Jim's Mailings

Pacifist's Passion

NORMAN THOMAS and the Decline of American Socialism
PACIFIST'S PROGRESS by Bernard K. Johnpoll
PREFACE
Norman Herman Thomas was the hero of my childhood and youth. When my contemporaries were extolling the glories of Tom Harmon or Johnny Mize or Max Carey or if they had theatrical ambitions of Katherine Cornell, or Fred Alien or Leslie Howard, I was busy on street-corners singing the virtues of Norman Thomas and the placid revolution he exemplified. But that was many years ago. A war and an explosive peace which followed have exposed the dreams of my youth as nightmares or apparitions; in their stead have arisen new dreams, new hopes, and new lethargy. I am no longer a Socialist nor is the memory of Norman Thomas any longer quite so sacred to me. His philosophy appears today to be obsolete, even though this was not true when he espoused it. I suspect that Norman Thomas was no longer a Socialist in his latter days; his last book, Choices, far from seeming the work of a convinced Socialist, reads more like that of an ethicist pleading for the Golden Rule. Yet Thomas must be given his due. All his life, as he fought for civil liberties, for peace, and for an elusive ideal which he labeled democratic socialism, Thomas sought to improve the lot of "the least of these my brothers." He was a great, honest, and compassionate human being. Moreover, he was a man able to embody his views in action; he was a man who faced without fear a court injunction, an unfriendly crowd egged on by the corrupt mayor of Jersey City, or a lynch mob of Arkansas planters. He struggled without equivocation for what he believed to be the right. At times he erred, and being human he was less than eager to concede those errors. Yet, when I spoke with him in October 1963, he admitted that he had been wrong in his evaluation of communism and World War II, two of the major issues on which he took strong stands. If he had his life to live over again he would, he told me then, have changed some of his positions and, accordingly, some of his actions; but he would have followed the same path, for he believed he could do no other. He dedicated his life to peace, freedom, and justice, as he interpreted those terms, and he was then as much dedicated to these aspirations as he had been more than forty years earlier.
In its final assessment of Norman Thomas, after his death in December 1968, the New York Times called him a "mover and shaker" whose "moral fervor for social justice has contributed to a more just America." There can be no doubt that he was a "mover and shaker" or that he had great moral fervor. It was this moral fervor which led him into socialism, his own modified version of pacifism, and the struggle for civil rights and civil liberties. It was this same moral fervor which allowed him to attempt to influence the direction of his country during his fifty years of continuous political activity. Whether he succeeded is another matter and it is to this question that I address myself in this book.
INTRODUCTION
For forty years, from 1928 until his death in 1968, Norman Thomas and the American Socialist party were virtually synonymous. Yet except for a short period during the 1930's Thomas was not a .Marxist, though the party had long prided itself on its thoroughgoing Marxism. He was the political personification of the Protestant Social Gospel, in a party which included a great many Jews, Catholics, and nonbelievers; he was also an intellectual in a party which claimed to be of, by, and for the working class.
Thomas came to American socialism during World War I motivated by the poverty he witnessed in the neighborhood where he was a minister and by the Socialist party's opposition to the war. It was his pacifism that first led him into political action through his work with the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, the American Union against Militarism, and the No-Conscription League; yet Thomas, who opposed the use of force, allied himself in the Socialist party during the 1930's with a faction that accepted, or at least refused to oppose, the use of armed insurrection as a means for achieving socialism.
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Under Thomas's leadership the Socialist party withered and virtually disappeared. Internal disputes dominated the years he was its leader; and these disputes were at times sufficiently irreconcilable to rend the party with schisms. Each split had its own mass exodus of disaffected Socialists. And yet, despite the decline of the party's fortunes during his stewardship, particularly from 1932 to 1941, Thomas remained, and remains today, a popular figure in American political folklore. By the time of his death, it had become almost commonplace to give Thomas credit for many of the innovations, among others, social security, minimum-wage and maximum-hour laws, and public works, that were in fact enacted into law under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet these same reforms were propagated by the Socialist party campaigners at least as early as 1908, or more than ten years before Thomas joined the party.
What was Norman Thomas's role in the collapse and disintegration of the American Socialist party? And why has Norman Thomas been enshrined in the Valhalla of American political folk myths? These are two of the questions which this book will attempt to answer.
2
The political movement which Norman Thomas inherited was a mere shadow of its old self when he came to lead it in 1928. Organized in 1901 from a coalition of disparate regional and local Socialist organizations, the Socialist party ranged in ideology from dogmatic Marxist to Populist to municipal reformist to Christian ethicist; in political leadership, from big-city boss Victor Berger to the almost Christlike figure of Eugene Victor Debs, to the lackluster Marxian dialectician Morris Hill-quit to the revolutionary orator and organizer William Hay-wood. From the beginning, the party was rent with dissension. Ostensibly, disagreements were almost always over questions of tactics and theory, but in reality they were caused by clashes of personality. The founders of the Socialist party in 1901 brought their own organizations into the party with them. Adorns Hill-quit and most of the Easterners from New York and Boston brought the remnants of the anti-De Leon forces of the Socialist Labor party, who had split from the older organization when the vituperative, vindictive Daniel De Leon gained complete dictatorial control of it. Victor Berger and his Germanic followers in Milwaukee brought a political organization which included hundreds of members. The saintly though hardly erudite Gene Debs brought the remnants of the Social Democracy of America, the Utopian foster child of his nearly successful attempt at organizing an industrial union of all railroad workers. George Herron, fresh from his battles for academic freedom in Iowa, brought a goodly number of his fellow Social Gospeleers. (By 1908 there were an estimated three hundred ministers in the ranks of the Socialist party, a source of embarrassment to the .Marxists who relegated most clergymen to their own "materialistic" version of purgatory.) Other groups were involved as well; and, as the party developed, new factions arose continually, until the party was an unsteady coalition of minuscule sects each with its own prophet. Only rarely before 1918, however, did one group of
Thomas's role in the collapse and final Socialists purge another; feuding was kept "within the family." True, there had been some splits, some schisms, some "bloodletting," but this was rare. The ouster of the IWW's "Big Bill" Haywood from the national executive committee in 1913 for his defense of sabotage as a possible weapon in the class war was the most significant; but this hardly constituted a purge in the classic sense.1
If there was a dominant philosophy in the Socialist party during its pre-Norman Thomas years, it was a simplistic Marxism best exemplified by Hillquit's Socialism in Theory and Practice and the 1908 Declaration of Principles and Electoral Platform. The latter was basically a pedantic reiteration of the class-struggle thesis coupled with appeals for working-class political action aimed at ending the capitalist system. "Capitalism," it declared, "keeps the masses of workingmen in poverty, destitution, physical exhaustion, and ignorance." Therefore, the "wageworking class... has the most direct interest in abolishing the capitalist system." To prevent the working class from seizing power, the Socialist declaration proclaimed, the capitalists "must keep in their pay all organs of the public powers, public mind and public conscience." The Socialists insisted, in effect, that the government of the United States, and all other political parties, served as the executive committee of the capitalist class. There could be no ultimate freedom, the Socialists declared, until "class rule" was destroyed by the working-class victory which would "free all humanity from class rule" and would "realize the international brotherhood of man." A victory of this kind could only come when the workingmen elected a Socialist government.
But until the achievement of the Marxian Utopia, the Socialists proposed social and economic reforms which would alleviate the sufferings of the mass of the workers of the United States. These reforms included public works for the unemployed; legal restrictions on hours of labor; abolition of child labor; factory inspection; compulsory insurance against unemployment, old age, illness, accident, invalidism, and death; the graduated income tax; steep and graduated inheritance taxes, and the establishment of a separate Department of Labor.2 Although these demands were considered by most Socialists to be of only temporary importance, they were the basis for almost all campaigning; as a full-blown program, socialism was rarely, if ever, the theme of a campaigner's speech. Thus, the official call for a radical socialization of society, coupled with actual work aimed at reformation of the existing order, remained a hallmark of Socialist campaigning after the war, as well as during the early and most successful years of Thomas's leadership.
3
The Social Gospel movement was, to quote one of its historians, "the uniquely American movement toward the socializing and ethicizing of Protestantism." Its origins can be found in the social ethics of the Old Testament Prophets, particularly Isaiah, and in the social and ethical teachings of Jesus. Historically, both Jews and Christians had attempted to create a human society on earth which would be based on the Judeo-Christian ethic. Since the communism of the earliest Apostolic Christians, social redemption has been part of Christian doctrine. Certainly, it was among the dominant themes of the Puritans, who, rebelling against the socially-anesthetized formalism of the seventeenth-century Church in England, sought to build a new church and a new society in the New World.
The Social Gospel carried that tradition into industrial America of the latter half of the nineteenth and the first third of the twentieth centuries. Its immediate roots were primarily in New England Unitarianism, which "stressed the dignity and divine possibilities of man, the achievement of salvation through character . . . the unity and immanence of God, and the importance of the present life. . . ." The Social Gospel had other sources besides Unitarianism: the anti-slavery movement, particularly that part of the movement led by Wendell Phillips which saw in the economic or social exploitation of any human being a violation of Christianity; the liberalizing tendency in theology, best exemplified by such men as Frederick Maurice and Horace Bushell; the rising social consciousness among nontheologian scholars such as John R. Commons, Lester Ward, and Richard T. Ely; and the utopianism of Edward Bellamy and Laurence Gronlund.
Like the Socialist party, the Social Gospel was composed of several ideologies, ranging from philanthropism to socialism. Despite differences, however, a basic ideology permeated the movement. It was based on the passage in the Lord's Prayer, composed by Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Because the Social Gospeleers proposed that God's will be done on earth, they rejected as antithetical to Christianity the Augustinian assumption that life on this earth was merely transitory in preparation for some future existence in the City of God. It was on this earth, the Social Gospeleers insisted, that God's will should come to full fruition. In essence, the Social Gospel reasserted the basic Puritan "this worldliness," whose primary aim was the establishment of the "Kingdom of God on earth." Unlike their Calvinist precursors, however, the Social Gospeleers interpreted the "Kingdom of God" as a purely ethical society. Thus, to quote Socialist-Christian historian James Dombrowski, the "most prominent feature of the Social Gospel is its emphasis upon the saving of society rather than upon the salvation of individuals."
The Social Gospel was basically optimistic. It assumed that man was by nature good, that only the pressures of a venal society corrupted humanity. This assumption merely reiterated what most social scientists of the period were claiming. It led some of the Social Gospeleers to revolutionary conclusions (though not rebellion). Although some, possibly most, of the leaders of the movement were "liberals advocating the ethic of charity," there were some who believed that only a complete uprooting of the system, a full Socialist reconstruction of society, could bring about their dream of a Kingdom of God on earth. But even the most radical Socialist Christians were wedded to the concept of gradualism. This was natural in view of the pacifist nature of the religious base of the Social Gospel and the liberal Christian emphasis on moral persuasion, which was one of the keys to Social Gospel ideology.
The Socialist Christians agreed that a complete redistribution of economic, and hence of social, power was necessary if men were to live as brothers in the projected kingdom. They insisted that production for profit had to give way to production for use. They differed from their Marxian contemporaries primarily in the emphasis they placed on the means to be used to achieve their ends, and in their social origins. Whereas the Marxian Socialists were generally of working-class origin (although many of them rose into the middle class as attorneys, teachers, and physicians), most of the Social Gospel Socialists came out of the middle and upper classes, and almost all were ministers, publicists, or university professors.3 The working-class oriented Marxian Socialists were less interested in means than in ends; because they came out of the working-class, or were still in it, their primary interests were still basically working class, the achievement of higher pay, shorter hours, protection against unemployment, old age, illness, and improved work conditions generally, regardless of the methods used to achieve them. The Social Gospel Socialists, being further removed from the working class, never lost their interest in means. Immediate alleviation of economic distress, though important, was of less significance to them than the methods used to achieve it. Thus the Social Gospel Socialists were more involved with civil liberties and civic betterment movements than were their Marxian comrades. The Christian Socialists fought against corrupt unionists, for example, whereas the so-called Marxians were ready to support them as long as they could "deliver the goods" for their members. The two groups could thus work harmoniously together only under limited conditions in which means were not at issue.
Norman Thomas was a Social Gospel Christian Socialist.
4
In 1844, Wendell Phillips, one of Norman Thomas's heroes, was sorely tempted to become a practical politician in the small anti-slavery Liberty party. But he refused because: "The politician must conceal half his principles to carry forth the other half, must regard, not rigid principle and strict right, but only such a degree of right as will allow him at the same time to secure numbers. His object is immediate success." Phillips considered himself a moral reformer who worshiped truth: "his object is duty, not success. He can wait, no matter how many desert, how few remain; he can trust always that the whole truth, however unpopular, can never harm the whole of virtue.4 In sum, Phillips was reiterating the political truism that the practical politician must be willing to compromise to achieve his ends; the ideologue, whom he called a moral reformer, who has no expectation of achieving the goal he sets forth, need never compromise.
Like Wendell Phillips, Norman Thomas was a moral reformer, an ideologue. But, unlike Wendell Phillips he also thought himself a politician. Indeed, during his entire political career, he was faced with the unpleasant choice of being a political failure or of compromising his ideals.
5
Norman Thomas's best friend, Roger Baldwin, has described him as "a great denouncer, aroused to indignation by one injustice or another." Yet he was more than that, he was also a great advocate pleading for a society based on the Social Gospel and unwilling to settle for less. Thomas was a great orator, an evangelist preaching the gospel of a better world free of hunger and despair and war and injustice, a world where all men would be brothers cooperating with one another in building an ever better tomorrow.
Tall and thin, inclining toward the gaunt, Thomas looked every bit the Old Testament prophet as he denounced the sins of society. Beginning with a reasoned critique of the society in which he lived, he would rise to thunderous heights of indignation as he assailed the inhumanity of a social order that condemned fully one-third of its population to poverty, permitted its young to die on far-off battlefields, consigned one-tenth of its population to ghettos lacking the minimal amenities of life, or which with one bomb slaughtered 100,000 human beings in a distant land. "He was," to quote Baldwin, "a crusader, an evangelist, a humanist to whom nothing mattered more than the search for the right road to abolish war, end poverty and create a world order of freedom and equality. His socialism was his search for the elusive road.5
The object of this book is to explore that search.

posted by James E. Opfell @ 8:56 PM