Norman Thomas

Norman Mattoon Thomas was an American Presbyterian minister, pacifist, and six-time Socialist Party candidate for President of the United States, contesting every election from 1928 through 1948. Born in Marion, Ohio, in 1884, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, he graduated as valedictorian from Princeton in 1905 and from Union Theological Seminary in 1911.

Ordained that year, he served as pastor of East Harlem Presbyterian Church and head of the American Parish, a settlement-house mission to immigrant families. Opposition to American entry into the First World War led him to help found the Civil Liberties Bureau in 1917, predecessor of the ACLU, and to leave the parish ministry in 1918 to edit the pacifist journal The World Tomorrow.

Thomas joined the Socialist Party of America in 1918 and replaced Eugene V. Debs as its presidential standard-bearer in 1928. His best showing came in 1932, when he received nearly nine hundred thousand votes against Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. He campaigned on Social Security, unemployment insurance, public housing, and the abolition of child labour, programs largely absorbed by the New Deal in his next two campaigns.

He testified before Congress against Japanese American internment in 1942 and against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. His many books include America's Way Out (1931) and Socialism Re-examined (1963). He died in Huntington, New York, in December 1968.

The name Norman is a masculine name of Germanic origin meaning "northman," originally denoting the Norse settlers of Normandy in northern France. It crossed into English use after the Norman Conquest and gained popularity as a given name in late-Victorian and Edwardian America, suiting the genteel Ohio Presbyterian household of his birth.