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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 '' publication in January of 1918. From 1921-1922 Thomas was associate editor of '' The Nation '', and became (1922) 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, highly ethical Thomas--who often wore three-piece suits--looked like and talked like a president and gained a grudging admiration. Thomas frequently spoke on the difference between socialism and Communism , and explaining the differences between the movement he represented and that of Revolution ary Marxism . He had an early admiration for the Russian Revolution that subsequently turned into a 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 Objector s, ''Is Conscience a Crime?'', and his statement of the 1960s Social Democratic consensus, ''Socialism Re-examined''. Thomas was as outspoken in opposing the following the attack on Pearl Harbor at a time when virually every public figure and government official approved of it. 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 reform liberalism, in collaboration with labor leaders like Walter Reuther . He championed a many seemingly unrelated progressive causes, and left unstated the essence of his political and economic philosophy. From 1931 until his death, to be a "socialist" in America meant to support those causes which Norman Thomas championed. 137 A High School in Manhattan is named after him. REFERENCES
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SEE ALSO Socialist Party USA
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