Reviewed by Harriet Douty Dwinell

Family memoirs are fraught with peril. Where to begin? What to include? How much of the narrative should be driven by source material, how much by the author’s themes? Louisa Thomas, the young author of Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists,  One Family — A Test of Will and Faith in World War I, seems to have wrestled with these issues in shaping the interesting story of the four Thomas brothers whose consciences she explores: Norman, Ralph, Evan and Arthur. Norman Thomas, the most public of the brothers as a six-time candidate for president of the United States on the Socialist Party ticket, provides the book’s focus. He was the author’s great-grandfather.

Conscience explores the impact of World War I — its outbreak in 1914 and the run-up and eventual American participation in 1917 — on the Thomas brothers. The subtitle oversells the story, however, in suggesting a clash among brothers, when the most serious conflict appears to have been internal, within the hearts and minds of the two pacifists, Norman and Evan, who came to their positions through very different paths.

Ralph and Arthur joined the military with no apparent reservations. Arthur, the youngest, who had always wanted to fly, joined the Army’s Air Service. Ralph, an engineer, considered it his duty to fight for his country. He also harbored dreams of heroism, and when a wound in France put him out of action for most of the war he was devastated. His conscience moved him in more private ways than his more public brothers. For example, it was he who, as a 28-year-old bachelor living in a boarding house, took in their suddenly widowed mother and made a home for her.

Faith — religious faith, the final element in the subtitle — provides the book’s subtext. Like their forebears, Norman and Evan studied for the ministry. Their paternal and maternal grandfathers were both Presbyterian ministers who had been trained at the theologically conservative Princeton Theological Seminary, as was their father, Welling Thomas. Breaking from tradition, all four Thomas boys attended Princeton University, but not its seminary.

Norman, the eldest, was the first to turn his back on the theological traditions of the family. Unlike Evan, who saw ministry work as a catalyst for moral fervor, Norman approached a religious calling as a means to social justice. After college he worked at a settlement house on the Lower East Side and then enrolled, against his father’s wishes, at Union Theological Seminary, which preached a Social Gospel of justice on earth rather than hope of heaven above. Once ordained, Norman served at the Presbyterian East Harlem Parish (known as the American Parish), where Italians, Hungarians and other newly arrived immigrants shared a fragile co-existence that was tested when war broke out

Conscience traces the evolution of Norman Thomas’s beliefs — from believing that capitalistic excesses were responsible for economic strife at home and war abroad to the idea that capitalism itself was the underlying problem; from taking a stand against World War I to a position of opposing all war. He went from believing that “God works in mysterious ways” to wondering where God was. In far more detail than is necessary, Louisa Thomas presents these changing beliefs in the context of Norman Thomas’s participation in two organizations — the American Union Against Militarism and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a Christian Pacifist group — which brought the young clergyman into association with leading figures on the Left. 

At the same time Norman Thomas had amazing access to political power. As class valedictorian at Princeton, held in high esteem by Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of Princeton and was now president of the United  States, Thomas often traveled from New York to Washington to meet with Wilson and other high-level officials. His influence helped expand the definition of “conscientious objector” to include  not only those who were pacifists for religious reasons but also those who refused military service on the basis of  ethical or humanitarian beliefs — categories beyond those whose religious doctrine forbade military service, such as Quakers.  These categories would later be challenged tested by Evan.

Evan Thomas initially piggybacked on Norman’s journey, attending Union Theological Seminary and working at his brother’s American Parish in East Harlem. But through his activities at Princeton he had embraced the idea that personal transformation was possible “only when a man risks persecution and rejection,” and he became obsessed with the martyred Christ.

After transferring to New College, Edinburgh, he felt contradictory impulses at witnessing the struggles of conscientious objectors driven to oppose military service out of personal convictions, and feeling his heart “[leap] at the sight of soldiers leaving for France” in an expression of civic duty. He and Norman diverged in their attitudes toward agency. Evan celebrated the individual soul; he believed that individuals, by sheer moral courage, could alter the world. Norman believed in the fellowship of human beings, that people acting together could change the world.

When America entered the war on April 6, 1917, Evan’s conscience told him to return to the States to be drafted — and then refuse to serve. He became an Absolutist, a person unwilling to accept military orders, which included eating. Despite near starvation, he held out, was force fed, and agreed to have food forced down his throat via a rubber tube, as long as he didn’t have to swallow, which would have meant obeying military orders to eat. Later, he was court-martialed and placed in solitary confinement, and eventually shackled and chained to the bars nine hours a day. Sentenced to life imprisonment, which was reduced to 25 years, Evan eventually was freed on a technicality. His harrowing experience, which mirrored that of others, is one of the most absorbing sections of this book.

Peopled with as many characters as a Victorian novel, who are generally identified only the first time they are introduced, and heavily referenced with sources of research, Conscience is not easy to read. One also wishes for more physical description and fuller portrayals of the personal lives of the four young men whose story is being told.

Louisa Thomas seems to have been overwhelmed by her extensive research material, and her decision to begin the book by looking at two previous generations of the family makes it hard to engage immediately with the main characters. Furthermore, her decision to center the book around the life of Norman Thomas takes the reader down many an obscure path. Reading Conscience is like looking into a kaleidoscope that never resolves itself into a single, captivating image. It’s a pity. One wishes the author could have another go at the interesting material, for in the poignant final chapter, when she offers an update on her subjects’ lives, Louisa Thomas seems to step away from source material and write out of her own knowledge. Would she have done that more often.

Harriet Douty Dwinell broke into print in the late l960s with a number of articles in the mainstream press on aspects of the New Left, including the draft and draft resistance.