479 - Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist

Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist
By W. A. Swanburg
New York, Charles Scribners'Sons, 1976. 528 pp. $14.95

Norman Thomas emerges-with Violet-from the pages of this book an altogether believable if extraordinarily complex man. The richness of detail which Swanburg weaves into his tapestry is part of its realism, and the wonder is that patterns are not lost in ornamentation. The climax of unfolding Socialist Party factionalism occurred at the 1934 Detroit convention, for example, but having set in motion the elements of factional battle, Swanburg interpolates eight pages of "duties small and large" which must have distracted Thomas in those crucial weeks but "were mostly in the cause." The humanity of the book and its pace are grounded in detail, and the reflective quality of its concluding chapters is governed by Thomas' own late attempts to filter some pattern of idealism from the activism on which be had fed.

Swanburg does not impose a pattern of ethical development on Thomas' career (as Bernard Johnpoll did in Pacifist's Progress). He eschews sanctimony. He makes no effort to transform Thomas' political activity into success and does not moralize on political failure; he provides us with no Thomastic formulae. The biography is authentic for this reason.

Thomas was precisely not an ideologue. The constants in his philosophy were skepticism and compassion, and he lived in tension between these poles. Their relative attraction waxed and waned throughout his life, a largely learned response to the foibles of our people. He wrote, "I've found it a help to consider that if God must be disappointed in us, so must be the devil in the presence of such courage and comradeship as plain people show."

"God and the devil were, of course, mentioned metaphorically," Swanburg assures us. Perhaps the devil was banished from Thomas' mind, but God tugged at him to the end, for at least as significant as his agnosticism was the fact that Norman Thomas was a bearer of twentieth-century theology.

He foundered on first principles, as did so many of his generation: "I cannot discover a God who is love and at the same time omnipotent," Swanburg quotes him . . . . not that perfection of creation or that loving care for each of us as individuals which I crave and which I once found in Christian doctrine." FI1, the impersonality of capitalism, the fate of the Spanish Revolution, the perversion of the socialist experiment in imperial Russia, or the perversion of the democratic experiment in imperial America. Since he could not square first principles (the Westminster Confession), he turned to consequences. The Socialist Party was a platform from which he ministered to the needs of indi-

480 - Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist

viduals and from which he might raise hard questions about public policy. In his attention to social and ethical consequences, Thomas epitomized what was essential in the social gospel theology of others who were able to resolve or sublimate questions of first principles. In his concern with the life of Norman Thomas rather than with his historic relationship to organized religion, Swanburg does not make this point, but he provides enough evidence to justify it.

The author also neglects evidence that might substantiate a closer connection between Thomas and ecclesiastical liberalism. So tightly is the narrative focused on the individual that the constituency of organized support groups outside the central Socialist Party are obscured, but the Y.M.C.A. housed a Thomas coterie and social gospel ministers studded the League for Independent Political Action and the Fellowship of Reconciliation which provided the socialist leader with certain leverage within his Party. As Swanburg does note, old friends like Theodore Savage and Charles Gilkey retained a profound sense of kinship with him, wondering all the while why he found it so hard to relate the social values they shared to a common theology. What is significant is that Thomas was liberated from a religion of first principles more or less in common with a theology which attended to consequences.

In some degree, other of Thomas' inner and intellectual struggles could be more fully developed in this biography. They were revealed periodically in his major writings, as he took stock of the rush of events and gave it perspective. That is a small caveat. Swanburg has captured the pulse of a man who lived richly in the rush of events, an unfulfilled conscience that we came to value without hitherto knowing.

Charles Chatfield
Wittenburg University
Springfield, Ohio