Norman Thomas Family Biography A Study in Conscience
Conscience was named one of the ten best books of the month by Barnes and Noble this week, putting a story that details the life of one of FOR’s early leaders in a prominent and deserving place on bookshelves across America. This is the story of the conscience that informs conscientious objection as a core element of the birth of FOR as manifest in the biography of Norman Thomas and his brothers Ralph, Evan, and Arthur told by Norman’s great-grand-daughter Louisa Thomas. Ms. Thomas shared a pre-release copy which I read over the Memorial Day weekend and review below. She also agreed to answer some questions raised in my mind by the book. These follow the review.
Conscience
Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family – A Test of Will and Faith in World War I
By Louisa Thomas
The Penguin Press, New York, 2011
Louisa Thomas never uses the word quixotic to describe the lives and passion of her great-grand-father, Norman Thomas, his pacifist brother Evan or their soldier siblings Ralph and Arthur. But the nostalgic, ambivalent echo of lives largely unrewarded, when spent in loyalty to conscience, gives a certain reverence to this family biography, and you can almost see them tilting at the windmills of idealism.
While Norman Thomas carries the most recognition for his long tenure as the perennial candidate for President from the Socialist Party, an early member and significant leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and other early 20th-century pacifist organizations, and editor first of The World Tomorrow (now Fellowship magazine), and later The Nation, his brothers are equally central pillars of this story.
Ralph, the second born, is trained as an engineer and enlists in the first world war. A Princeton and MIT graduate with officer qualities, he is wounded at the front and hospitalized; never returning to his regiment, he avoids further injury in combat. He debates the pacifist case his brothers make his whole lif,e but offers a forum for Norman’s views from time to time. He loses one son to the second world war.
Arthur, the youngest brother, is torn between training for mission work in Asia — which would exempt him from service — and a vision of flying. In the end he joins the Army air corps and trains as a pilot, but the war ends before he is tested as a soldier. Two sisters are a part of the family portrait, but less central to the story here.
“After World War I, Norman wrote a book called The Conscientious Objector in America… The dedication was to his brothers, with whom he had so often disagreed. That book was, therefore, a family story, and so is this,” says Louisa Thomas in her preface. But “In the Thomas brothers’ history, we all might find some of our own.” Her promise here, as well of those in a glowing set of dust jacket epigraphs by Doris Kearns Goodwin, Walter Isaacson, Jon Meacham, and Hendrik Hertzberg, among others, is completely fulfilled. Exhibiting a satisfying balance of family affection and journalistic objectivity, Thomas describes an era and set of ideas which still demand our consideration today.
In an age when we obsess on a theory of the separation of Church and State, this story reminds us that citizenship, for most Americans, is still an ongoing dialogue between political and religious ideologies which together define both individual and corporate biographies in deep and important ways. “At the time, the church was part of the engine of social reform, no less than law. The progressive spirit drew some of its fervor from a sublimated Protestant moralism.” The voice of Thomas from the pulpit moved rather easily to the voice of Thomas from the public soapbox, more easily than in a world after Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr., another scion of the age of conscience as it slowly evaporated from the pulpit of the 21st century descendants of this story. (Coffin’s grandfather, Henry, was a mentoring peer of the Thomases.)
The description of the McKinley-Bryan presidential race and the rise of populism at the end of the 19th century, cannot be read without the color of current politics tinting the view. “Populism can be ugly, infused with racism and xenophobia. In those days, many populists encourage farmers to fear foreigners, who, they suggested, would take their work and ‘dilute’ their culture and blood. They sometimes embraced policies potentially more ruinous than the ones they meant to fix. At the same time, populists kept alive egalitarian ideas that countered the inequalities and excess of the Gilded Age. The people demanded to be heard, and their demand was backed by combustible energy.”
Among the wonderful accomplishments of the story is the clear sense of development over the lifetimes of the family members, we see the growth of clarity and commitment to pacifism, even when it requires somewhat monumental movement from conservative Christianity to progressive Socialism, on the part of Norman and Evan. It captures well the notion of crystallization of conscience emerging in the current literature to describe the experience of war on those wrestling with the moral issues of killing. And it also explores with intimacy and elegance the space for tolerance in a family with widely divergent views, especially in the portrait of the family matriarch, Emma Thomas, who serves as a reconciling intermediary even as her owns values are challenged by her children’s choices.
It is true that this is not the fully ordinary family. As students at Princeton University, three of the Thomas brothers personally knew — and were known and admired by — Woodrow Wilson, allowing for a nuanced sense of drama as Wilson listened to but rejected the case Thomas made to avoid the war and Evan made to respect conscientious objectors. The FOR nexus is even richer as Evan’s mentor, John Nevin Sayre, was a successor to Norman as general secretary of FOR, was also the brother-in-law of Wilson’s daughter and he exercised Eleventh Hour access more than once on behalf of the Thomas’s views.
The continuing movement to the margin of progressive religious voices is often prefigured in the life of Norman and Evan, who, in seeking to make a difference, to do something that had meaning, found themselves looking beyond the Presbyterian Church in which they were raised and trained for ministry. The longing to do good may have found, for them – especially Norman — expression in the Socialist agenda, but that portal opened and peaked only briefly during their lifetime and has been subjected to the same pejorative attack as progressive faith-based conscience since. Louisa Thomas writes that “In 1911, hundreds of Socialists had been voted into office in elections around the country, including fifty-six mayors and a congressman…. Few realized that 1912 [in Eugene Debs run for President against Taft and Teddy Roosevelt] would be, in fact, the peak of the Socialist’s prospects.”
The surprising, beguiling ease with which the country moved from the impossibility of any war to the inevitability of a world war during Wilson’s term as President unfolds clearly in Louisa Thomas’s narrative. The surprising, disturbing slide to censorship and suppression of dissent fuels the sense of injustice with war and warring for the Thomas brothers. The careful exploration of an emergent, organic understanding of conscience as the root issue in conscientious objection is the richest gift of this biography. It should serve to stir a deeper discourse on the place of conscience in political, theological, economic and social life today. We can be grateful to the Thomases and their peers for close and serious thinking on conscience, and especially to this grand-daughter for offering this story.
For this reviewer, who serves in the lineage that extends from Norman Thomas and John Nevin Sayre, through the lines of A.J. Muste and Father John Dear among others, and who followed the path to conscientious objection during the Vietnam war (made more passable and even smooth by the precedent of the Thomas brothers and many others), and finds himself related by marriage to military policy-shapers like General Stanley McChrystal, I did find, in this story, much of my own. Having done alternative service in The Lebanon and studied at the American University of Beirut, I met descendants of Cleveland Dodge, and a career in the YMCA meant that John R. Mott, Kirby Page, and Sherwood Eddy shaped my life and career in ways very similar to those of the Thomases a generation earlier. But I recommend it more fully in the confidence that, so well written and so fully relevant to the continuing questions of conscience and war, every reader will find it entertaining and enlightening.
Mark C. Johnson, Ph.D.
Executive Director, Fellowship of Reconciliation
June 14, 2011
The following exchange with author Louisa Thomas took place over the course of the week of June 12, 2011.
Johnson: There is a clear pre-figuration of the Fellowship of Reconciliation when John Nevin Sayre and others at Princeton founded a fellowship for Christian action as a club called the Crusaders in 1912, well before the founding in Europe in 1914 of FOR and the transfer of FOR to the USA in 1915. I’m curious about how clearly Thomas and Sayre saw and shaped that relationship by joining and leading FOR from 1916 on?
Thomas: The Crusaders Fellowship, which Sayre founded at Princeton, was not a pacifist organization. It had a broader social gospel focus. But Sayre and Evan Thomas, Norman’s brother, who was one of its first members, did develop the early foundations of their pacifism in meetings and discussions among the Crusaders. When Sayre joined the FOR, then, he brought with him the thinking and energy that was born of those debates. Norman did not belong to the Crusaders — it was founded after he had left Princeton — but he was certainly aware of it and sympathetic to its aims.
The links were probably more indirect than direct, but they were real.
In June, 1915, Sayre gave a speech to the small group of Crusaders at their annual meeting in which he described why he had become a pacifist. Evan Thomas transferred his seminary studies to Britain that fall, determined to see a nation at war. To his brother Norman — who was not yet a pacifist — he wrote long and searching letters about pacifism. To Sayre, he sent a postcard with two lines. “Have thought much about your Crusaders’ talk of last June,” he wrote. “You were right in what you said of war, I am sure.”
Johnson: Evan Thomas, in particular, but Norman as well, had relationships with John R. Mott of the YMCA,the World Student Christian Movement, the World Council of Churches, etc. I wonder what additional research you did on this relationship given Mott’s role in bringing Hodgkin and Sigmund-Schultz to the United States in 1915 and the YMCA’s role in the early years of FOR (Gilbert Beaver for example).
Thomas: John Mott’s relationship to the Thomases is an interesting story. Of course he resigned from the FOR before Norman helped lead it. Mott and Norman had a strong professional relationship in the years leading to the war, and Evan had become quite close friends with his son at Princeton. The brothers both corresponded with Mott during the war, and there was some sense of betrayal and abandonment when Mott became the general secretary for the National War Work Council. Norman wrote to Mott, partly angry and partly pleading, “though you do not now agree with these conscientious objectors, in the case of some of them it was your own addresses that gave them part of their spiritual background for their present stand.”
Johnson: I’m curious, if I am reading your tempered respect (idealistic but not pragmatic) of the Thomases, how clear you think they were about the quixotic nature of their (our) quest for peace through nonviolence?
Thomas: I think you’re reading my attitude well. As for how clear they were, yes and no! I think this answer would require a very long response. But I will say that I think, of the two, Evan was both more quixotic and less hopeful. He understood that there was a category difference between the state and the individual — that what he felt he had to do was different than what he felt Woodrow Wilson had to do. (As a result, he was much more admiring of Wilson, at least 1914-1917, than Norman was.) But he felt he was keeping some spirit of freedom of conscience alive in his stand, and that hopefully one day enough people would do the same so that there would no longer be war.
Johnson: As a fourth-generation descendant, did you grow up with an active understanding of pacifism and active nonviolence and this family history, or was this a process of discovery for you in writing the story?
Thomas: I think — I hope — writing any book is a process of discovery. A few years ago, a family friend gave me a paper that my father had written about his great-uncle and namesake, Evan Thomas, who was a conscientious objector during the First World War. That was really my first exposure to the idea of active nonviolence outside of the civil rights movement. I had known that Norman Thomas was a pacifist before Pearl Harbor, but I didn’t know about his brothers — and even if I had, I’m not sure I would have understood what their positions implied. I was born well after Vietnam; conscription has always been a distant thing to me. It took reading the brothers’ letters and placing them in their historical context to understand their urgency and depth of conviction.
Johnson: As a journalist with a currency in the popular culture, how do you think the understanding and use of “socialism” and “socialists” is different today than in your great-grand-father’s day?
Thomas: “Socialist” was sometimes a slur even in Norman’s own time. The Red Scare that followed World War I was one of the most polarized moments in American history. But socialism was in those days was considered a viable political system. Eugene Debs had won six percent of the vote in 1912, and won nearly a million votes while running from prison in 1920. By the time of Norman’s last presidential campaign, he led a shadow of a party. Explaining socialism’s failure in the United States has occupied historians for decades. By now the word has been so discredited — even as a lot of people are not so happy with capitalism — that to call someone a socialist is to label her as irrelevant at best, and possibly a Stalinist. It’s been so tainted in the American imagination by Communism and ‘National Socialism’ (Nazism).
Johnson: The ideas of pacifism and nonviolence are often critiqued as “confused and contradictory.” Are the ideas of militarism really any less confused and contradictory? The passage where Norman wrestles with this is poignant, ending as it does in the call to America to be the “conscience to the nations” (p.142) which you suggest in your closing lines was not and never became true (p.272).
Thomas: One thing seems to be true about every war: it never goes just as planned. Every war involves painful compromises, and every war has unforeseen results. Some of these are contradictory. Whether or not the contradictions outweigh the most compelling logic in favor of
combat in any given situation is, I suppose, another question. I think Woodrow Wilson was making that gamble when he called for war. He also hoped the country would ultimately be the conscience to the nations, though in a different sense than Norman hoped for. He used that kind of language. I think his story is, ultimately, a tragic story, and the irony of fighting a war to end all wars that laid the groundwork for an even bigger war was part of that tragedy. The short answer is that we can’t know. We can only hope. One idea that I think Evan and Norman (and even in their way Ralph and Arthur) were right to emphasize is the idea of freedom of conscience. It allows for idealists but not despots. People who are acting in the name of their consciences can do some terrible things, after all, including asserting their will over others.
Johnson: Was Evan right, we will be lead to a better world by individuals who think carefully about what they believe and then act on those beliefs? Does this describe the impact of the despot as accurately as it does the idealist? Do we still need the conscience of the community to serve as a cairn for the journey as your book does for us?
Thomas: Of course no man lives alone. We are members of communities, of families narrowly and widely defined. The struggle to find the right balance between individual conscience and the values of the community is one that is unceasing, the dynamic that describes the journey. Soon after Evan finished a hunger strike in prison, Norman wrote him a letter. “You say truly that the life of Jesus or of St Francis of Assisi was a marvelous victory from the standpoint of its inward harmony, its sincerity, its peace, its freedom from all bitterness and hatred; but I don’t think either of them would have felt this victory had they not believed they could communicate it and share it, make it more easily attainable for all future generations. I am willing to agree with you that their causes ‘were tragic failures’ if you limit the idea of the cause to the Franciscan movement or even to the course of organized Christianity, but sure the end is not yet, and as long as men strive for finer conditions of life they will feel the inspiration of Jesus of Nazareth and Francis of Assisi.”
