Norman Thomas

Norman Thomas (1884-1968), American Socialist Party leader and six-time candidate for the U.S. presidency.

Norman Mattoon Thomas was born November 20, 1884, in Marion, Ohio, and educated at Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary. In 1911 he became pastor of the East Harlem Presbyterian Church, New York City. As a result of his work in the slums and his observation of what he regarded as unnecessary inequalities, waste, exploitation, and poverty, Thomas became an active socialist. Also a pacifist, he opposed the entrance of the United States into World War I. Thomas resigned his pastorate in 1918, and from 1918 to 1921 he was the editor of the magazine The World Tomorrow, a publication of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. He was an associate editor of the liberal periodical The Nation in 1921 and 1922, and from 1922 to 1935 he was codirector of the educational League for Industrial Democracy, which advocated industrial production geared to use rather than profit.

After the Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs died in 1926, Thomas was regarded as the leader of the Socialist Party in America. He formally resigned from the ministry in 1931. A perennial candidate for public office, Thomas was the Socialist Party nominee for the presidency six times between 1928 and 1948. He polled his greatest number of votes, 881,951, in the 1932 election. During his lifetime, most of the social legislation Thomas advocated became law, including unemployment insurance, the abolition of child labor, a minimum wage, and a shorter workweek. Thomas devoted his later years to lecturing and writing against Communism and totalitarianism and in favor of international disarmament and civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech. He died in Huntington, New York, on December 19, 1968. Thomas was the author of more than 20 books, among them War—No Profit, No Glory, No Need (1935), A Socialist's Faith (1951), The Great Dissenters (1961), Socialism Re-Examined (1962), and the posthumously published The Choices (1969) and What Are the Answers? (1970).