Thomas, Norman

THOMAS, NORMAN (1884–1968). The most noted leader of the US socialist movement after Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas was a frequent candidate for the presidency and, in later years, was widely regarded as the “conscience of America.” Born into a family of clergymen—his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were Presbyterian pastors—Thomas graduated from Princeton and was ordained at Union Theological Seminary in 1911. Influenced by the Social Gospel and his own ministry experience in the slums, he became a Christian socialist and antiwar pacifist. Editing the World Tomorrow, journal of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Thomas also worked with anticonscription organizations and the forerunner of the American Civil Liberties Union to support the rights of conscientious objectors.

Thomas entered the Socialist Party (SP) in 1918, avowing his libertarian commitments, and left the clergy. During the early 1920s he became associate editor of the Nation and editor of the short-lived Socialist daily New York Leader. In 1924 he entered the race for governor of New York and became a perennial socialist candidate. During the 1920s, Thomas also emerged as a major public spokesman for civil liberties and labor rights. Intervening in the Passaic, New Jersey, silk strike of 1926, he characteristically held a mass meeting in defense of strikers and was locked up for a “riot law” later declared illegal.

As a political candidate, Thomas won increasing respect within the liberal (and sometimes conservative) mainstream. His 1928 campaign for the presidency did little to revive the membership of a flagging SP, but he drew numerous intellectuals into the Thomas for President clubs. His 1925 and 1929 mayoralty campaigns in New York dramatized his attack on corruption, and inspired support among ministers, rabbis, and professors. His 1932 presidential campaign had a particularly dramatic effect on college students, on some of whose campuses a majority favored Thomas. He received 884,781 votes, far less than many socialists expected, but nearly the number Debs had received in 1912, and vastly more than any radical candidate would receive again in the next half-century.

The New Deal, many conservatives and liberals believed, carried out the Socialist program. (Thomas retorted that it had been carried out “on a stretcher.”) Many Socialist intellectuals and labor leaders soon defected to the Democratic Party. Thomas declined to oppose Fiorello La Guardia’s progressive campaign for New York’s mayor, himself joining the city’s Charter Revision Commission. By 1936, when Thomas polled less than 200,000 votes in his bid for the presidency, the grandest electoral hopes of the Socialists had passed.

Thomas struggled meanwhile to hold together an SP disintegrating into internal quarrels. Leader of the “Militant” faction, he opposed, successively, the conservative Old Guard wing of aging garment trades Socialists; ultraradicals, who mostly passed over into Communist movements; Trotskyists, whose entry he had encouraged in 1936, only to see paralyzing factional disaster; and finally those within the party who resisted Thomas’s basically anti-war approach (until 1942) toward the impending world war. Due in no small part to Thomas’s efforts, the SP emerged as a fighting organization with a solid weekly press (the Socialist Call) and aggressive if scattered activism in labor, student movements, civil liberties, race issues, and resistance to the militarization of American society.

Thomas himself continued to crusade, above all in civil liberties, on national and international scales. He became a selfless public figure who would defend even those (such as Communist Party leader Earl Browder, in 1940) bitterly opposed to him. Thomas appealed to presidents and dictators, sometimes successfully, for the safety of imprisoned political leaders. Fearlessly, he invaded Jersey City, challenging Mayor Frank (“I am the law”) Hague to arrest him. He faced vigilantes in Arkansas, sustaining arrest and beatings for his support of tenant farmers. During the Second World War, he appealed for justice toward Japanese Americans, for the continuance of civil liberties and the advance of civil rights in wartime.

His presidential poll diminished from the 1930s (116,796 in 1940, 80,518 in 1944, and 140,260 in 1948), Thomas turned after 1948 to supporting Democratic presidential candidates. Yet he did not endorse the “better dead than red” policies of the Cold War. He upheld the principles of peaceful coexistence, while generally condemning violations of freedom on both sides. In ripe old age, Thomas helped to found the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy and spoke out against the Vietnam War.

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., perhaps the only twentieth-century American (along with Debs) with equivalent moral credentials, sent a taped message to Thomas as King flew to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize: “I can think of no man who has done more than you to inspire the vision of a society free of injustice and exploitation.... Your example has ennobled and dignified the fight for freedom, and all that we hear of the Great Society seems only an echo of your prophetic eloquence.” Thomas suffered a stroke after returning home from delivering his final speech, for peace in Vietnam. From his hospital bed he dictated a testament to the SP convention that began, “Not for a minute do we need to assume that the human race is irrevocably damned....”

Fleischman, Harry. Norman Thomas: A Biography, 1884–1968. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969.

Gregory, Raymond F. Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter. Sanford, NC: Algora Publishing, 2008.

Johnpoll, Bernard K. Pacifist’s Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970.

Norman Thomas Papers, 1904-1967. Collection Overview. Archives & Manuscripts. New York Public Library. http://archives.nypl.org/mss/2975

Swanberg, W. A. Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1976.