He was the oldest of six children. His father and grandfathers were all Presbyterian ministers. Welling Thomas served as pastor of the Marion Presbyterian Church. In an unpublished autobiography, Thomas later recalled his father's strict moralism: the reverend "frowned on playing cards, marbles for keeps, dancing and theater-going. He was sure that all drinking was immoral and thought that smoking wasn't much better." Thomas's work ethic developed early. He served as a paperboy for Warren G. Harding's
Marion Daily Star. He dutifully remained loyal to his father's Republican sentiments but recalled being greatly impressed by the figure and voice of the populist Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan during an 1896 election speech in Marion.
Following Thomas's high-school graduation in 1901, his family moved to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. Thomas attended nearby Bucknell University during his freshman year, in 1901-1902. With the aid of a wealthy uncle, he transferred to Princeton University for his sophomore year in the fall of 1902. At Princeton, Thomas became a great admirer of professor and future U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Thomas also studied socialism and Social Gospel economics with Walter Wyckoff. One of the first of the "human interest" social scientists, Wyckoff had traveled with transient laborers during the depression of the 1890s and recorded his participant observations in a book, The Workers: An Experiment in Reality (1897).
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