https://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Political-Thought-Bibliographies-Reprint/dp/0836951425?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0836951425
educator politician scientist senator
Thomas was born in Salt Lake City, Utah Territory on June 17, 1883. He was the son of Caroline Stockdale and Richard Kendall Thomas, English converts to Mormonism, who immigrated to Utah in the early 1860's. His father was a successful dry-goods merchant and realtor, served a term in the state legislature (1898 - 1899), and was prominently mentioned for the Democratic nomination for governor.
In 1906 Thomas obtained the A. B. in Greek, Latin, and history from the University of Utah (his undergraduate thesis was entitled "The Roman House").
In 1907 together with his wife he began a Mormon mission to Japan, where they stayed until 1912. Thomas became proficient in Japanese and developed an abiding interest in Oriental culture and history. His talks on Mormon theology given in Japanese were collected as The Discourses of Elbert D. Thomas. In 1911 he published Sukui No Michi, a Japanese translation of the Mormon tract Way to Salvation.
From 1914 to 1916 Thomas taught Latin and Greek at the University of Utah, and from 1917 to 1922 he served as secretary of the university's board of regents. Beginning in 1917 he held for nine years the rank of major in the Utah National Guard and the United States Reserves. In 1922 he received a two-year teaching fellow-ship in political science at the University of California at Berkeley. His doctoral thesis, Chinese Political Thought, was based on the writings of the principal thinkers of the Chou period and was published in 1927. Thomas returned to the University of Utah in 1924 as professor of history and political science (later expanded to include Asian studies). His scholarship was rooted in the classics of both the East and the West and, far from remaining academic, was placed at the service of humanitarian causes.
Thomas' strength lay in his comparative approach. He was able to consider immediate and local issues in a national context, and national concerns in a worldwide framework. He often projected an issue backward or forward in time in order to gain perspective. Students remember the curious blend of Confucius, Lao-tsu, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson in his lectures, which were delivered with soft-spoken, relaxed deliberation. His classroom air was that of a mild-mannered sage; in Congress he became a genteel statesman.
In 1932 Thomas was elected Senator from Utah on a Democratic ticket, unseating Reed Smoot, a Mormon apostle who had held the seat for thirty years. He was reelected in 1938 and 1944. He served, most notably, on the Foreign Relations and Education and Labor committees; he was also wartime chairman of the Military Affairs Committee and of the reorganized Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. As a freshman senator he locked horns with the veteran Senator William Edgar Borah over the Neutrality Act, which Thomas, without success, proposed to amend. He also served on the Reorganization of Congress and the Civil Liberties committees.
"The scholar in politics, " Thomas was always more the professor than the politician. Adversaries thought him naïve in his faith in the goodness of human nature; advocates found him a "realistic idealist. " Thomas Jefferson, World Citizen (1942), published when he was a key member of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Commission (he selected the inscriptions for the memorial), is representative of his historical and philosophical approach to the ideal of world unity. Although by no means a rubber-stamp legislator, Thomas was an administration spokesman, introducing and often originating important New Deal legislation that responded to critical needs during the Great Depression and World War II. This included bills for the creation of a Department of Education and Public Welfare and for the establishment of the Civilian Conservation Corps, federal aid to education (the so-called GI Bill of Rights), national health insurance, fair labor standards, the control of atomic energy, and the establishment of the National Science Foundation. Thomas was also five times a delegate to the International Labor Organization conferences and twice a delegate to the Interparliamentary Union.
During World War II, Thomas sent monthly messages to Japan in Japanese for the Office of War Information, explaining American intentions in simple terms and preparing Japan for capitulation. He was among those who urged the U. S. government to retain the emperor to prevent anarchy.
In This Nation Under God (1950) Thomas considered the question, Is ours a land of destiny? During the war he had planned for peace and later helped bring the United Nations into being. "History is not just lived, " he said. "It is made. " He considered the Constitution a "companion of the American people, " an organic rather than an absolute instrument, adaptable to changing times, with government as the enabling agent to achieve the objectives of "general welfare" broadly interpreted.
Thomas was defeated for reelection in 1950 after a particularly vituperative campaign in which his opponent, Wallace F. Bennett, accused him of being soft on Communism. He was, in fact, a tenacious philosophical as well as political opponent of what he called "the single will state. " He believed federalism to be the United States' contribution to political thought and held that making it work was the country's contribution to the art of government. "Democracy, " he said, "hangs upon a thin thread of fair play. " His liberal voting record and sympathetic statements about the Soviet Union, particularly his book The Four Fears (1944), were accepted during the 1940's but were turned against him in the ensuing cold-war atmosphere, to which he was unable to adjust. In 1951 he became high commissioner of the United States Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. His was a benevolent administration.
Thomas died in Honolulu.
On June 25, 1907, he married Edna Harker, a classmate; they had three children. On November 6, 1946, four years after the death of his wife, Thomas married Ethel Evans.
