

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

...Would another stance (short of Lenin's disastrous "democratic centralism") have helped...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...The labels fit...

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

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

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

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

...If, 20 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...

...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 civilized man...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

...But he fails to 232 BERNARD ROSENBERG explain why...

...We were brought up to be good...

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

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

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

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

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

...He was a tireless and apparently effective fund-raiser...

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

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

...Thomas for the most part occupied a centrist position 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...

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

...Whereupon the Old Guard withdrew...

...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...

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

...Of those who remained some were prowar, others antiwar...

...Well, both biographers assert that his otherwise superb speeches suffer from overrapid delivery...

...Today, he views the campaign of 1944 as the most satisfying of his career...

...Perhaps...

...on a strictly organizational level...

...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...

...This shamed them into reelecting him—without dampening the fires of discord...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...part socialist, part anarchist, part pacifist, part agnostic," went to prison under barbarous conditions, subsequently THE EXAMPLE OF NORMAN THOMAS 229 became chairman of the War Resisters' League, continued unremittingly to struggle for peace, and flirted with but never joined the Socialist party...

...Seidler attributes this oratorical weakness to Thomas's habit of talking fast into the telephone during the period when A. Mitchell Palmer's boys might be listening, and Fleischman attributes it to the party's penury which required Thomas to cover everything over the radio in a breathless 15 minutes...

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...In a class letter he wrote: With all my love for Princeton, I 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...

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

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

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

...I can hardly walk...

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

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

...them...

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

...Surely not much...

...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...

...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...

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

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

...In the '40s, it nearly perished of blows more crushing than those that had already been absorbed...

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

...The party had a vigorous youth movement, 13 daily newspapers, 232 English and 36 foreign-language weeklies, 12 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...

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

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

...Harry Fleischman, Norman Thomas: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1964...

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

...a view interminably repeated since Thomas's formal assumption of leadership in 1928...

...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, Princetonbred 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...

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

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

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

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

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

...His brother and lifelong soul mate, Evan, himself a pacifist, recalls...

...The vain effort to grapple with overwhelming social problems at a settlement-house level made many a preprofessional English or American social worker conclude that total change was necessary...

...He has been taxed, notably by Daniel Bell, for not going along with the Old Guard (a few of whose remnants 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) . He is criticized both for his intransigence and for his latitudinarianism, and maybe each in its time was inappropriate...

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

...And the Militants...

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

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

...After World War I, Thomas emerged as the leader of a Socialist party in the doldrums...

...234 BERNARD ROSENBERG...

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...The list of reasons is a long one (the Russian Revo230 BERNARD ROSENBERG lution, 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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...The virtues everywhere ascribed to Thomas are in very short supply among politicians, and we have shamelessly wasted * Murray Seidler, Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1961...

...There were murmurings about that foreign-born New York Jew, which prompted Hillquit to THE EXAMPLE OF NORMAN THOMAS 231 tell the delegates: "I apologize for being born abroad, for being a Jew, and for living in New York...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...The war and the red scares of 1919-20 left their mark...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...There is no ectoplasmic presence in anything Thomas ever says, for THE EXAMPLE OF NORMAN THOMAS 233 one reason because he cannot afford ghost writers, and for another, because he finds them morally offensive...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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