Word: swanberg
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...board of trustees or president sometimes did. President Nicholas Murray Butler was so distressed by what he considered offensive and lascivious in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls that he refused to submit the award recommendation to the trustees. The trustees refused to approve W. A. Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, so Swanberg got a later consolation prize for an inferior biography of Henry R. Luce...
...Left, government repression, the superficially socialistic New Deal, and the advent of World War II constituted political obstacles that may well have been insurmountable. In any case, a sophisticated analysis of the Socialist Party's decline is a task more suited to an academic than to a biographer, and Swanberg is more interested in providing a complete, detailed study of his subject than he is in assaying Thomas's tactics...
...Swanberg, Norman Thomas was "that bird many people now consider all but extinct, an honest politician." Thomas refused to compromise his firm democratic, egalitarian, and civil libertarian ideals, even when his stands alienated many of his supporters. A case in point was his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War II on the grounds that it would result in repression and fascism at home and the shoring up of imperialist regimes (Britain and France) abroad. Even those of his supporters who disagreed with his position in this case--and in others in which he was more prescient--could not help...
...this is perhaps why Swanberg, even while admitting Thomas's flaws, so clearly respects and admires Thomas, a man of, in a phrase he once used to characterize a friend, "uncommon common decency." For although he was sometimes mistaken, occasionally naive, Thomas served as America's conscience, educating and reminding her citizens of their government's failure to live up to her ideals in a way no marxist-idealogue could have. If Thomas's is a history of failure, it is less of a story of personal flaws than of the failure of the American political system...
...Luce and His Empire, Swanberg...