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Norman Mattoon Thomas (November 20, 1884 – December 19, 1968) was a leading American socialist, pacifist, and six-time presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Thomas was born and raised in Marion, Ohio, and graduated from Marion High School. As a primary school age child, Thomas was a paper carrier for Warren G. Harding's Marion Daily Star. Thomas later attended and graduated from Princeton University in 1905.

He then attended Union Theological Seminary, and there became a socialist. He was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1911, shunning the Park Avenue churches and ministering instead to an Italian Protestant church in New York's East Harlem. Union Theological Seminary was then a center of the Social Gospel movement and liberal politics, but Princeton had a largely Republican student body and even faculty. At Princeton reunions many alumni shunned Thomas, though he had some support among the faculty.

Thomas opposed the United States' entry into the First World War. He founded The World Tomorrow (magazine) publication in January, 1918, and from 1921-1922 he was associate editor of The Nation.

In 1922 he became codirector of the League for Industrial Democracy. Later, he was one of the founders of the National Civil Liberties Bureau (the precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union) and The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He was an unsuccessful Socialist candidate for Governor of New York in 1924, and for Mayor of New York in 1925 and 1929.

Following Eugene Debs' death in 1926, Thomas became the Socialist standard-bearer and was the party's Presidential nominee in every election from 1928 to 1948. As an articulate and engaging spokesman for democratic socialism, Thomas' influence was considerably greater than that of the typical perennial candidate. Although socialism was viewed as an unsavory form of political thought by most middle-class Americans, the well-educated Thomas -- who often wore three-piece suits -- looked like and talked like a president and gained grudging admiration.

Thomas frequently spoke on the difference between socialism and Communism, and explaining the differences between the movement he represented and that of revolutionary Marxism. He had an early admiration for the Russian Revolution that subsequently turned into devout anti-Communism. (The revolutionaries thought him no better; Leon Trotsky, on more than one occasion, levelled high-profile criticism at Thomas.) He wrote several books, among them his passionate defense of World War I conscientious objectors, Is Conscience a Crime?, and his statement of the 1960s social democratic consensus, Socialism Re-examined.

Thomas was as outspoken in opposing the Second World War as he was the first, and served on the board of the America First Committee. However, once the United States was attacked by the Japanese in Pearl Harbor, his stance changed to support for US involvement [1]. He and his fellow democratic socialists were also some of the only public figures to oppose the internment of Japanese Americans following the attack on Pearl Harbor at a time when virtually every public figure and government official approved of it. Thomas loudly condemned the ACLU for "dereliction of duty" when the organization supported the internment. Thomas was also a pioneer in his campaigning against racial segregation, war, environmental depletion, anti-labor laws and practices, and for his efforts to try to open up the United States to Jewish victims of Nazi persecution in the 1930s.

After 1945 Thomas made the non-Communist left the vanguard of social reform, in collaboration with labor leaders like Walter Reuther. He championed many seemingly unrelated progressive causes, while leaving unstated the essence of his political and economic philosophy. From 1931 until his death, to be a "socialist" in the United States meant to support those causes which Norman Thomas championed (as per [Hyfler 137]).

The Norman Thomas High School in Manhattan and the Norman Thomas '05 Library at Princeton University's Forbes college are named after him. He is also the grandfather of Newsweek columnist Evan Thomas. [2]

• Fleischmann, Harry Norman Thomas: A Biography, New York, Norton & Co., 1964.
• Robert Hyfler; Prophets of the Left: American Socialist Thought in the Twentieth Century Greenwood Press. 1984.
• Bernard K. Johnpoll, Pacifists Progress: Norman Thomas and the Decline of American Socialism (1987).
• Swanberg, W.A. Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist, New York, Charles Scribner and Sons, 1976.