AN AMERICAN CONSCIENCE

Utopia is not a republic of fraternity to be taken by violence. Neither can it be taken by men who have no vision of better things for mankind.

--Norman Thomas, 1963

HE spent most of his 84 years tugging at America's lapels, beseeching it to share his vision of better things. Goad and gadfly to his country's conscience, he espoused a variety of socialism that was questioning rather than doctrinaire, Christian rather than Marxist, democratic rather than totalitarian. Much of what he sought in social welfare legislation was eventually adopted by those who once recoiled from his proposals. "The ultimate token of approval," he said with rueful satisfaction, "is that the Democrats and Republicans have stolen my thunder." Son of a Presbyterian minister, valedictorian of Princeton's class of 1905, six times Socialist candidate for President of the U.S., Norman Mattoon Thomas made an his toric mark. He died in his sleep last week in a Long Island nursing home.

Thomas was born and grew up in Marion, Ohio, and earned pocket money delivering the Marion Star, published by Warren Gamaliel Harding. After Princeton, he did social work at Manhattan's Spring Street Presbyterian Church and Settlement House, traveled around the world, took a divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary, and then became pastor of an East Harlem church. His work in city slums led him to socialism, and he became a pacifist during World War I, thus alienating many of his patriotic friends and earning enduring hostility from others. He entered politics in 1924 as the Socialist and Progressive candidate for Governor of New York. After the death of Eugene V. Debs in 1926, he became leader of the U.S. Socialist Party and two years later ran for President for the first time. In 1932, at the depth of the Depression, he polled 884,649 votes; in his last race in 1948, he got only 139,572.

Socialism and Rheumatism. He was an indefatigable barnstormer, crisscrossing the U.S. in each of his presidential campaigns, riding the upper berth of a Pullman sleeper to save money, lecturing in the booming, resonant tones of a prophet. As early as 1928, he argued for old-age pensions and public works, the five-day week and unemployment insurance. When Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal made those ideas law, socialism's appeal to the U.S. working class began to diminish. "It was often said," Thomas reflected, "that Roosevelt was carrying out the Socialist Party platform. Well, in a way it was true --he carried it out on a stretcher."

Because he was such a firm democrat, Thomas found no interest or enchantment in Soviet-style Communism. "The thing which is happening in Russia," he said after a visit during the 1930s, "is not socialism, and it is not the thing which we hope to bring about in America, or in any other land." On another occasion, he noted: "I daresay I have denied Communism, fought against it, more than most people, because at my end of the political spectrum one must make it clear that standing for democratic socialism is quite another thing from standing for Communism." He gleefully told how he instructed three House Un-American Activities Committee agents in that difference. "They'd previously been unable to distinguish between socialism and rheumatism," he said. "I assured them that we didn't want to overthrow their Government, and they went away happy."

Communism and Capitalism. Russian Communists were as hostile toward Thomas as he was toward them. Leon Trotsky once rumbled: "Norman Thomas called himself a socialist as a result of misunderstanding." But the real issue, Thomas insisted, was not Communism against capitalism. It was democracy against totalitarianism. In 1959, he ventured a prediction for the future of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.: "If we and the Soviet Union escape war in the next 30 years, we'll both wind up practically with the same economic system. I emphasize the word economic. It will be the welfare state writ large. I hope we won't lose our democracy, and I hope Russia will get more."

Thomas' pacifism wavered during the Spanish Civil War, when he sympathized with the loyalist opposition to Franco. But it led him to speak against the U.S. intervention in World War II before isolationist America First audiences, because he feared that entry into the war would bring about fascism at home. Later, however, he concluded that an Axis triumph would condemn the world to the "lowest circle of hell," and gave "critical support" to the war. But when the U.S. used the atomic bomb against Japan, he cried out in protest.

He worked earnestly for disarmament, and toward the end of his life he was still dauntlessly touring the U.S., a rumpled figure on college platforms and at socialist gatherings. Thomas opposed the U.S. role in Viet Nam. "We must stop thinking that God has called us to be policemen," he said. "You never had a more high-minded intervener than Woodrow Wilson. But I don't notice it worked so well. Wilson wanted to be very righteous. You know, he felt that he and God thought very much alike."

Old Left and New. Yet he argued that war critics had a duty to offer realistic suggestions about how the U.S. might extricate itself from Viet Nam. As elder statesman of the Old Left, he viewed the New Left with some mistrust. Said Thomas: "I by no means denounce all civil disobedience, but some of the forms of it advocated and practiced by some members of the New Left seem to me to do more harm than good to the cause of peace."

In his last years he was tormented by arthritis, failing eyesight and a weak heart. Not long before his death, he reflected: "I suppose it is an achievement to live to my age and feel that one has kept the faith, or tried to. To have had a part in some of the things that have been accomplished in the field of civil liberties, in the field of better race relations, and the rest of it--that's the kind of achievement that I have to my credit, if any."

He concluded: "As the world counts achievement, I have not got much." Not all of the world agreed.

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