Norman
Thomas,
the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born in Marion, Ohio, on 20th
November, 1884. He studied political science under Woodrow
Wilson at Princeton University and graduated in 1905.
Thomas did voluntary social work in New York before studying theology
at the Union Theological Seminary. Influenced by the writings of the
Christian Socialist movement in Britain,
Thomas became a committed socialist. Thomas
was ordained in 1911 and became pastor of the East Harlem Presbyterian
Church in New York City.
A pacifist, Thomas believed that the
First World War was an "immoral, senseless
struggle among rival imperialisms". His brother shared his views
and went to prison for resisting the draft. Thomas
joined with Abraham Muste, Scott
Nearing and Oswald Garrison Villard
to form the Fellowship of Reconciliation
(FOR). In 1917 Thomas, Crystal
Eastman and Roger
Baldwin established the National Civil Liberties
Bureau (NCLB).
In 1918 he founded and
edited the World Tomorrow and
two years later joined with Jane Addams,
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Upton
Sinclair to establish the American Civil
Liberties Union. As well as being associate editor of the Nation
(1921-22), he was co-director of the League
of Industrial Democracy (1922-37) and a frequent contributor
to its journal, The Unemployed
(1930-32).
Thomas, a member of the Socialist Party,
was its candidate for Governor of New York in 1924. After the death
of Eugene Debs Thomas became the party's
presidential candidate in 1928, 1932 and 1936. Although easily defeated,
Thomas had the satisfaction of seeing Franklin
D. Roosevelt introduce several measures that he had advocated
during his presidential campaigns.
Thomas
joined Burton K. Wheeler and Charles
A. Lindbergh in forming he America
First Committee (AFC) in September 1940 and soon
became the most powerful isolationist group in the United
States. The AFC had four main principles: (1) The United States
must build an impregnable defense for America; (2) No foreign power,
nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America; (3)
American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European
War; (4) "Aid short of war" weakens national defense at
home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.
The AFC
influenced public opinion through publications and speeches and within
a year had over 800,000 members. The AFC was dissolved four days after
the Japanese
Air Force attacked
Pearl Harbor on 7th December, 1941.
Although
previously a pacifist, Thomas now supported
United States involvement in the Second World War.
However, he was critical of some aspects of Roosevelt's policies,
including the internment of Japanese
Americans and big business control of war production.
Thomas was the Socialist Party presidential
candidate in 1940, 1944 and 1948. A strong critic of Soviet communism,
Thomas also denounced rearmament and the development of the Cold War.
Other issues associated with Thomas during the post-war period included
his campaigns against poverty, racism and the Vietnam War.
Thomas wrote several books on politics, including Is
Conscience a Crime? (1927), As
I See It (1932), A Socialist Faith
(1951), The Test of Freedom (1954),
The Prerequisites of Peace (1959)
and Socialism Re-examined (1963).
Norman
Thomas died on 19th December, 1968.
(1)
Norman Thomas, New
Republic (26th May 1917)
As conscientious objectors we turn to your journal because, more powerfully
than any other, it has expressed in subtle analyses our abiding faith
in humane wisdom. You have never countenanced the evil doctrine of
the brute coercion of the human will. You have preached and practised
the virtue of tolerance, the kind of tolerance for the lack of which
the state grows mechanized and conscienceless.
You
know something of the machinery of
unfair play. You understand the tyranny of sham shibboleths. You appreciate
the menace of military psychology. We appeal to you, strategically
situated as you are, to assist the cause of the conscientious objectors.
We beg you to note the following facts:
In the evolution of the
human mind we discover a gradually widening hiatus between physical
competence and intellectual moral competence. So deeply imbedded in
our life values is this distinction that we feel rather ashamed of
being too expert physically. The man of blood and iron does not appeal
to our finer perceptions as a being altogether worthy of our worshipful
attention. (The God whom we worship is neither a jingo nor a militarist.)
But Voltaire - he of the skinny shanks and the anemic face - what
exuberant pride wells up in the greatest and in the least of us at
the sound of that marvelous name! And soft-spoken Jesus - what fitting
tribute can the reeling world lay at the feet of him who died that
goodwill and loving kindness might assuage the hearts of inimical
men.
The complexity and richness
of life have permitted,
and increasingly so, the more or less
free play of all modes of energy. There are many men best adapted
by training and temperament
to the performance of physical acts
of heroism; there are some men more naturally
suited to the performance of intellectual
deeds of courage, while yet some others
shine in deeds of moral bravery.
Why sanction the inhuman
device of forcing
all manner of men into the narrowly specific
kind of devotion for which so many of
them are hopelessly unfit? Tolerance arises
from the existence of varying types of doers,
all willing to respect one another's special
competence. It is not too extreme to assert
that in wartime (as in peacetime) some
of the most heroic deeds are performed
by those who do not (and, if called upon,
would not) take up arms in defense of
the cause. There are other forms of bravery
than the purely military one. Let us be reasonable.
The one ineradicable fact
which noamount of official intimidation can pulverize out of existence
is that there is a type of man to whom (military) participation in
war is tantamount to committing murder. He cannot, he will not commit
murder. There is no human power on God's earth that can coerce him
into committing (what he knows to be) the act of murder. You may call
him sentimentalist, fool, slacker, mollycoddle, woman - anything "disreputable"
you please. But there he is, a tremendous fact. Shall he be maltreated
for his scruples?
Or shall he be respected (as his denders are) for his conscientiousness?
We cannot leave so momentous an issue to chance or to the cold machinery
of administration. Men of sensitive insight must help prepare a social
setting within America sufficiently hospitable to all conscientious
objectors.
It is good to remind ourselves
of our in- stinctive respect for conscientious objectors. When a man
is called to serve on a jury empaneled in a murder case, he may be
honorably excused from duty if he has conscientious objections to
the death penalty. When we think sanely we are not averse to honoring
the man of conscience provided he be an active friend of mankind and
not a mere ease-taker. The test of manhood lies in service; not in
one particular kind of service (suitable to one particular type of
mind and body) but genuine service genuinely rendered to humanity.
Hence the philosophic
value of tolerance. To keep alive genuine tolerance in wartime is
the greatest single achievement to which rationalists can dedicate
themselves. America is caught in this insidious entanglement; obsessed
with the tradition - the mere outward form and symbol - of liberty
of conscience, she has failed to realize the living need of a real
grant and a substantial practice of our vaunted freedom of conscience.
It is not the tradition we lack; only a vital belief in that tradition.
In times of precarious
peace, when the social classes wage an almost relentless warfare and
the daily grind of poverty and distress lays armies of the proletariat
low, life for the disadvantaged groups is made more or less livable
only by the thought that between them and their official superiors
certain constitutional and humane guarantees of tolerance exist as
safeguards of mutual understanding. There is room for difference of
opinion. There is a breathing space for discussion.
How desperate must the
social situation have become if large numbers of conscientious and
law-abiding citizens have begun to feel an appalling sense of uneasiness
in the presence of huge inscrutable forces, far beyond their power
of control or sympathetic understanding. Why this amazing disquietude?
The answer is simple and straightforward. There is no longer the sense
- so natural and dear to free men - of being able to appeal from manifestly
unfair decisions. Too many subordinate officials are being vested
with a tremendous authority over impotent human beings.
(2)
Statement issued by the
Norman
Thomas, Roger
Baldwin
and Crystal
Eastman
for the Civil Liberties Bureau
(2nd July 1917)
It
is the tendency even of the most 'democratic' of governments
embarked upon the most 'idealistic of wars' to sacrifice everything
for complete military efficiency. To combat this tendency where it
threatens free speech, free press, freedom of assembly and freedom
of conscience - the essentials of liberty and the heritage of all
past wars worth fighting - that is the first function of the AUAM
today. To maintain something over here that will be worth coming back
to when the weary war is over.
(3)
Norman Thomas, The Profit System and Unemployment, The
Unemployed (December, 1930)
Power driven
machinery makes it possible to support great populations in plenty.
It has changed the basis of our civilization from one of enforced
frugality to abundance. In spite of its mismanagement it has shortened
hours and in many cases lightened the burden of monotonous and back-breaking
toil. Yet under the the profit system the story of the progress of
machinery is literally written in tears and blood. And for every advance
step in technological progress the under dog has paid in the loss
of his job.
This is true because we have never asked: how can we use machinery
to provide more abundant goods and increase leisure for everybody?
Instead the profit seeking owners of factories have said: how can
we increase profits? It is easy to how that in the long run machinery
by making it possible to have more things makes possible more jobs
as well as shorter hours of labor. But men eat in the short run, and
in the short run the boss introduces a new machine in the hope of
making an immediately greater profit, which profit is very often realized
only by cutting down his payroll. The employer who does this is not
a villain. Under the profit system his business is to make profit.
He can't help it if that means giving some men the bitter leisure
of unemployment and speeding up others.
Only planned production for use, the abolition of parasitic ownership
and the increase of spending power in the hands of the masses of the
workers will end unemployment. I do not say that this way to end unemployment
is easy. In the long run it will have to take account of the whole
world and not merely just the United States. The final answer to unemployment
and to poverty is intelligent international Socialism. There is no
other way. Immediate remedies for some of the suffering of unemployment
will be good not only in themselves but because they help our progress
toward this goal.
(4)
In March 1942 Freda Kirchwey,
editor of The Nation
argued that the fascist press should be banned in the United States.
In a letter to Kirchwey, Norman Thomas objected to this point of view
(3rd April, 1942)
It is a rather
terrible thing that liberals should now be the spokesmen for a jittery
program which, if it means anything, can only be interpreted to mean
no criticism of the Administration except from us. In ten years or
less it won't be the people you want to suppress now who will be suppressed
and stay suppressed by your theory; it will be yourselves along with
many others, unless, indeed, you want to go farther than I think you
do in support of a Roosevelt totalitarianism. Don't forget that neither
Roosevelt nor anybody else is immortal. The principles once established
are apt to outlive men.
(5)
Fenner Brockway, Towards Tomorrow
(1977)
Norman
Thomas, succeeding a hero of my youth, Eugene Debs, was Socialist
candidate for the Presidency during one of my visits. I met him many
times and through the years we remained friends. He was originally
a minister of religion and still had the appearance of one, tall,
silver-haired, clean-shaven, domed forehead, a distinguished scholarly
figure. I found he was respected throughout America by members of
all Parties. I remember at a football match the spectators round me
discussed the election whilst waiting for the game to begin. "Thomas
is the best of the three, but he's got
no chance. I'm voting Roosevelt," said a man, and I was impressed
by the many who agreed. Thomas had a continuously developing mind.
On my first visit he was a typical Social Democrat of the Centre,
except that he was a pacifist. On my third visit he had moved far
to the Left. He was a pioneer in denouncing America's part in the
Vietnam War.
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