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Thomas Ryum Amlie was born on April 17, 1897 near Binford, North Dakota, United States, the son of Paul William Amlie, a farmer, and Julia Ryum. The family farm never prospered, and following his mother's death in 1912 Amlie lived with an aunt in nearby Cooperstown.
Amlie graduated from nearby Cooperstown high school in 1916. From 1916 to 1918, he studied at the University of North Dakota, leaving for military service. He attended the University of Minnesota in 1919, then worked as an organizer for the agrarian Non-Partisan League. He entered the University of Wisconsin in 1921 to study law, receiving his degree in 1923.
Early in career Amlie became a practicing attorney in the Wisconsin towns of Beloit and then Elkhorn. For several decades politics in Wisconsin had been played out largely in Republican party primaries in contests between the party's conservative wing and the progressive wing, headed by Robert M. La Follette and then by his sons Robert M. and Philip. Following the death of the long-time incumbent in Wisconsin's First Congressional District, Amlie ran in the 1931 Republican primary for the vacant congressional seat as a La Follette progressive, defeated his conservative rival, and served as United States Representative from 1931 to 1933.
The most significant phase of Amlie's career followed his 1932 Republican primary loss for renomination to Congress. Increasingly radicalized by the Great Depression, Amlie attended the September 1933 conference called by the League for Independent Political Action, which led to the creation of the Farmer-Labor Political Federation (FLPF). Amlie galvanized the conference with his speech, and he was selected as chairman of the new organization. Joined by radical Common Sense editor Alfred M. Bingham as executive secretary, with philosopher John Dewey serving as honorary chairman, Amlie strove to make the FLPF, which in 1935 was renamed the American Commonwealth Political Federation (ACPF), a viable third-party alternative by the election year of 1936.
Amlie looked to Wisconsin and Minnesota to provide the foundation stones for a national third party. In Wisconsin he hoped to persuade the La Follette Republicans to form a new state party; in Minnesota he hoped to build upon the existing state Farmer-Labor party. Amlie helped convince Philip and Robert M. La Follette to launch the Wisconsin Progressive party in 1934, and he was elected as a Progressive to his former congressional seat in 1934 and 1936. But under the La Follettes the Wisconsin Progressive party did not move in the more radical direction desired by Amlie. Nor did the Minnesota Farmer-Labor party commit itself to serve as a nucleus for a national ACPF effort. In the country at large, third-party sentiment tended rather toward what Amlie considered the superficial and simplistic panaceas of Senator Huey P. Long's "Share Our Wealth" movement and Representative William Lemke's 1936 Union party presidential bid. Given the failure of the ACPF to attract a significant following, Amlie concluded that the only politically realistic course would be to try to push the New Deal in the direction of more fundamental change.
Amlie thus abandoned his national third-party crusade after 1936, joining with other like-minded congressmen in an unsuccessful endeavor to pass legislation designed to graft a form of economic planning onto the existing economic system. In 1938, Amlie ran for the Progressive party nomination for United States senator from Wisconsin, losing the primary election to Herman Ekern, a veteran associate of "Old Bob" La Follette. His tenure in the House of Representatives now over, Amlie was nominated by President Roosevelt in 1939 to serve on the Interstate Commerce Commission, but Amlie withdrew his name in the face of heated opposition.
Amlie ran again for Wisconsin's First Congressional District seat in 1941, this time as a Democrat supporting Roosevelt's foreign policy and attacking isolationism, but he was defeated by his Republican opponent. Following his defeat, he moved his family from Elkhorn to Madison, Wisconsin.
Amlie worked in 1942 for the liberal Union for Democratic Action political organization and advised the Political Action Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the 1944 campaign. He now believed that the Democratic party was the only viable instrument to achieve the limited reform to which the American people had proven agreeable and that third parties in Wisconsin and Minnesota would only divide the reform vote and result in the election of conservatives.
In 1950, Amlie published Let's Look at the Record, a comparative study and compilation of Democratic and Republican voting records in Congress. He remained active in Wisconsin state politics in the post-World War II era. His last try for elective office came in 1958 in a losing bid for the Democratic nomination in Wisconsin's Second Congressional District. Forced into retirement by Parkinson's disease, Amlie died in Madison.
Amlie was a member of the Republican Party from 1931 to 1933 and again from 1935 to 1939 as a member of the Wisconsin Progressive Party. Amlie's radicalism was of a distinctly American kind. He agreed with the Marxist proposition that capitalism was doomed, and he believed in the 1933-1936 period that President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal reforms could at best postpone the inevitable collapse. But he also believed that the Marxist concept of class struggle was ill-suited to American traditions. His intellectual hero was not Karl Marx but rather the American economist Thorstein Veblen. In a country that had known prosperity and opportunity, Amlie held, people did not think in terms of rigid class lines. Only an appeal couched in such American terms as abundance and efficiency could persuade voters to turn to a publicly owned and operated "production for use" economic system, an American "cooperative commonwealth. "
Of an intellectual bent, Amlie characteristically thought in terms of systematic concepts, patterns, and trends. As a speaker, his presentation was crafted and his style serious and substantive rather than flamboyant or emotional.
On February 21, 1925, Amlie married Marian Caldwell Strong, who died in 1930 following an extended illness. He married Gehrta Farkasch Beyer on May 7, 1932. Together they raised three sons from his first marriage, a son from her first marriage, and a daughter.
