Why Thomas Failed

...At the time of the Six Day War he went so far as to proclaim that the conflict "had been caused by Soviet-Arab provocations, and he supported the official Socialist party statement which was sympathetic to the Israelis...

...But there are good political and sociological reasons for this...

...co-author with Earl Raab, "The Politics of Unreason: Right-Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970" Bernard K. Johnpoll has taken on the unhappy yet important task of specializing in the politics of futility, to use the title of his excellent study of Poland's Jewish Socialist Bund...

...Although my own evaluation of Norman Thomas' activities would in many instances differ from John-poll's, Pacifist's Progress is an important book, particularly in the light of the revived attempt to build an American radical movement...

...In his new book, Johnpoll extends his examination of this politics of futility to Norman Thomas and the American Socialist party...

...Johnpoll criticizes Thomas for often following rather than leading the more doctrinaire elements in the party, but it is difficult to demonstrate that Thomas could truly have improved its political fortunes had he acted otherwise...

...rather, it is an attempt to evaluate "his role as a political actor," the extent to which his policies fostered or hampered his manifest goal--the building of an American socialist movement...

...The New Left certainly shows less interest than any previous radical group in learning from history, but one hopes that some of its followers will consult this book...

...He blamed all this on Roosevelt's popularity...

...King apparently recognized that the politics of an East European minority community--one also comprising 10 per cent of the population--might be relevant to American blacks...

...A month later he died, at the age of 84...

...The life of Norman Thomas has much to teach activists who would change America in the directions he favored...

...Johnpoll's basic conclusion is that in this endeavor Thomas was a failure--not because he was never elected to public office, but because too often he led his party down narrow paths that reduced its membership, following, and influence on the national political mainstream...

...itself into a totalitarian society was clearly mistaken...

...And if the Trotskyists had entered as the result of a victorious fight on their behalf--a likely outcome--their chances of gaining large numbers of adherents, and even of taking over, would have been greater still...

...It is true, as Johnpoll points out, that socialist parties developed in Canada and many other countries while losing ground here...

...Following the election, he declared that he "was not unhappy at Humphrey's defeat...

...Although Thomas disagreed with the left-wing militants, he was reluctant to alienate the radical recruits, especially "the young intellectuals, who, he feared, would abandon the party if the Socialists did not 'revolutionize.' " His capitulation to the leftists lost the party much of its trade union strength and electoral bargaining power...

...For as he noted, the USSR was not capitalist, yet it had become a nationalist, imperialist, war-provoking power...

...If Thomas had opposed it, he would have seemed a prejudiced reactionary to many of his youthful "followers...

...He had always opposed a predominantly Jewish state, feeling it would lead Jews away from "liberal internationalism to narrow nationalism...

...shortly before his murder...

...In his later years, Thomas was also to change his views on Zionism...

...Probably the major mistake he and the Socialists made was to go the third-party route for so long...

...Like the Jewish Socialist Bund, the author contends, the American Socialist party kept many Left-oriented activists from their country's effective politics, so strengthening the conservatives...

...Indeed, at the end of 1936 the party had less than half the members it claimed in 1934, and Thomas had secured the least votes of any Socialist Presidential nominee since 1900...

...Many of Thomas' fears concerning our entry into the War proved unwarranted, as he subsequently acknowledged...

...Moreover, Thomas came to recognize that his life-long conviction that capitalism was the root cause of war in the modern age was wrong...

...Another self-inflicted wound in 1936 was the Socialist party's acceptance of the Trotskyists to membership...

...In January 1965 he called for immediate American withdrawal, a demand he was to repeat on many occasions thereafter...

...Perhaps Thomas' greatest political blunder, Johnpoll believes, was his opposition to American participation in World War II, an opposition stemming from the consistent pacifism that first led him to the Socialist party during World War I. Dissension over foreign policy resulted in a further membership decline, especially among Jews and Spaniards...

...it must continue the traditional method of "dialogue," of accumulating evidence to sustain a given interpretation that will in turn be countered by an alternative view...

...Yet the same can undoubtedly be said of any man who spent a lifetime taking political positions...

...The Trotskyists' recruiting success, particularly among members of the Young People's Socialist League (ypsl), exceeded their wildest dreams...

...The party demanded that its sympathizers, including many trade union leaders, renounce Roosevelt, maintaining that the major issue of the campaign was "socialism versus capitalism...

...And in 1963 he stated that his unwillingness to support a united prewar resistance to Hitler by the democratic powers was an error, too: "I failed to realize that vigorous action by France and Britain, with definite encouragement by America, would rather easily have checked the rearmament of Germany...

...Pacifist's Progress is not strictly a biography of the Socialist leader...

...With the wisdom of historical hindsight, the verdict must clearly be that Thomas was frequently wrong...

...By this time, though, the Trotskyists had effectively destroyed the party and the ypsl, for many who were opposed to them from the start dropped out, disgusted with the endless internal polemics...

...Touring Israel in 1957, however, he was particularly impressed by the government's efforts to integrate Jews from African and Asian countries, and he "was also convinced that Israel was moving in the direction of raising its Arab minority to a position of equality...

...The Trotskyists--previously organized in the Workers' party--came in under an agreement that they would not function as a faction...

...The admission of the Trotskyists in 1936, for example, was clearly a blunder, but the large majority of Socialists supported the move...

...This was an admitted disaster...

...Thomas ended his public career a bitter opponent of the Vietnam War...

...While that earlier book unfortunately attracted little attention from reviewers or from his fellow political scientists, it did interest Martin Luther King Jr...

...For the Jewish Socialist Bund, like several current black groups, insisted upon divorcing itself from the progressive, democratic elements in the majority sector--despite the fact that its brand of radical nationalism was secular and anti-Zionist...

...Johnpoll contends, however, that Roosevelt's enactment of many programs earlier proposed by Socialists was no excuse for Thomas' electoral strategy...

...In any case, he held, it was too late to consider a solution to the Middle East problem that would eradicate the Jewish State...

...He strongly backed Eugene McCarthy's campaign to end the war, and refused to endorse Humphrey after his nomination by the Democrats...

...Still, if political science is to be relevant, it cannot limit its investigations to verifiable hypotheses...

...Thomas' quest, Johnpoll argues, was in part doomed by his exacerbation of the party's early factional divisions, which culminated in the secession of the right-wing "Old Guard" in the mid-'30s...

...His often repeated prediction that the War would transform the U.S...

...Johnpoll's analysis, based on the hypothesis that Thomas' efforts to build a pure socialist movement were a political catastrophe, is testimony to the variety of insights this method can produce in the hands of an intelligent scholar...

...They kept the party in a constant state of turmoil, debating every possible issue of socialist policy...

...But in fact, as their leaders boasted later, they remained a cohesive group...

...And by thus preventing an oppressed minority from playing a significant role within the liberal or Left communities, the Bund contributed to the reactionary dominance in prewar Poland...

...Thomas could never fully accept politics for the halfway house it is--he always required a final goal, a Utopia, a heaven on earth...

...John-poll argues that this was an entirely predictable chain of events: By their earlier behavior and published statements the Trotskyists had given clear notice that their objective in joining the Socialist party was to take it over, or at the very least to disrupt it, after using it as a base for recruitment...

...As Thomas himself was to realize, the American electoral system--with its requirement that one man, rather than members of Parliament, be chosen to govern --effectively prevents the institutionalization of a multiparty system...

...Obviously, such evaluations are impossible to prove, no matter how cogent the arguments or how massive the data marshaled in their support...

...Even if they do not agree with the author's arguments, they may at least see that those who will not try to learn from the past are destined to repeat its errors...

...Inside of six months Thomas, who had supported their entry, decided to throw them out --an act accomplished at a special convention in 1937...

...This assessment may appear reasonable to some, but in my judgment Johnpoll exaggerates Thomas' causal role in the decline or dissolution of American socialism...

...Johnpoll writes: "Thomas' fatal weakness was his inability to recognize that politics was in effect the art of the possible, and this doomed him to failure...