Most American don’t know who Norman Thomas is. Conservatives seem to be taking advantage of this fact and applying a couple quotes to him, that he most certainly never said.

“I no longer need to run as a Presidential Candidate for the Socialist Party. The Democrat Party has adopted our platform.”

and

“The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism. But, under the name of “liberalism,” they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program, until one day America will be a socialist nation, without knowing how it happened.!”

These two quotes are attributed to Thomas in a speech he gave in 1944. It would seem terribly unlikely that he would have ever said these things. Here is a (link) to another blogger thinking along the same lines.

There has been no evidence offered to show that these quotes are legitimate. And seeing how the overwhelmingly vast majority of the search engine hits lead to right-wing sites, it wouldn’t surprise anyone that this is fabricated. Honestly, when would a conservative ever bother to get their hands on a speech written by a Socialist in the mid 40s?