Volume 24, Number 3 · March 3, 1977
Socialist Celebrity
By William Phillips
Norman Thomas: The Last Idealist
by W.A. Swanberg
Scribner's, 528 pp., $14.95
Large radical movements often have had both their saintly figures and their politicians. The socialist movement in America, having been small and unsuccessful, had to combine the two images into one, in the person of Norman Thomas. Not that Thomas was either a saint or a very practical politician; but he did create the impression of being both because he usually took a high line of purity, honesty, and morality while his daily political life was filled with the lowly run of activities, with meetings, lectures, election campaigns, party infighting, committees, fund raising, rallies, protests. As Sartre said of Camus, he carried his moral pedestal with him, but, unlike Camus, who was a private man and for whom morality was a style of thinking, Thomas had his pedestal on constant public display in a politics of perpetual motion.
Review, 3519 words
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