The First Amendment; John T. Williams on Norman Thomas

The First Amendment and a free people. A weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in the United States and around the world. The program has produced cooperatively by WGBH Boston and the Institute for democratic communication at Boston University the host of the program is the institute's director Dr. Bernard Rubin. The dissenter in a democratic society or in any other society has a hard time of it usually but sometimes there emerges from the pack of dissenters. A man who is absolutely a woman who is absolutely glorious because somehow they express not only dissent but the joie de vivre the the great faith in democracy. One of the people that I guess a pin in my eyes is this emergence from merely being at the center to being someone who was a Democratic theorist probably is Norman Thomas. Norman Thomas died in 1968 at the age of 84. In that long life he was one of the

great men expressing some of the thoughts about where we should be going unpopular most of the time bitterly despised by some groups for most of his life and yet ending a hero with his birthday party is almost a national celebration and the presidents of the United States toward the end of his life are welcoming him and inviting him to the White House and so on and so forth. Norman Thomas the socialist Norman Thomas as W.A. Swanberg in his book Norman Thomas the last idealist to discuss this book by W.E. Swanberg the Pulitzer Prize winner which was published by Charles Scribner's Sons in New York. 976 I'm delighted to have John Taylor Williams of the law firm of Hauserman Davis and Shattuck of Boston who do much of their work in the publishing area. John and I read this book and and are trying to figure out what made Norman Thomas tick. First let me ask you this rather simple

question. This young man this Princetonian this young cleric decided to do good for humanity. Is this the basic ingredient of Norman Thomas in his life that he was a humanitarian. I think that's I think that's a fair statement. I'm sure he would have disagreed for Sephora Salih that you burned when you said his commitment to democracy since he always viewed himself as a socialist at least that's what he always articulated. But I think that it was that Christian kind of upbringing that he had as a third generation ministers and that was the most influential theme in his life always. Now as a young man he he came from a ministerial background. People in his forebears were were ministers bringing the gospel of Presbyterianism to sayI.

He then in his own life went into the Presbyterian ministry but saw God in his own light saw himself as a basic Christian as it were of the Protestant mold and first went to a very prestigious church on Fifth Avenue and left it for the slum. Did that fascinate you that he would give up the rock I think is called The Rock Church on Fifth Avenue old brick church the old brick church used to thinking in terms of simile the old brick church on Fifth Avenue to go into a slum church where there were the Italians in the Yugoslavs and the blacks and so on and so forth. Did that surprise you that such a turn would come of it. Not with that missionary background that he came from. What interested me a great deal about him was this parallel between his classmate at Princeton or just about his classmate at Princeton John Foster Dulles. Again the son of a missionary and the grandson of a missionary. I think of course they were Chinese. Chinese missionaries in two generations in China I think were as Thomas as grandparents had been missionaries in

Siam But from there they go their separate ways. One with a legit commitment to quote democracy as Thomas never view democracy. Thomas with a view that. What he calls socialism I think you're right was a commitment that man had to bettering one's fellow man and it was a true Christian kind of a doctrine and a commitment to truth which doesn't really have any. I don't think real good grounding in religion because I think without without offending any one religion happens to be one of the great forms of propaganda. By definition it has to be because its whole idea of proselytizing means that you denigrate someone else's beliefs in order to supplant those beliefs with your own. I think you offended anybody. No but I found that of course was the Dulles approach from his religious background was to convince save the world from communism. Make the world free for democracy.

Course that degenerated into brinksmanship but it started out with some kind of high sounding language that certainly had its background in the same kind of Judeo-Christian. Let's take a look at Norman Thomas in terms of the enigmas of his life. He married a woman of extraordinary capacities deep warmth partner all through his life a woman who from her early days as a young woman suffered from heart attacks and heart problems. She was always worried about that and he was too. Yet there was money in the family. He never really had to worry about his daily bread. There was always more than $10000 a year at the start. From her family. And so when he went into helping the poor. As a member of the church he was doing it because of some inner zeal and yet He literally lived a kind of schizo phrenic

life the mid-western he was born in Marion Ohio along with Warren Gemayel the maleo Harding the Midwest are now transported to the east. Who would summer at Cold Spring Harbor in an area where there was restricted bathing and so on and so forth and not see that as essentially a problem because he spent 99 percent of his time fighting for everybody. How do you how do you reconcile the two Norman Thomas's. Well I'm I'm sympathetic I guess not with necessarily the way he dealt with the kind of schizo frantic life that anyone with money has to have when they're committed to a social cause that is based on spreading wealth equalizing wealth. And yet at the same time you retire from the Socialist Party dinner at which most of the people go home to a cold water flat and you go home to your townhouse. Obviously you had to come to terms with that or you become schizo phrenic in the sense that you don't even consider that on the other hand both he and

Dulles came from backgrounds that were that had money and both had this enormous commitment to public service. And I think it's the commitment to public service I think it's the Americans who cast him in the St.. I'm sure he loved it he was a man of some ego. But I don't think he ever pretended that he was a saint and therefore he was going to take a vow of chastity and poverty. He never never really. No that's what I'm trying to get out he lived in both worlds trying to reform and help the other. He left the church. As a young minister because he felt he no longer could believe in Christian tenants as they were delivered by his group he thought they would too. And he he couldn't see beyond some of the hypocrisy is that he observed hypocrisy is in his mind. So he went off and began to drift toward the Socialist Party. Now the Socialist Party had a handful of members by comparison to any other party across the United States. And in the East Coast

area was primarily a European party financed in large part by Jewish daily newspaper The forward. That's that's to me the most fascinating part of his life in a way watching a Gentile from an upper class background at least by education and into a world that was very very ethnic as you say the Socialist Party strength was in New York City really they polled almost 30 percent of their vote as an immigrant vote in effect and it was all mainly Eastern European. A lot of Jews and there were some Hungary and poles and Italians but that was basically a Jewish party that had grown up in the social struggles in Eastern Europe and Czechoslovakia and Austria and had very strong ties to the labor movement and often they come up through the labor movement although they were labor movement intellectuals we've had nobody like that except for maybe Marcos I think that. And here came this man walking out of a church and changing his collar around backwards and suddenly was the head of the party. And obviously you all the

struggles that started from that point on you could see written on the wall. Now their definition of socialism was not necessary collectivism and it was not necessarily any style and isn't. It was a basic tenet attempt to gain some inroads into the new society. It was a very idealistic thing as well based in large part upon the same anomalous mixture of the Bible. For Norman Thomas it was a new and old testament for them it was just the old has a mixture of the Bible and social welfare play. And rather than the the iron clad socialism that we associate with modern day politics today or communism as as differentiated from socialism it was it was ideological The people at least the people he dealt with primarily were ideological were they not. Yes but they were Marxian in the sense that they did early Moxie as well pure Marx in the sense but but like the communists of the Trotskyite Lenin period they did view the worker as the hope for modern society and it was going to

be the workers revolution it was going to be the workers republic whether most of them were workers. Intellectuals and workers right intellectuals and workers now when Norman Thomas moves on we see this I guess metamorphosis to a concern for anybody who is on strike with the employer using goon squads whether it's Jersey City or anywhere else or anybody that is threatening to curtail the right of information. He was basically I think brought out beautifully by Swanberg a civil libertarian couldn't stand injustice. I'm going to tell him truthfully he was viscerally reacted to injustice anti war to the nth degree. His brother was a conscientious objective object or in World War One Evan. And who was brutally treated. He reports by the federal authorities in a federal place incarceration. He was against the war. He believed that war was the basic enemy of all progress and that the

political opponents he faced were always encouraging war least this was the theory that he proposed but that's a pure communist socialist theory of the Marxian period that words were used by by capitalism both because they engendered a great deal of economic growth and that wars were basically productive as for capitalist confines out in Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw as well sure sign when when Swanberg describes Norman Thomas in his middle period. We find him the leader of the Socialist Party in the United States with most socialists almost going to be daring here not say many but most socialists opposing him. I one ground or another. He was the one person that who could not. Gone are much general support in this miniscule party. True. Well the war period is different because of course he did not remain. He started as a pure pacifist during the First World War and then of course he had a very large union

with people like Gurley Flynn who was then later to become the first woman president of the Communist Party United States and Earl Browder who was also a high party official in the American Communist Party. He later came to detest Browder Wright with the aid. Well they had a rapprochement at the end of the life but the I.W.W. everyone who was committed to pacifism he felt was his ally at that point. Of course later in Spain he decided that he wanted to support the Republic and was very angry at Roosevelt withholding support and the British socialist and Labor Party withholding any support for the Republicans. And that point began to become anti-communist for the first time as he saw the Republic torn down as much by so-called help from the Communists as it was from the opposition the fascist backing Franco. At that point he never really becomes a pacifist again. He becomes a noninterventionist and find himself mixed up with some pretty strange bedfellows with Charles Lindbergh and a lot of America first years during the 40s and of

course at that point he sees the entire socialist party drift off into organized labor in the sense of strong unions and then from there they endorse the New Deal and they never return to the social sphere. Here's this man who is supposedly a dissenter for the socialist standing on platforms with Burton K. wheeler and Charles Lindbergh. And people like that against American intervention. And curiously enough tremendously accepted by them. Here is the man who in the town hall Radio 4 was one of the most popular radio series of the 40s and 50s was one of the regulars. There's something about Norman Thomas. He was perhaps Was he one of the outsiders who came from the inside and therefore could step back and forth unlike his associates. You know I think in just. Reaching out for an analogy but in American Indian culture and at least in many cultures people who were considered crazy were also considered sacred because they had been invested with the Divine Spirit and therefore were no longer

really part of Indian society but instead of being an outcast they were treated as sacred because the gods had taken possession of them. I think that the thing that impressed me about Norman Thomas going back to it was this absolute search for the truth. And he admits he was often not truthful but not meaningfully not truthful. He never ever took advantage of a situation to tell a half truth in order to pick up a vote which of course was disastrous as a party leader. So he lost all the party because he couldn't compromise he always had to say exactly what he believed to be the truth. In the long run of course that was what made him so special and I think more and more Americans came to recognize the fact that at least when they heard Norman Thomas they heard someone who was absolutely telling them what he believed to be the truth and He would they know that he could not be reached by anyone. He might be wrong. But if he was wrong it was because he had come to the wrong conclusion without anyone telling a party that was the hope of some immigrants and people who never mastered the use of English as well as they did other languages. He was the quintessence American

wasn't he. Well now I think you put your finger on it and the reason he couldn't hold any following together was he was preaching very Christian and very noble ideal. The socialists had to deal with the party as you say of basically first and second generation immigrants who had not been assimilated into even New York society when society I'm talking about being able to get jobs and being able to get teaching positions and those kinds of things after they got out of the public school system and the New Deal and the strong labor unions and the needle trades with Dubinsky in these kinds of labor leaders offered those Jewish members of the Socialist Party not only an entree into the mainstream American life but an entree into the power core of American life in American labor and the CIO in the NFL. All of these ex socialist found there was real power. They got in the mainstream of America which was power. And Thomas was always out of the mainstream because he never wanted power. He wanted to convince people of the truth. And unfortunately as you see Thomas's life you realize more than ever that America wants to believe in and follow and

listen to a winner and a winner is someone who knows how to exercise power. And if anyone didn't know how to exercise power lest we push that old canard that the Socialists were automatically Jewish or vice versa most of the Jewish voters were in the Democratic Party the Socialist Party was always a very miniscule party. It had a lot of other immigrant bases and a lot of American bases. It was on the ticket in some elections in 23 states. But sometimes it was down to as little as five or six thousand members nationally and sometimes it was up to 30000 or 40000 members nationally. Thomas began to shift away this five time candidate for the Socialist Party nomination of presidency and the nominee began to shift away from socialist causes as it were to anti-war causes to anti atomic bomb causes to anti Stalinist causes. He saw himself in a role from the time he was about 50 years of

age. That was entirely different then the younger seeker after truth. Well I think that's I think that so he. It's hard to say how he really saw him self he was so he was so wrapped up in what he was doing. He has amazing perspective on events I think had very little perspective about himself. And if you get any idea who he will he was he had it. Obviously he's turned out to be right about almost every long term political position that the United States has taken which he disagreed with. The opposite of the position that America took is almost always turned out to be his position the one that eventually prevailed. Saw that it was an inveterate writer. You believe that if you believe something strong enough you should make a book out of it which shows how much of an idealist he was while other people were making automobiles. And ploughs Norman Thomas was making books but influencing people. He was one of the great speakers.

I would say of the 20th century at least from the descriptions and from radio recordings. And yet his voice is raspy and sharp and 20. There was something charismatic about his ability to capture an audience when we were saying earlier that if he had lived in an Asiatic Society where wisdom and the pursuit of higher moral truths are viewed as the kind of highest form of. Of endevour for ice age in Confucian society or in Japanese or some other far eastern societies he would have been one of the most preeminent men of his age and recognized right away. But he's perhaps the only person we can think of in the last 50 years who's attained that kind of moral state who has any respect from the American people. Others are considered to be sort of cranks and eccentrics and even the English treat a lot of those people as a centrist someone who's only interested in what the moral highest moral position one can take on an issue are treated in western

society basically as eccentrics as opposed to sages and people in pursuit of truth they believe in lots of very eccentric things from the point of view of some people who believe in freedom of speech he believed at the same time in responsible speech he believed in freedom of the press and the same time believed or responsible press he was a good newspaper editor and magazine editor publisher never on the masseur collation market. He dearly wanted to have his stuff published by the Reader's Digest more often than not and it was only toward the end of his career they gave him a favorable article or two. But he spoke out against any sort of birth control is one of the most important issues in the world he was the first real American adherent of Indian independence and always pushed the English socialist party to the granite and was very disappointed with Churchill. He never had a high risk regard for Churchill anyway because of Churchill standing aside and letting the Spanish. Let's go under and I think I said Republicans really.

That's one world where none of the names make any sense Republicans turn out to be frank turned out to be that of the Republicans but his position on almost every issue is unpopular at the time he castigated every form of organized religion from all the Christian religions in particular because they always were against every war as he said but the war we're presently in. And then they violently supported that war and a position that probably was borne out more than the Lutheran Church in Germany than some of the churches here but if you look at the church's involvement in Vietnam of the church's opposition to the First World War it was basically a non non issue. I mean the war suddenly made religious precepts. I just went I mean if they weren't there anymore if they took a holiday until the war was over and then then Christian precepts were to be practiced again. But even a World War Two he criticized some of the people who

were very early on opposed to Hitler. He was opposed to fascism but wanted to take the war route and to stand up strong. He thought this was really because of their own personal experiences and so on it's over he could understand but he couldn't join. He was so anti-war that it was a unifying theory for him not to be broken by this war or that war. He saw his goal after Pearl Harbor as preparing for the post-war period rather than condoning anything that happened. Of course we have never lived in a period of that kind of intense political life the life of American political life has pretty much been issue oriented at least in my generation then it wasn't it was ideologically party oriented. I didn't have a question with any particular issues but that was the great problem the socialists had because the communists of course suddenly had a rapprochement with fascism and you had the Ribbentrop Molotov pact and these kinds of strange alignments went on and people followed them because they weren't following the issue they were following the party

line and not just necessarily communist party line of the American party line was not intervention. They destroyed Wilson in the league on that basis that that's what Americans wanted. And then something else comes along a new issue and suddenly the issue is it's fascism and he saw nonintervention as the right issue in the long run. He changed his mind of course on the war he later really had no strong opposition to the war itself except that he saw the same kind of alignments of imperialist powers Russian British and American and French as soon as the war was over carrying on the same things the French went back to Indochina they went back to North Africa the British without if Atli had not been elected and Churchill had there would have been no Indian independence the Dutch tried to regain Indonesia and the Dutch colonies. Russia took as much of Eastern Europe as she could so he felt that he was borne out that the war perhaps was right but in the long range nobody changed their colors the war was merely an extension of capitalist Norman Thomas Jones was one of those

unique singular Americans who was beloved as you point out by foreign leaders for his views. He's also one of those singular Americans who could. Get back to elementals in his own life for example simple elementals. Once a year he went to the Princeton Yale game and sat there with his little sticker and joined with everybody else. I was very disturbed in the first world war and post First World War period that he was persona non-grata with the Princeton group. I never did give him an honorary degree. I don't think but they admitted him into the inner circle at the end I don't think they gave an honorary degree either. He was very appreciative. He certainly gave us one. Yes he was very appreciative of his Princeton education and saw that as a kicking off place for all of his work. He was also very much interested in trying to talk to people. He was unlike other dissenters in that regard he would write letters to everybody that he disagreed with.

Unbelievable correspondent. One hundred twelve letters a day or something. In the age of non-writing where everybody either calls someone a dozen doesn't communicate at all except when you see somebody it's this. This is an amazing kind of I remember one of those little thing that the author writes about him. He was chartering He was 83 he had arthritis to the terrible degree and he used to effect this because of his good sense of humor. He would try to get a chair at the very end of the stage when he had a public meeting and he would then lean on his cane and slowly work his way toward the microphone he got to the microphone was a great big Xhosa. It was a great line it's hard to fit. I mean he's so square in the sense of having no really fiery romantic kind of persona that a lot of so-called revolutionaries in the sense of being against basically almost everything that the American government really had none of this yet member of this huge rally in

Berkeley and Tom Hayden says there are only three people that anyone can trust who are over 30 and they are Norman Thomas. Right males and forgotten who the third was. But. He had one that kind of love. And from such a wide variety of the American public he was he was forgiven by those who opposed him at the end by most of those who opposed him at the end. Maybe they all died out because by and by the end he was in his middle 80s. But he began to be appreciated. He died as the Vietnam War was heating up. He began to be appreciated one wonders what would have been his reaction if he had lived another 10 years he would probably been in the forefront of every battle that had been waged to protest the Vietnam War. Well he certainly I mean he he identified the problems of replacing the French presence as a colonial power in Vietnam the minute Kennedy sent in advisors and never changed his tune and so he was certainly borne out as being right there and

talking about the war. He said early on the next step is the world spreading to Cambodia. And I never was wrong to me the most impressive part of his life was civil rights. But I'm sure he's in a either a socialist heaven or a Christian heaven or a Christian socialist heaven with his wife Violet asking to be given the most ordinary room in the hotel. Everybody said that you mean when we all go to hell at least your water will be not quite as hot as the others when it was actually rather amazing and one of the Americans that young Americans especially want to know about one of the dissenters whose life we all ought to trace and to ponder. I recommend Norman Thomas my ws one I deeply appreciate your your participation today. John Williams for this edition Bernard Reuben. The First Amendment and a free people a weekly examination of civil liberties and the media in the United States and around the world.

The engineer for this broadcast was Margo Garrison. The program is produced by Greg Fitzgerald. This broadcast has produced cooperatively by WGBH Boston and the Institute for democratic communication after Boston University which are solely responsible for its content. This is the station program exchange.