Murray Polner: Review of Louisa Thomas’s “Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Will and Faith in World War I” (Penguin Press, 2011)

“Socialism” has been redefined, praised and denigrated by free marketeers, assorted liberals and conservatives, pandering politicians and Obama-haters.  But in the end, it never took hold in this country because of governmental persecution, corporate opposition, recurring internal divisions, the New Deal, and perhaps above all the “American Dream,” which led American workers to support capitalism.

Was it possible to reconcile socialism with capitalism?  In socialism’s heyday, Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, received 6 percent of the vote in the 1912 election running against the Republican William Howard Taft, the pugnacious Bull Mooser Teddy Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson.  Eight years later, in the 1920 election, while Debs was still imprisoned in Atlanta penitentiary for opposing World War I and the draft, he received one million votes.  It’s hard to remember that today’s consistently Republican/conservative Oklahoma once contained the nation’s second-largest socialist party.  The nadir of socialism’s national electoral popularity was when Norman Thomas, the party’s perennial candidate, won 140,000 votes in his final run in 1948, next to Harry Truman’s 24 million and Thomas Dewey’s 22 million.  In that last fruitless presidential campaign he railed against communism, Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, and the bellicose foreign policies of both Democrats and Republicans.

Neither Debs, nor Thomas, nor for that matter once-prominent socialists Daniel DeLeon, Morris Hillquit, and even Helen Keller, are remembered today.  Nor are socialism’s historical ancestors:  Brook Farm, the Amana and Oneida communities, Robert Owen’s New Harmony colony, and Edward Bellamy’s late nineteenth-century “Looking Backward,” a hugely popular novel about a socialist and utopian America.

All the more reason, then, to welcome Norman’s great-granddaughter Louisa Thomas’s Conscience, a fitting title for the story of the four Thomas sons and their two sisters.  It’s an affectionate, well-crafted, and occasionally critical biography of the writer’s extended family set during the early twentieth century, when poverty was common and suffering unrelieved by safety nets.  Strikes were brutally smashed by the military, police, the National Guard, hostile judges, and rapacious corporations.  It was a century that began with the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars and continued with U.S. military intervention in China, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico, and Russia—and of course World War I.  The aftermath of the Great War witnessed federal agents and vigilantes hunting down “subversives,” and lynchings and attacks against Black Americans.

After graduating from Princeton, Norman became an ordained liberal minister, serving in an East Harlem Protestant church where, for the first time in his rather sheltered life, he was exposed to his congregation’s poverty and desperation.  Never really a doctrinaire theologian, he discarded his Christianity in 1918 and turned instead for the rest of his life to an unrequited devotion to socialism, pacifism, defense of liberty and protection of working men and women.

His younger brother Evan was an ethical and religious conscientious objector to WWI.  Encouraged by pro-war officials, super-patriots condemned COs as traitors.  Seventeen received death sentences and some one hundred fifty life sentences, all of them ultimately rescinded, yet not until the early 1930s were the last COs finally released.  Louisa Thomas describes Evan’s remarkable courage and stubbornness while being tortured in federal prisons, a practice repeated in our secret prisons after 9/11.

The Thomas family also produced Ralph, an Army captain whose soldier son was killed in World War II, and the youngest, Arthur, who briefly served in the army but never in combat.  “Two pacifists, two soldiers, One Family,” the book’s appropriate subtitle, also briefly includes the two younger Thomas sisters whose outlooks resembled Norman’s and Evan’s.  Emily became a social worker in a hospital for interned Japanese during the Second World War, while Agnes was a teacher in a Quaker school and active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.

Louisa Thomas spends the greater part of her absorbing book on Norman.  He was hardly a dogmatic socialist, and one imagines he never spent much time composing theoretical works about the blessings of socialism or trying to master Marx and the writings of European socialists.  “Norman became a socialist,” writes Louisa, realistically but somewhat sorrowfully, because “he wanted to help workers who were powerless to change their situations, but the truth was that he was powerless, too.”

Once World War I ended, he challenged the notorious Red Scare, denounced the cruelties directed at powerless blacks, and, with Raymond Baldwin and Rabbi Judah Magnes, helped establish the ACLU.  During World War II, even though he ran and lost six times for the presidency, Thomas was one of the rare well-known Americans who dared to denounce the incarceration of Japanese Americans.  Until Pearl Harbor and the resulting collapse of the huge non-interventionist America First movement to which he belonged (other prominent members included Joseph Kennedy, Gerald Ford, progressive senator Robert LaFollette, Jr. and Father Charles Coughlin, the anti-Semitic Catholic radio priest), he opposed the U.S. entry into the war.  In his old age, Norman continued speaking against his nation’s addiction to war, appearing at anti-Vietnam War rallies where he always seemed to reflect Randolph Bourne’s classic remark, “War is the Health of the State.”

Long forgotten, it was the socialists in this country who early on propped up labor unions, backed the 8-hour day, favored laws against child labor and other protections for working people.  Yet Norman and his adherents never succeeded in building an organization strong enough to challenge the forces that created the Great Depression.  The growing Communist Party and its loyalists were in love with Stalin’s Russia while Democrats were infatuated with FDR and the New Deal.  Moreover, the bombing of Pearl Harbor meant that few Americans wanted to listen to any talk about pacifism or the reordering of the capitalist system.  Louisa is absolutely correct in summing up her great-grandfather.  “Norman’s conscience,” she wrote, was not the nation’s; it was his own.”