Uncommon common decency

principles could not be compromised. Thomas's political strategy was often contradictory and destructive. Striving to broaden the party's base, he wooed both liberal Democrats on the right and communists on the left, wishfully and, as it turned out, rather naively viewing the latter as Socialists who had gone astray. In so doing, he alienated many of the Old Guard Socialists who accused him of undue willingness to compromise, while simultaneously providing an opening for the Trotskyites, who deliberately sabotaged their rival party on the Left. The liberals, on the other hand, regularly deserted the party to vote for "progressive" candidates such as Fiorello La Guardia and Franklin D. Roosevelt whose ties to corrupt and reactionary political machines made it unthinkable for Thomas to endorse them.

But even if FDR's comment "Norman, I'm a damned sight better politician than you are," was correct, it is clear that the Socialist party's problems were not solely the product of failures on the part of its leadership. The ideological divisions and rivalries among the parties of the American Left, government repression, the superficially socialistic New Deal, and the advent of World War II constituted political obstacles that may well have been insurmountable. In any case, a sophisticated analysis of the Socialist Party's decline is a task more suited to an academic than to a biographer, and Swanberg is more interested in providing a complete, detailed study of his subject than he is in assaying Thomas's tactics.

To Swanberg, Norman Thomas was "that bird many people now consider all but extinct, an honest politician." Thomas refused to compromise his firm democratic, egalitarian, and civil libertarian ideals, even when his stands alienated many of his supporters. A case in point was his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II on the grounds that it would result in repression and fascism at home and the shoring up of imperialist regimes (Britain and France) abroad. Even those of his supporters who disagreed with his position in this case--and in others in which he was more prescient--could not help appreciating and respecting his reasons. Swanberg's Thomas thus appears as an almost classically tragic figure whose discriminating mind and commitment to democratic ideals were at once his greatest personal assets and political liabilities. In what seems an apocryphal metaphor, Swanberg notes that Thomas was a singularly inept bridge player, often "playing the wrong cards but, his son-in-law John Gates observed, "always having a good reason for it."

There was also the apparent contradiction that existed between the political views and positions of the public, Socialist Thomas and the private Thomas, a member, however reluctant, of the upper class. Thomas's wife Violet (nee Stewart) was the daughter of one of New York's wealthiest and most illustrious families, and the bulk of the Thomas family income was derived from her sizeable inheritance. Thomas sent his children to private schools, owned a luxurious country house, employed several servants, and enthusiastically supported his wife's hobby of raising cocker spaniels. A staunch, and early, opponent of racial discrimination he nevertheless swam at the exclusively white Cold Spring Harbor Club, where he enjoyed the company of cold warrior brothers Allen and John Foster Dulles, whose views on practically every subject were diametrically opposed to his own.

Thomas himself recognized the disparity between his public stands and his upper class life style, but did not view it as a contradiction.

...My own particular feeling is that there is no particular virtue in not eating cake unless it helps my brother to have bread ... the ascetic ideal as such makes no appeal to me. The question, as I see it, is the extent to which our denial may help others ... My wife has a leaky heart. If she can be kept from overwork the doctor has said that she may hope for a reasonable long and useful life ... I think it is a dubious service to society not to bring up [my five children] as well as I can...

With his moralist, individualist approach, upperclass lifestyle and unshakeable belief in the democratic and civil libertarian ideals Thomas, never a Marxist ideologue, was at best a bourgeois socialist. Indeed, in his later years, disturbed by the systematic suppression of dissent in Stalinist Russia, he felt his socialist faith slipping.

But even if in the end Thomas's socialism consisted, as The New York Times put it, "mainly in jumping in wherever he thinks human beings are being abused or human rights ignored, and doing something about it," he was no Don Quixote; the sufferings of the people whose causes Thomas espoused--the urban poor, Southern sharecroppers, repressed political dissidents in the U.S. and abroad--was painfully real.

And this is perhaps why Swanberg, even while admitting Thomas's flaws, so clearly respects and admires Thomas, a man of, in a phrase he once used to characterize a friend, "uncommon common decency." For although he was sometimes mistaken, occasionally naive, Thomas served as America's conscience, educating and reminding her citizens of their government's failure to live up to her ideals in a way no marxist-idealogue could have. If Thomas's is a history of failure, it is less of a story of personal flaws than of the failure of the American political system.