NORMAN THOMAS

I walk where I choose to walk.

Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we'd kill 300 million people in the first hour. McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.

I always get more applause than votes.

The secret of a good life is to have the right loyalties and hold them in the right scale of values.

To us Americans much has been given; of us much is required. With all our faults and mistakes, it is our strength in support of the freedom our forefathers loved which has saved mankind from subjection to totalitarian power.

On ..., the very day after the great pageantry of Hitler's first German Labor Day, the Nazi Government occupied–without a struggle–all trade union headquarters, arrested all trade union officials, and took control of all trade union property.... They set up official arbitrators and denied to the unions the right to strike or otherwise to function independently. In practice, these fascist-controlled unions were scarcely more than debating societies.

Workers ... do not eat legal rights but bread. History, especially recent history, gives much evidence to support the contention that men want security more than freedom and that for an indefinite time they may be successfully governed by a dictator who keeps in mind the maxim that 'contented cows give the best milk.'

Under the Nazi Government there has been much 'invisible unemployment.' The number of unemployed Jews is great and is increasing; but these are not counted as unemployed. A decision by the highest labor court at Weimar on November 27, 1935, opened the way for the dismissal of all Jews working for non-Jewish employers. ... in order to protect 'Aryan' employees from Jewish influences. Jews will have to work for Jews or not at all. Another source of 'invisible unemployment' has been the wholesale discharge of women whose husbands are employed, and of unmarried men under twenty-five. None of these are included among the unemployed in the official statistics. Part-time workers are counted as fully employed...

Religious pacifists were confined in unsanitary guardhouses—sometimes in unheated cells during winter months, without blankets …. Men were … beaten, pricked or stabbed with bayonets, jerked about with ropes around their necks, threatened with summary execution, tortured by various forms of the “water cure.”

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag, wash it.

In modern megalopolis the very men who make the city, who clean its streets and shovel its coal and run its subway trains, may be exiled from it when they quit work at night. To-day in New York the average worker simply cannot provide a decent home for himself on the average wage. We have been so victimized by the spirit of the real estate speculator that we have almost forgotten the logical ideal of a city as a pleasant place for common people to live together.

The notion that paradise begins with personal home ownership is one that has been drummed into Americans for so long by presidents … and realtors that it is hard to dislodge.

New Yorkers pay a price of untold millions to the great private monopolies every year an excessive price because these monopolies use their power to defeat effective regulation.-

The law firms of the city swoop down like vultures on the land owners of any neighborhood where a civic improvement is planned, sometimes fifteen years in advance of actual sale, and "sign them up" in a house to house canvass with an agreement that the law firm shall receive 5 per cent of the total award. That means, of course, $50,000 for a million dollar award which can often be secured from friendly courts with very little labor. The labor, in fact, is nearly all in getting the clients and holding them together. The actual condemnation cases are perfunctory affairs. The claimants have an expert who has become known as a professional optimist. The city has an expert who is only slightly less optimistic.

Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President.

For the common man the justice meted out in the lower courts is much more important than that meted out in the Supreme Court.

Democracy, in brief, requires government by parties because the citizens are too numerous, too ill-informed and too preoccupied to come together spontaneously to choose the policies and leaders they wish to prevail. Political machinery has to be worked. The parties work it.

The two old parties … fight only for office. Observe how utterly both parties in this respect lack program and new leadership.

Our present two-party system lives on the strength of organization rather than of principle. Both parties belong to the same general set of masters who pay their bills.

Among other things the Russian experiment, no less than the experience of Socialist parties in Western Europe which have got some degree of power, shows clearly that not even the most cataclysmic revolution can create overnight those habits of mind and that social machinery necessary to the successful functioning of a new social order.

In Socialism as in every great historic movement there are divergences of opinion and ideas. There is the sharp division between Socialists and Communists, principally on the important question of methods and tactics.

Indeed, it is unnecessary to do more than point out that the worst danger of cataclysm in a capitalist society is the danger of war arising out of imperialism born of the union of capitalism and nationalism.

There is no use in repeating that threadbare capitalist boast that we have more things than ever before and that workers are better off than were ancient kings. The point is that no age has ever so tragically failed to use the machinery it had for ease and security of living. Things may have increased but so has insecurity. The peasant and artisan of old was assured work and an honorable place in his family and community while he lived. He knew nothing of the dead line at forty or forty-five which gives new terror to old age. He knew almost nothing of unemployment as a social disease which in so-called normal times affects some ten per cent of the workers and is today the lot of twenty-five to thirty-three per cent of them.

… only today, or yesterday at the earliest, after the long millenniums of man's life on this planet, has he acquired the technical skill, the command over the forces of nature, the physical power to produce enough and more for all his children upon the face of the earth.

The struggle against demagoguery scarcely fits the St George-against-the-dragon myth. Our democratic St George goes out rather reluctantly with armor awry. The struggle is confused; our knight wins by no clean thrust of lance or sword, but the dragon somehow poops out, and decent democracy is victor.