Flashback Friday: Socialist Norman M. Thomas Challenges Willkie to a Debate

Seventy years ago this week Norman M. Thomas, waging his fourth consecutive campaign for the presidency on the Socialist Party ticket, challenged Republican Wendell Willkie to a face-to-face debate.

Thomas’s challenge came in response to Willkie’s request for a series of debates with Franklin D. Roosevelt — a proposal initially made during his acceptance speech in his boyhood home of Elwood, Indiana, on August 17.

“I propose that during the next two and a half months the President and I appear on public platforms together in various parts of the country and on those platforms debate the fundamental issues of this campaign,” Willkie told his audience.

Realizing that he had little to gain from such give-and-take verbal jousting with his Republican rival, Roosevelt refused, telling reporters that he was too busy to engage in any active campaigning.

Refusing to take no for an answer, Willkie renewed his challenge shortly thereafter, insisting that FDR, who was breaking 150 years of tradition by seeking an unprecedented third term in the White House, was under “a double obligation” to discuss the issues facing the country. “Lincoln did not think it unworthy or undignified to debate,” Willkie told reporters, “and neither did Daniel Webster.”

The public, too, was clamoring for a debate between Roosevelt and Willkie. According to the New York Times, more than 200,000 people had signed petitions circulated by the Citizens’ Committee for Democracy urging President Roosevelt to debate his Republican challenger in two face-to-face encounters, one focusing on defense and foreign policy and another on economics and domestic policy.

Moreover, students on thirty college campuses around the country also circulated petitions calling on FDR to debate his Republican opponent.

Willkie continued to press for a debate throughout the remainder of the campaign, making a final plea to share a podium with Roosevelt on October 30 when both men were scheduled to speak in Baltimore. FDR declined.

Saying that he applauded Willkie’s desire to revive the Lincoln-Douglas tradition, the Socialist Party’s Thomas weighed in with a debate offer of his own, challenging his Republican opponent to a face-to-face debate on a wide-range of issues facing the country.

The two men had debated a year and a half earlier in New York City on the issue of government ownership of utilities.

“In principle your position and the President’s on vital issues is the same,” Thomas wrote in a telegram to the Republican nominee on August 19, two days after Willkie’s acceptance speech. Arguing that his own position on peacetime conscription and economic policy was very different from the positions shared by both of his major-party rivals, Thomas said the national interest would be served with or without President Roosevelt’s participation.

When Willkie ducked his Socialist rival’s challenge to a debate, Thomas’s supporters — as few as they were that year — began picketing the Republican candidate’s hotel in New York, carrying banners demanding that Willkie agree to debate his minor-party opponent.

When informed of the protesters, an amused Willkie laughed and said that he would be willing to participate in a three-way debate. “I’m very fond of Norman,” he said, “and if he can get Mr. Roosevelt to join us, I’ll be glad to participate in a tri-partite debate.”

Of course, that never happened.

Nobody could blame Willkie for refusing to debate his Socialist opponent, a formidable and quick-witted adversary who asked his audiences at the height of the Great Depression not to hold Herbert Hoover responsible for the country’s miserable economic plight because “such a little man could not have made so big a depression.”

The prevailing conventional wisdom suggested that Willkie had nothing to gain from such an exchange.

Persistent to a fault, Thomas tried again to engage Willkie in a public debate late in the campaign, suggesting the two men mix it up at a city park in Elmira, New York, on October 24, when Willkie was scheduled to speak. Thomas had been denied a speaking permit at the same park a few months earlier.

“In the spirit of fair play and public discussion,” pleaded the 55-year-old Thomas in a telegram to Willkie a few days earlier, “I would suggest a debate in that park Friday, especially on your foreign policy, which is similar to and as dangerous as that of the President.” The Socialist standard-bearer was convinced that both of his major-party opponents — twin interventionists, as he described them — would involve the country in World War II.

Willkie again said he would be willing to debate, but only if Roosevelt participated.

In the end, Roosevelt refused to debate Willkie and Willkie refused to debate Thomas.

Convinced that a record number of Americans were choosing sides based solely on the “lesser of two evils,” the lanky and avuncular Thomas closed out his fourth bid for the White House with an eleventh-hour plea to all of those “reluctantly for Roosevelt and unwillingly for Willkie” to avoid canceling out one another’s votes by casting a protest vote for the Socialist ticket.

Few listened. The patrician rebel polled a painfully disappointing 116,827 votes nationally — a small fraction of the more than 884,000 votes he received eight years earlier — as FDR, pummeling Willkie by nearly five million votes, swept to an unprecedented third term.