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Norman Mattoon Thomas (November 20, 1884 – December 19, 1968) was an American Presbyterian minister, political activist, and perennial candidate for president. He achieved fame as a socialism and pacifism, and was the Socialist Party of America's candidate for president in six consecutive elections between 1928 and 1948.
After some settlement house work and a trip around the world, Thomas decided to follow in his father's footsteps and enrolled in Union Theological Seminary. He graduated and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911.Shannon, The Socialist Party of America, pp. 189–90. After assisting the Rev. Henry Van Dyke at the fashionable Brick Presbyterian Church on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, Thomas was appointed pastor of the East Harlem Presbyterian Church, ministering to Italian-American Protestants. Current Biography 1945, pp. 688–91. Union Theological Seminary had been at that time a center of the Social Gospel movement and liberal politics, and as a minister, Thomas preached against American participation in the First World War. This pacifist stance led to his being shunned by many of his fellow alumni from Princeton, and opposed by some of the leadership of the Presbyterian Church in New York. When church funding of the American Parish's social programs was stopped, Thomas resigned his pastorate. Current Biography 1945, p. 688. Despite his resignation, Thomas did not formally leave the ministry until 1931, after his mother's death.
It was Thomas's position as a conscientious objector that drew him to the Socialist Party of America, a staunchly antimilitarist organization. When party leader Morris Hillquit campaigned in the 1917 New York City mayoral election on an antiwar platform, Thomas wrote to him expressing his good wishes. To his surprise, Hillquit wrote back, encouraging the young minister to work for his campaign, which Thomas energetically did.Shannon, The Socialist Party of America, p. 190. Soon thereafter he himself joined the Socialist Party.Shannon, The Socialist Party of America, pp. 190–91. Thomas was a Christian socialist.Shannon, The Socialist Party of America, p. 191.
Thomas was the secretary (then an unpaid position) of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation even before the war. When the organization started a magazine called The World Tomorrow in January 1918, Thomas was employed as its paid editor. Together with Devere Allen, Thomas helped to make The World Tomorrow the leading voice of liberal Christian social activism of its day. In 1921, Thomas moved to secular journalism when he was employed as associate editor of The Nation magazine. In 1922 he became co-director of the League for Industrial Democracy. Later, he was one of the founders of the National Civil Liberties Bureau, the precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Thomas's political activity also included attempts at the US presidency. Following Eugene Debs's death in 1926, there was a leadership vacuum in the Socialist Party. Neither of the party's two top political leaders, Victor L. Berger and Hillquit, was eligible to run for president because of their foreign birth. The third main figure, Daniel Hoan, was occupied as mayor of Milwaukee. Down to approximately 8,000 dues-paying members, the Socialist Party's options were limited, and the little-known minister from New York with oratorial skills and a pedigree in the movement became the choice of the 1928 National Convention of the Socialist Party.
The 1928 campaign was the first of Thomas's six consecutive campaigns as the presidential nominee of the Socialist Party. As an articulate and engaging spokesman for democratic socialism, Thomas had considerably greater influence than the typical perennial candidate, but never achieved Debs's level of popularity, topping out at 2.23% of the vote in the realignment election of 1932. Although most upper- and middle-class Americans found socialism unsavory, the well-educated Thomas—who often wore three-piece suits and looked and talked like a president—gained grudging admiration.
Thomas frequently spoke on the difference between socialism, the movement he represented, and communism and revolutionary Marxism. His early admiration for the Russian Revolution had turned into energetic anti-Stalinism. (Some revolutionaries thought him no better; Leon Trotsky criticized Thomas on more than one occasion.)
He wrote several books, among them his passionate defense of World War I conscientious objectors, Is Conscience a Crime?, and his statement of the 1960s Social democracy consensus, Socialism Re-examined.
In April 1938, Thomas was the center of national controversy when he came to Jersey City, New Jersey to defend labor organizers' free speech and challenge the political machine of Mayor Frank Hague. Hague was a close ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt and controlled federal patronage in the state. Though denied a permit, Thomas came anyway to speak at an outdoor rally. The police arrested him as soon as he got out of his car. As the officers prepared to expel him from the city, Thomas quipped, "So this is Jersey justice". People across the political spectrum, including the 1932 and 1936 Republican presidential nominees, Herbert Hoover and Alfred M. Landon, criticized Hague for his suppression of free speech and Roosevelt for his silence about the incident. Thomas and Landon became good friends as a result of the incident..
In testimony to Congress in January 1941 he opposed the proposed Lend Lease program of sending military supplies to the United Kingdom, calling it "a bill to authorize undeclared war in the name of peace, and dictatorship in the name of defending democracy". He said that the survival of the British Empire was not vital to the security of the United States, but added that he favored helping Britain to defend herself against aggression. Facts on File: World News Digest, January 28, 1941.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, a bitter split took place in the Socialist Party regarding support for the war; Thomas reluctantly supported it, though he thought it could have been honorably avoided. His brother and many others continued their pacifist opposition to all wars.Swanberg, Norman Thomas, p. 260 Thomas later wrote self-critically that he had "overemphasized both the sense in which it was a continuance of World War I and the capacity of nonfascist Europe to resist the ".Thomas, A Socialist's Faith, p. 313.
Thomas was one of the few public figures to oppose President Roosevelt's incarceration of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor. He accused the ACLU of "dereliction of duty" when the organization supported the forced mass removal and incarceration.The ACLU national board supported the government and tried to stop a rogue chapter on the West Coast from going to court. "American Civil Liberties Union," Densho Encyclopedia (2013)For more detail see . Thomas also campaigned against racial segregation, environmental depletion, and anti-labor laws and practices, and in favor of opening the United States to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in the 1930s.
Thomas was an early proponent of birth control. The birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger recruited him to write "Some Objections to Birth Control Considered" in Religious and Ethical Aspects of Birth Control, edited and published by Sanger in 1926. Thomas accused the Catholic Church of hypocritical opinions on sex, such as requiring priests to be celibate and maintaining that laypeople should have sex only to reproduce. "This doctrine of unrestricted procreation is strangely inconsistent on the lips of men who practice celibacy and preach continence." The Abortion rights controversy in America, A Legal Reader, edited by N.E.H. Hull, William James Hoffer and Peter Charles Hoffer, 2004. p. 60
Thomas also deplored the secular objection to birth control because it originated from "racial and national" group-think. "The white race, we are told, our own nation—whatever that nation may be—is endangered by practicing birth control. Birth control is something like disarmament—a good thing if effected by international agreement, but otherwise dangerous to us in both a military and economic sense. If we are not to be overwhelmed by the 'rising tide of color' we must breed against the world. If our nation is to survive, it must have more cannon and more babies as prospective food for the cannon."The Abortion Rights Controversy, p. 61
Thomas actively campaigned for Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 presidential election. He was critical of Johnson's foreign policy, but praised his work on civil rights and poverty. Thomas called Johnson's opponent Barry Goldwater a "personable man with good stands on domestic issues" but also described him as "the greatest evil" due to his views on foreign policy.Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter; Raymond F. Gregory, 2008
Thomas's 80th birthday in 1964 was marked by a well-publicized gala at the Hotel Astor in Manhattan. At the event Thomas called for a cease-fire in the Vietnam War and read birthday telegrams from Hubert Humphrey, Earl Warren, and Martin Luther King Jr. He also received a check for $17,500 () in donations from supporters. "It won't last long," he said of the check, "because every organization I'm connected with is going bankrupt."
In 1966, the conservative journalist and writer William F. Buckley, Jr chose Thomas to be the third guest on Buckley's new television interview show, Firing Line. In 1968, Thomas signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War."Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", New York Post, January 30, 1968.
Also in 1966, Thomas traveled to the Dominican Republic along with future Congressman Allard K. Lowenstein to observe that country's general election. The two were leaders of the "Committee on free elections in the Dominican Republic", an organization based in the U.S. that monitored the election, in which Juan Bosch of the Dominican Revolutionary Party, affiliated with the Socialist International, was beaten closely but decisively by the conservative ex-president Joaquín Balaguer. Balaguer continued to govern the country on and off for the next 30 years. In the autumn of that year, Thomas received the second Eugene V. Debs Award for his work in promoting world peace.
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