'Conscience': Brothers in war and peace

CONSCIENCE: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family -- A Test of Will and Faith in World War I, by Louisa Thomas. Penguin Press, 320 pp., $25.95.

Wartime courage reveals itself in at least two ways: In the soldier who faces the enemy, despite his trembling hands, and in the pacifist who follows his conscience, despite the crowd taunting him as a coward.

Louisa Thomas' "Conscience" evokes both types of courage, in a family chronicle that reminds us of the shameful underside of World War I (1914-1918) on the American home front. Here, going to war also meant crushing dissenters, labeling them as "un-American" and even imprisoning some.

Thomas' essential point is that freedom of conscience, including the right to be a conscientious objector to war, lies at the heart of any authentic understanding of American freedom. Fighting for freedom abroad while suppressing it at home, as President Woodrow Wilson did in this era, was not only hypocritical but against American principles.

"Conscience" is anything but a tract. It's a well-paced, well-told story of an American family nurtured on mainstream middle-class, Christian respectability, testing its values as the Great War threatened to suck in America.

The story's fulcrum is Norman Thomas, the author's great-grandfather, the son of a Presbyterian minister and a Presbyterian minister himself who, beginning in 1928, ran six times for the U.S. presidency on the Socialist Party ticket. Revolving around Norman are his younger brothers, Ralph, Evan and Arthur.

Using a large cache of letters between the brothers and their parents, Thomas constructs a narrative highlighting the political-ethical dilemmas raised by the war. But unlike many war stories, Thomas' pacifists are the actors ratcheting up the drama -- they are the book's heart and soul -- while the soldiers' derring-do remains largely offstage.

All the brothers were educated at Princeton. Norman was clearly the star, the college's best debater and his class valedictorian. Ralph, who followed ably, later put his MIT graduate education to work in the Army Corps of Engineers. The two younger brothers floundered a bit before finding their way, Evan as a resolute antiwar resister and Arthur as an Army aviator in training.

At Union Theological Seminary, Norman broke free from his father's rigid Presbyterianism. Grounded in critical study of scriptural texts, his faith evolved into a social gospel, with Jesus as champion of the dispossessed. This bastion of liberalism also launched Evan on a path of questioning any authority outside the sovereign self.

How would the Thomas brothers act when push came to shove during a war of unparalleled horrors? When the Battle of the Somme ended, with an Allied advance of only seven miles, for instance, more than a million men were killed or wounded.

When the United States entered the war on April 6, 1917, its policies on conscientious objection were not even written, and a military draft was relatively new. Thirty-two years old, a clergyman and father of five, Norman was exempt. Yet his leadership of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and the National Civil Liberties Bureau (precursor of today's ACLU) drew the attention of federal authorities. Under the sway of the Espionage and Sedition Acts, anyone who challenged U.S. involvement in the war or supported conscientious objectors was subject to prosecution.

While Norman cheered on war resistance, a radicalized Evan put his body on the line. He declined to work on a farm as alternate service. After he stopped eating and refused direct military orders, he was clapped into a tiny cell and manacled to the wall. Norman and their mother, Emma, rushed to an Army base in Kansas to plead with him to end his apparent bid for martyrdom. He reluctantly did so, but was court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment, anyway.

Still, the privileged Thomas pacifists got off easy. Because of the intervention of a friend with ties to President Wilson, Norman never faced the persecution of Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, forced to spend two years in prison. And Evan's sentence was commuted, somewhat to his dismay.

Luck smiled on the other brothers. Ralph was wounded in France, but made it home safely, and at war's end Arthur had not yet completed flight school.

The country's wounds were harder to heal than Ralph's. The legacy of jingoism and intolerance would rear its head many times in decades to come. Ralph, who did not agree with his brothers' pacifism, nonetheless respected their commitment to conscience. It's an example worth honoring.

EXCERPT: "Conscience" by Louisa Thomas

Norman Thomas was expecting bad news. His country was at war, his brothers were in danger, and he was the subject of suspicion. Even so, the telegrams that arrived in the hot days of late August 1918 were worse than he feared. One said that his brother Evan, a conscientious objector, had been hospitalized at Fort Riley, a military training camp in Kansas, during a hunger strike against the draft. Then came word that another brother, Ralph, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, had been wounded by a German artillery shell on the western front in France.

With two sons who were pacifists and two sons who were soldiers, Norman's mother, Emma, had already felt anxious. Now she was beside herself. She had misgivings about Norman's pacifism and worried that his activism would get him in trouble. She believed that Evan's hunger strike amounted to suicide, and she had no idea what exactly had happened to Ralph or where he had been taken. Even her youngest son, Arthur, wasn't safe. He was at training camp in Texas flying flimsy practice planes. Yet she was proud of them all. Her relationships with each of her sons were as complicated as theirs were with one another.

Norman and his mother could do nothing to help Ralph on the western front. They could, however, go to Evan in Kansas. They left New York City on August 28. As the train sped west, Norman dwelled on his brothers and the demands of citizens and the state. "The situation of Mother-Evan-Military-myself has no promise of simplicity and ease," he wrote to his wife, Violet.

Late in the summer of 1918, the Thomas brothers' conflicts were apparent -- and irreconcilable. All of them believed they were fighting for freedom. Evan had become a conscientious objector to protest the government's conscription of life and conscience. Ralph had enlisted in the army immediately after the United States declared war, and Arthur had followed several months later, answering President Woodrow Wilson's call to fight for "the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience." Norman, too, wanted to make it possible for all men and women to pursue their own ends, but he thought that violence undermined Wilson's aims. So did the repressive atmosphere at home, where saying the wrong thing could land a man in jail, and being radical, or being black, or being foreign could get a man lynched. Through his work as a Presbyterian minister in New York City tenements and as an officer of anti-war organizations, Norman had seen unconscionable degradation and despair, too much inequality and too many abuses of power. American society had to change, Norman thought, and he was starting to believe he had a part to play.

Brothers have always disagreed; families have always fought. Some fights are bigger than others. When the Thomas brothers staked out their positions during that war, they had to reckon to an unusual degree with the questions of how to live, what to fight for, and why. They had to answer to one another, and they had to answer to themselves. That process of re-evaluating, explaining, defending and acting on his beliefs during World War I changed the course of Norman's life. And after the war was over, he dedicated himself to trying to help others change their own.

Norman Thomas is now largely forgotten, but for much of the 20th century it was commonplace to call him America's conscience. In a special remembrance that ran two days after his front-page obituary in 1968, The New York Times wrote, "He spoke to the feelings that most Americans have about themselves: that they are a fair people; that it is somehow wrong for poverty to exist amid plenty; that it is a perversion of justice to be jailed for political reasons; that Constitutional rights should be respected regardless of race or creed." He understood that these political, economic and social problems were moral problems, and he confronted those problems publicly. He wanted others to do the same.

At the end of World War I, Norman became a Socialist. He would go on to run for president six times on the Socialist ticket, and he represented democratic socialism until the day he died. Though many of his goals for social reform, from civil rights legislation to unemployment insurance, are now law, he was not a good politician, and he always fared badly at the polls. His failure as a politician, though, matters less than the reasons he traveled down the path he did. He became a Socialist because he despaired at what he saw and held out hope for something better. He thought society had lost the balance between opportunity and equality, creativity and security, the individual and the community. He was convinced that the capitalist emphasis on self-interest and profit engendered injustice, irresponsibility and class conflict, and that it was perverse that money was treated with greater reverence than the lives of workers. He was a pacifist before he was a Socialist, believing methods of force were antithetical to freedom. But his pacifism helped lead him to socialism, after he came to see war as the result and ultimate expression of capitalist exploitation.

As a politician he never managed (nor really tried) to put forth a coherent political philosophy, except to say what he was not: not a Marxist, not a communist, not a liberal, not a capitalist. At times, during party battles, he tried to adopt a more orthodox socialism. He was pessimistic about the state bureaucracy from the start, however, and he became less dogmatic after long and bruising fights with communists, of whom he was an early and determined opponent. With his hand in many causes, he spoke everywhere, in chapels and high school gyms, atop soapboxes and on the stage at Madison Square Garden. He cut a striking figure: tall and thin, with a high forehead and penetrating blue eyes. His voice resounded, and when he made a point he cut the air with the jab of a finger. He connected freedom to justice and justice to human beings.

But that came later. When World War I broke out, Norman was an unknown minister, more extraordinary for his promise as a pastor than for his politics. Soon after the United States entered the war, he lost his church. He also lost his faith in the aims and efforts of many liberals, including his old professor Woodrow Wilson. Yet it was also a time of discovery. Norman developed a new sense of purpose and a new understanding of what makes men free: freedom of conscience. Every person, he believed, has a conscience -- a sense that he is more than a creature of instinct, an awareness of ultimate ethical ends -- but not everyone is ordinarily free to heed it. A person is not free while fighting in war or living in extreme poverty. A person is not free if he is censored or unjustly jailed. During the war, Norman's own brother Evan was sentenced to life in prison for refusing an order to eat.

The politicians who led their countries into World War I described it as a war for freedom. But Norman became convinced that an ethical society could not emerge from the inferno of battle. Courage was important, but what was necessary was courage in daily life -- the courage to judge right from wrong and oneself before others. He thought freedom required the conditions that would satisfy the basic needs of men and women so they might have the chance to cultivate their own way of life, and so they might also treat others and be treated by others with dignity and respect.

Norman's faith in freedom of conscience raised questions about citizenship and responsibility that could not easily be answered, if at all. His brothers answered those questions differently than he did. No brother was always right, nor always wise nor always fair. Still, each understood that he was not alone; he had brothers.

Excerpted from "Conscience" by Louisa Thomas. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright (c) Louisa Thomas, 2011.