Norman Thomas - The Last Idealist [antikvár]

I 1. Mama's Boy Norman Mattoon Thomas, who would become a magnificent fighter, came very near losing the preliminary battle that made possible all the others—the fight for his own life. Evidently premature, he weighed only four pounds when he was born on November 20, 1884. The family doctor shook his head. For several struggling years, neighbors kept saying pityingly that he was not long for this world. Norman fooled them all by growing to prodigious strength and achieving an international fame that only one other fellow townsman of Marion, Ohio, would match, though in a very diflFerent way. The other was Warren Gamaliel Harding, nineteen years older, who like Thomas developed the aflFable personality that seemed the very distillation of the easygoing, neighborly atmosphere of a fresh-water county-seat town near the turn of the century. Both also would become men of great charm and handsomeness. The similarity ended there. What was said perhaps unfairly of Harding—that he was all personality and no character— could never be said of Thomas. These two would brush together in Marion, their paths would cross again and indeed Thomas would be a frequent visitor at the White House he could not win for himself, bringing admonition to Harding and to succeeding occupants for more than a generation after Harding was dead. To follow these two Ohio men into the world, to compare their dreams and their friends and their acts, to see what politics did to them and what they did to politics, would be an American study with overtones ranging from the slapstick to the exalted and the tragic. Marion was on the Erie and the Big Four, forty-five miles north of Columbus, seventy-five miles south of Toledo, a farm market town of 1