Evan Welling Thomas

Born in 1890; before 1918 worked in England among German prisoners of war, as a “Y” Secretary; drafted on April 30th, 1918 and voluntarily went to Camp Upton (NY) where he was classified as a C.O. and sent to the C.O. barracks; interviewed by the Board of Inquiry of Inquiry at Ft. Leavenworth twice, and both times was classified as sincere; refused a farm furlough and any type of noncombatant service; sent to Ft. Riley, where he went on a hunger fast starting Sept. 21; was sent to Base Hospital and tube fed from Aug. 27th to Sept. 3rd, 1918; courts-martial trial #121505; his court-martial trial record is 14 pages long; court-martialed and imprisoned at Ft. Leavenworth; told about by delegation to Secretary of War Baker in Dec. 1918 (which included his mother and his brother Arthur Thomas); released in 1919; reason for stance = Socialist; brother of Norman Thomas; became Assistant Professor of Medicine at New York University, Chief of Syphilis service at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, and National Chair of the War Resisters League; featured in The Radical “No”: The Correspondence and Writings of Evan Thomas on War; died in 1974.