Norman Mattoon Thomas  (aka Barack Hussein Obama)

Like Democrats and Republicans, Socialists mix politics and picnics, forensics and fun. Some 25,000 of them last week flocked to Ulmer Park, a big bare, boarded plot near Brooklyn's Coney Island, for an all-day political outing to start their party's national campaign. Working families brought boxes of coarse sandwiches, pickles and fruit. Hot dog stands did a sizzling business. Youngsters played on swings, rode the merry-go-round. Their parents lolled on newspapers listening to band music or strolled off to watch a soccer game. Trade groups sang songs. Broadway performers gave a free show.

Through this frolicking crowd of plain people in shirt sleeves moved a tall lanky figure extending a friendly welcome to all. His smooth white hand shook many a hard and horny fist. Outwardly he was with this throng but plainly not of it. His blue coat and grey trousers were wrinkled but he wore a necktie. His hair, above a high intellectual forehead, was a silky grey but his pale blue eyes were young, fresh, benign. His manner with the masses was one of studied informality. Yet he was their particular idol, Norman Mattoon Thomas, Socialist nominee for the Presidency.

Use v. Profit During the afternoon Nominee Thomas climbed up on a platform. He spoke easily, rapidly, with few gestures and no political blood & thunder. His speech not only inaugurated his campaign but gave his party its 1932 slogan: ''Repeal Unemployment." Avoiding abstract theory he hammered home the necessity for relief, not as the two old parties proposed but by means of the Socialist formula of "production for public use rather than for private profit. " Excerpts :

"There are between ten and twelve million unemployed. . . . Men and women search the garbage cans, especially in the more prosperous neighborhoods, for food that has been left—men competing with rats and stray cats of the street. . . . That's how the celebrated law of supply & demand works under Capitalism! . . . The situation is worse rather than better in State after State, especially in those hells on earth, the bituminous coal mining camps. Next winter offers no hope except a complete breakdown, made more terrible by riots and actual starvation.

"No hope? No hope, unless we declare war on poverty with the energy with which we warred on Germany. No hope, unless we seek to repeal unemployment with a hundred times the fervor and intelligence men seek to repeal the discredited 18th Amendment. . . .

"Here is where our Socialist plan begins . . . We intend to subsidize consumption instead of letting the subsidies all go to producers seeking profit. . . . The Federal Government should grant emergency subsidies to unemployed families on a weekly basis. . . . We must begin to think in terms of ten billions. ... If necessary, I should favor a big issue of Government money to the unemployed for relief to be retired by stamps on its circulation. . . . The next great Socialist principle is the five-day week. . . . Another emergency measure is the taking over of unused land and factories so the unemployed can produce for their own needs. ... A system of unemployment insurance must be set up. We Socialists urge that costs of such insurance must be borne not by underpaid workers but by industries through pensions and society through taxation."

Running Record. Offhand Norman Thomas does not recall how many offices he has run for. His running record:

1924—Governor of New York 1925—Mayor of New York 1926—New York State Senator 1927—New York City Alderman 1928—President of the U. S. 1929—Mayor of New York 1930—U. S. Representative 1931—Borough President of Manhattan 1932—President of the U. S.

Norman Thomas is no "tired liberal." The fact that he never won any of his races in no way cools his ardor as a perennial Socialist candidate. To him a campaign is more a form of public education than a means of attaining office. The only political job he ever held was as a member of the New York City School Board (1914-17). No other famed Socialists, however, seriously contest Mr. Thomas' right to run for the Presidency. One who might, if he were ever divorced from his present job, is Daniel Webster Hoan, now serving his seventeenth year as Mayor of Milwaukee. As head of a non-partisan Socialist Administration, Mayor Hoan has made his city a shining exception in the gloom of municipal insolvency.

Votes. The late Eugene Victor Debs first appeared as the Socialist candidate for President in 1900. That year he got 94,864 votes. In 1904 he got 402,895; in 1908, 420,890; in 1912, 901,873. Allan Benson, carrying the Socialist banner in 1916, polled only 585,113. In 1920 Debs, then a prisoner in the Atlanta Federal penitentiary for violating the Espionage Act, made his fifth run for the Presidency, rolled up the surprising total of 919,799 votes. Four years later the Socialist party threw its lot in with Senator Robert Marion La Follette whose independent presidential candidacy drew 4,882,856 votes from the two old parties.* In 1928 Norman Thomas got only 267,420 votes.

This year Nominee Thomas, though he observes the political amenities by publicly claiming victory, expects to surpass the Debs vote of 1920. Some Socialists think his vote will go as high as two million as a reaction to hard times. This expectation is based on the idea that many a liberal Republican and Democrat will protest-vote the Socialist ticket. Last month in Cleveland the League for Independent Political Action, led by Columbia's dreamy Professor John Dewey, plunked for Nominee Thomas.

Young Senior— Party secretary and manager of the Socialist campaign is a shy, softspoken, bespectacled 28-year-old named Clarence Senior. He was converted to Socialism when he heard Mr. Thomas lecture at the University of Kansas. Manager Senior's fondness for dancing shocks the older members of the party, called "glacial Socialists." Most of these veterans have been pushed into the back-ground at Chicago headquarters, by men around 30 recruited to rally Youth to Socialism. Ready for Nominee Thomas is a campaign itinerary which starts this month in New England, swings to the Pacific Coast and back to New York by way of the South.

Presbyterian & Publisher. Born into a family of gentlefolk 47 years ago at Marion, Ohio, Mr. Thomas started life as an orthodox Republican. He voted for Taft in 1908. His father was a Presbyterian minister, as was his Welsh-born grandfather before him. In Marion as a boy he used to deliver copies of the Star. Its publisher, Warren Gamaliel Harding, had a hearty way of slapping him on the back and calling him ''Norm." Years later "Norm" Thomas was thoroughly shocked when his old employer actually got into the White House.

Spring Street. When the Thomas family moved to Lewisburg, Pa. Norman, aged 16, entered Bucknell College. After one year, thanks to a relative who had more money than the other Thomases, he transferred to Princeton. Upon his graduation in 1905, he took a job as a settlement worker in the New York slums. It shattered most of his dreams about the nobility of the downtrodden. Upon the wreckage, amid the dirt and filth of Spring Street, he built up a practical philosophy about the masses which serves him to this day. In 1910 he married Frances Violet Stewart. Their honeymoon was spent on a tandem bicycle. Born to the Presbyterian Ministry, he went through Union Theological Seminary, emerging, after a newsworthy dispute with his elders on tenets, a Bachelor of Divinity in 1911.

For seven years he led a flock in East Harlem. Welfare work took up most of his time. Though his mind brimmed with strange economic and political questions, he could still vote a second time for Wilson in 1916. Then came the War. It knocked him loose from all his orthodox inheritances and belief. He refused to turn his pulpit into a recruiting station. He combated War hysteria. His patriotic friends turned from him. He gave up his church, found a refuge in the pacifism of the Socialist party. He founded and edited a radical monthly (The World Tomorrow), had a heartbreaking fling at publishing a Labor daily, went on the staff of The Nation for a year.

Jailed. In 1922. now a thoroughgoing Socialist, he became director of the League for Industrial Democracy, an organization dedicated to spreading Socialism. This job paid a small salary, his only regular source of income. Better than money, it gave him an opportunity to run for office, spread his gospel. Between campaigns he threw himself into labor disputes, less as an agitator or organizer than as a defender of civil rights. For publicly denouncing the Riot Act to strikers from the Passaic, N. J. textile mills in 1926, he was arrested, jailed, held in $10,000 bail. He was again seized last year for picketing with strikers from the Paterson silk mills. Only last October did he formally demit the Presbyterian ministry.

In New York he lives with his family in a brownstone house on East 18th Street. His wife runs a tearoom on Irving Place, raises cocker spaniels profitably at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I. Of their five children, William, 19, works for a power transmission company; Polly, 18, is at Vassar; Frances, 17, goes to Barnard this autumn; Becky, 14, is in high school; Evan, 9. attends a private school in Connecticut. For fun Mr. Thomas plays a little tennis, sails a small boat on Shinnecock Bay. He drinks buttermilk, seldom smokes.

U. S. Socialism. To the dismay of many an old-time Socialist, Nominee Thomas has evolved a brand of Socialism largely his own. Karl Marx's inflexible dogmas have been left behind as Mr. Thomas has adapted his general creed to the U. S. A major obstacle to Socialism in the U. S. is an innate hope in every citizen someday to become a capitalist. According to Mr. Thomas, U. S. workers have a discouraging habit of thinking of themselves first as white or black. Jew or Gentile, native or foreign born, factory hands or field hands, rather than as a toiling mass all in the same economic boat. To develop class consciousness among workers, to convince them that they have no worthwhile chance of becoming capitalists is one of Nominee Thomas' primary aims in each campaign. Likewise the international quality of true Socialism has to be soft-pedalled in this country which dreads even the semblance of "foreign control."

Program, Broadly Nominee Thomas advocates the "class struggle'' involving the peaceful displacement of capitalism by an economic system wherein the State owns and controls production for the common good. This does not mean nationalization of all industry along the lines of the postal service, with the Government owning and running everything to the exclusion of worker and consumer alike. According to Mr. Thomas, the nation would become socialized in the sense that, while the Government would be the proprietor, workers and consumers would be the operators of the industrial machine. He considers government more efficient and honest than private business; the New York Port Authority is his governmental ideal.

The Socialist program in operation, as distilled from the party platform and the nominee's writings, would approximate the following:

1) Congress would appropriate $10,000,000,000, half for unemployment relief, half for public works.

2) As tools of socialization, inheritance and income taxes would be boosted sky-high to break up private fortunes, reduce personal profits, abolish unearned income. Tax-exempt securities would be closed as a refuge for the rich.

3) The Constitution would be amended to permit the Federal Government to establish unemployment and health insurance and old age pensions; to take over and socialize railroads, banks, public utilities, mines, forests, oil fields, water power and "other business and industries."

4) The size of the Supreme Court would be increased then loaded with a Socialist majority to sustain the legality of this program.

5) Gradually the Government would acquire large private enterprises, by condemnation and purchase. Owner-managers would be put on a reduced salary as technicians.

6) A tax equal to its rental value would be imposed on all land not immediately occupied by its owner. Such a levy would deprive absentee landlords of their rent. Land would tend to revert to the State which would parcel it out among workers and farmers.

7) A national planning board would be set up to execute the program, distribute work, arrange priorities, dictate to the remnant of private business.

Sample Life, How would a Socialist regime affect, say, a lawyer who lives on a 25-acre estate in New Jersey, motors to work in Manhattan, makes $50,000 per year from a corporation practice? First the rental-value tax on his estate would be so burdensome that he would have to dispose of all his land, except that on which his house stood. His servants would all belong to a union; if he wanted his breakfast before 8 or his dinner after 7 he would have to get it himself. He would drive to town in a car built in a government factory. Instead of having his own practice, he would be paid a salary—possibly $5,000 or $10,000—by a State agency controlling all legal services. He would be assigned to cases much as attorneys are now assigned by the court. Corporate litigation would languish and die. The Law, and like it Medicine, would become a profitless institutional affair for the common good.

"Last Stand." As Socialist Thomas saw it last week, the U. S. is heading for a "highly nationalistic form of Fascism" which will be "the last stand of Capital-ism." The country, he believes, is ripe for a dictatorship, with the mass of people stunned into inaction by the Depression. All that is lacking is the dictator himself. The Bonus Expeditionary Force encamped at the capital, he once thought, offered fertile soil for such a backward movement but its leaders did not measure up to the political opportunity. "If the country wasn't so sprawling." declared Socialist Thomas, "a man like Senator Huey Long might seize demagogic control.

" For Communism and its creed of violent revolution Nominee Thomas has only bitter words, due perhaps to the fact tha't recurrent Red scares have driven a confused electorate back from Socialism to hard-boiled reaction. Peaceful methods are paramount in the Thomas program. Says he:

"I don't believe in Santa Claus but I do believe in the efficacy of political action. Only by that means can permanent Socialism be brought to pass. It may take a long time but it will come eventually."

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