Smith and Thomas (and Hoopes?)
Tucker Powell Smith, January 29, 1898 (Missouri) – June 25, 1970 (Ventura, Calif.)
VP candidate for Socialist Party of America (aka Socialist Party of the United States) (1948)
Running mate with nominee: Norman M. Thomas (1884-1968)
Popular vote: 139,569 (0.29%)
Electoral vote: 0/531
The campaign:
In his sixth and final run for the presidency, Norman Thomas found himself as the head of just another of the increasing and fragmented political parties on the Left. The days of the Socialist Party of America acting as the country's premier third party were over.
1948 running mate Tucker Powell Smith was long active in pacifist political activity. At the time of the campaign he was a resident of Highland Park, Mich.
Smith was rumored to have been a ghost-writer for an anti-Truman speech by his VP rival, Progressive Party running mate Sen. Glen Hearst Taylor.
The 1948 SPA platform slammed communists (and Henry Wallace's Progressive Party by association):
Three forces today are competing for the loyalty of men. And in this race, the stakes are the survival of mankind.
On the one hand, an economic system calling itself "free enterprise" asserts that it can lead to the salvation of humanity. It has brought us repeatedly to depressions and wars, yet its spokesmen in the Democratic and Republican Parties still pretend they
have solutions.
They have, in fact, betrayed the promises with which they woo the American people every four years. They offered prosperity and delivered depression. They pledged peace and delivered war. They promised to increase our standard of living and are now raising the cost of living. They promised freedom to organized labor and hobbled it with new bonds.
They have sought partisan advantage and jeopardized national welfare. The dominant wings in their parties have combined to destroy price control and give us inflation, to undermine restraints on greed and give us shortage, to favor the rich and deny the poor, to cut the taxes of the wealthy and insult the common man with a crumb.
There is a second force in the world—which promises security and speaks of freedom but delivers only economic bondage and dictatorship. It is the force of totalitarianism. Yesterday its most sinister front was Fascism; today it is Communism.
In the United States, it marches under masked banners. It calls itself a "new party" and has pushed into the forefront well-meaning liberals who do not know the purposes of their Communist allies. And this alliance, though speaking for civil liberties at home, defends the most powerful tyranny in the modern world. It speaks of peace but is blind to the most aggressive imperialism of the present day. It speaks of one world but works for two spheres of influence. It urges the brotherhood of man but sanctifies the divisive principle of national sovereignty.
As against these forces, the Socialist Party of the United States speaks for the Third Force—democratic socialism, the principles of democratic planning and international order.
With votes recorded in 34 states the Thomas/Smith ticket finished in a very distant 5th place. In Wisconsin they tallied 0.98%, in Oregon 0.96% and the percentages dramatically plummet after that. Georgia gave them three votes and in South Carolina they earned one single lonely vote.
Election history:
1929 - Alderman, New York, NY (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
1930 - US House of Representatives (NY) (Socialist Party of America) - defeated
Other occupations: college teacher, Director of Brookwood Labor College 1933-1937
Buried: Pierce Brothers Valley Oaks Memorial Park (Westlake Village, Calif.)
Notes:
Shortly after the election he was dismissed from Olivet College in Jan. 1949 for union agitation.
Buried in the same cemetery as Karen Carpenter, Ronald Goldman, Jack Kirby, Virginia Mayo, Harry
Nilsson, and Artie Shaw.
Future Pulitizer Prize winning author Carleton Mabee resigned his teaching job at Olivet in protest of
Smith's firing.
