Dorothy Thompson | |
|---|---|
 Thompson in 1937 | |
| Born | Dorothy Celene Thompson July 9, 1893 Lancaster, New York, U.S. |
| Died | January 30, 1961(1961-01-30) (aged 67) Lisbon, Portugal |
| Education | Lewis Institute Syracuse University (BA) |
| Spouses | |
| Children | 2 |
Dorothy Celene Thompson (July 9, 1893 – January 30, 1961) was an American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled fromNazi Germany, in 1934, and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s.[1][2] Thompson is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism"[3] and was recognized byTime magazine in 1939 as equal in influence toEleanor Roosevelt.[4] Recordings of her NBC Radio commentary and analysis of the European situation and the start ofWorld War II (from August 23 to September 6, 1939) were selected by theLibrary of Congress for preservation in theNational Recording Registry in 2023, based on their "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."[5]
Dorothy Thompson was born inLancaster, New York, in 1893, one of three children of Peter and Margaret (Grierson) Thompson. Her siblings were Peter Willard Thompson and Margaret Thompson (later Mrs. Howard Wilson). Her mother died in April 1901 when Thompson was seven, leaving Peter, a Methodist minister, to raise his children alone. Their father soon remarried, but Dorothy did not get along with his new wife, Elizabeth Abbott Thompson.[6]
In 1908, her father sent Thompson toChicago to live with his two sisters to avoid further conflict. In Chicago she attendedLewis Institute for two years and earned anassociate degree before transferring toSyracuse University as a junior. At Syracuse, she studied politics and economics and graduatedcum laude with abachelor's degree in 1914.[7] Because she had the opportunity to be educated, unlike many women of the time, Thompson felt that she had a social obligation to fight forwomen's suffrage, which would become the base of her ardent political beliefs. Shortly after graduation, Thompson moved toBuffalo and became involved in the women's suffrage campaign. During her time in the suffrage movement, Thompson also did advertising and publicity work in New York City and contributed op-eds on social justice toThe New York Times and theNew York Herald Tribune. In 1920, she went abroad to pursue a journalism career.[8]
Thompson boarded a ship toLondon in June 1920 to become a foreign correspondent. Beginning by submitting articles to theInternational News Service (INS), she went to Ireland in August and was the last to interview theSinn Féin Irish independence leaderTerence MacSwiney. Later on the day of the interview, Aug. 12, MacSwiney was arrested for sedition by the British government; he died in prison on a hunger strike two months later.[8]The interview was sent by INS to American newspapers and led to Thompson being appointed Vienna correspondent for thePhiladelphiaPublic Ledger.[9]
While working inVienna, Thompson became fluent in German. She met and worked alongside correspondentsJohn Gunther andG. E. R. Gedye. In 1925, she was promoted to Chief of the Central European Service for thePublic Ledger.[10] She resigned in 1927 and, not long after, theNew York Evening Post appointed her head of its Berlin bureau in Germany.[3] There she witnessed firsthand the rise of theNational Socialist or Nazi party. According to her biographer, Peter Kurth, Thompson was "the undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance".[11]
During this time Thompson cultivated many literary friends, particularly amongexiled German authors. Among her acquaintances from this period wereÖdön von Horváth,Thomas Mann,Bertolt Brecht,Stefan Zweig andFritz Kortner. She developed a close friendship with authorCarl Zuckmayer. In Berlin she got involved in alesbian affair with German authorChrista Winsloe, while still married, claiming "the right to love".[12]
Thompson's most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s.[2] InMunich, Thompson met and interviewedAdolf Hitler for the first time in 1931. This would be the basis for her subsequent book,I Saw Hitler, in which she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany.[1] Later, in aHarper's Magazine article in December 1934, Thompson described Hitler in the following terms: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man."[13]
Biographer Kurth wrote: "Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her 'Little Man' remark. 'I still believe he is a little man,' she replied. 'He is the apotheosis of the little man.' Nazism itself was 'the apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its forms.' "[14]
Fellow correspondent and friendWilliam L. Shirer once commented on Dorothy Thompson's "love for Germany, which was passionate but — as she wrote once — frustrated."[15] Her anti-Nazi journalism and, in particular, her depiction of Hitler in her book,I Saw Hitler, led to her becoming the first American journalist to be expelled from Germany.[16] On August 25, 1934, she received the expulsion order, delivered by aGestapo agent to her hotel room in theHotel Adlon, Berlin. She was given 24 hours to leave the country.[17][1] Thompson did so on August 26. Numerous journalists gathered to see her off at the train station, who gave her bunches of American Beauty roses to show their solidarity.[17][1]
Thompson's expulsion received extensive international attention, including a front page story on theNew York Times. Biographer Peter Kurth said "her expulsion from Berlin had turned her overnight into a kind of heroine – a celebrity of note, the dramatic embodiment of the nascent war against fascism."[1]
In 1936, Thompson began to write "On the Record", aNew York Herald Tribune newspaper column that was also syndicated nationwide.[2] It was read by over ten million people and carried by more than 170 papers. With a new column appearing three times a week, the feature lasted, uninterrupted, for 22 years.[1]
She also wrote a monthly column for theLadies' Home Journal[2][3] for 24 years, from 1937 to 1961. Its topics were far removed from war and politics, focusing on gardening, children, art, and other domestic and women's-interest topics.
Around the time when she started to write "On the Record",NBC hired Thompson as a news commentator. Her radio broadcasts on the network from 1936 to 1938 would become some of the most popular radio broadcasts in the United States, making her one of the most sought after female public speakers of her time.[2] When Nazi Germanyinvaded Poland in 1939, Thompson went on the air for fifteen consecutive days and nights.[6]
In 1938, Thompson championed the cause of a Polish-German Jewish teenager,Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination of a minor German diplomat,Ernst vom Rath, in Paris, had been used as propaganda to trigger the events ofKristallnacht in Germany by the Nazis. Thompson's broadcast on NBC radio was heard by millions of listeners, and it led to an outpouring of sympathy for the young assassin. Under the banner of the Journalists' Defense Fund, more than $40,000 was collected, enabling the famous European lawyerVincent de Moro-Giafferi to take up Grynszpan's case.
By 1939, Thompson was one of the most respected women of her age and as a result, she was featured on the cover ofTime along with a picture of her speaking into anNBC radio microphone, captioned "She rides in the smoking car". The article declared that "she andEleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S." and explained Thompson's influence: "Dorothy Thompson is the U.S. clubwoman's woman. She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them fromWalter Lippmann."[4] InWoman of the Year (1942)Katharine Hepburn played Tess Harding, a foreign correspondent modeled on Thompson. The 1981Broadway musical adaptation starredLauren Bacall as Tess.[1]
During the1936 United States presidential election, Thompson characterized Black voters as a bloc which was "notoriously venal. Ignorant and illiterate, the vast mass ofNegroes are like the lower strata of the early industrial immigrants, and like them, they are 'bossed' and 'delivered' in blocs by venal leaders, both white and black."[18]
In 1941, Thompson wrote "Who Goes Nazi?" forHarper's.[19]
Thompson had been sympathetic to the Zionist movement since she first travelled to Europe in 1920. During her visit, she had "endless discussions" about the movement with delegates who were traveling to the International Zionist Conference which was then being held in London.[20] In the late 1930s, as Thompson emerged as a leading advocate for Jewish refugees who were fleeing from persecution in Europe, she grew close to the Zionist statesmanChaim Weizmann and she also grew close toMeyer Weisgal, Chaim Weizmann's lieutenant in the US.[21] AsWorld War II unfolded, Thompson went from being a sympathetic commentator to being an outright advocate for the movement. She was a keynote speaker at the 1942Biltmore Conference, and by the war's end, she was regarded as one of the most effective spokespersons forZionism. However, Thompson's attitude towards the movement had already begun to shift, most especially after a 1945 trip to Palestine, because she grew more concerned about the activities of the movement's right-wing adherents. She was especially troubled by its escalatingterrorism against the British. After penning several columns which were critical of right wing Zionist terrorism, Thompson provoked a tremendous backlash that ultimately led her to cooperate with the leaders of the Jewish anti-Zionist organization, theAmerican Council for Judaism.
She wrote a critique of American Zionism inCommentary in 1950, accusing Zionists ofdual loyalty.[22][23] A response inCommentary byOscar Handlin criticised her "totalitarian" understanding of national identity in demanding single loyalty.[24] After herCommentary article, the backlash against her grew more intense.[25] This included accusations of antisemitism, which Thompson strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, "almost a definition of professional suicide."[26][27][28] She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war.[25] As Thompson's distance from the Zionist movement grew, she became an advocate for Palestinian refugees.[23] After she travelled to the Middle East in 1950, Thompson was involved in the founding of theAmerican Friends of the Middle East, an organization which was secretly funded by theCIA.[29]
Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote in 2017 that
There can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson’s later writing. Pathologizing Jewishness, in particular, became habitual for her in the 1950s. By May 25, 1950, she is writing toMaury M. Travis, darkly, of the “tragicpsychosis of the Jew”... In theCommentary piece she warns: “We bring on what we fear. Any psychologist will tell you that a primary neurosis is the fear of rejection and that when that neurosis takes hold of a person he unconsciously strives to create the conditions for that rejection.” The reference is to Jewish “neurosis,” but the passage also rather elegantly describes the logic of Thompson’s own fears. In what well may be a case of knowing your addressee, Thompson wrote toWinston Churchill in 1951: “I have become convinced that the Jews, phenomenally brilliant individually and especially in the realm of abstract thought, are collectively the stupidest people on earth. I think it must come from cultural inbreeding—perhaps physical inbreeding also—in a desire to retain a homogenous, in-group society in the midst of ‘aliens.’[23]
She was married three times, most notably, to her second husband, theNobel Prize in Literature winnerSinclair Lewis.[2] In 1923, she married her first husband, HungarianJoseph Bard; theydivorced in 1927.
Thompson met Lewis on July 8, 1927, at an afternoon tea at the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, held by German Foreign MinisterGustav Stresemann. The two arranged a dinner the following day, which was both Dorothy's 34th birthday and the day when her divorce from Bard was finalized.[1]
In 1928, she married Lewis and acquired a house in Vermont. They had one son, Michael Lewis, born in 1930.[30] The couple divorced in 1942.[1]
She married her third husband, the artistMaxim Kopf, in 1943, and their marriage lasted until Kopf's death in 1958.[3]
Thompson died in 1961, at the age of 67, inLisbon,Portugal, and she is buried in the town cemetery ofBarnard, Vermont.[31]
The character of Tess Harding, played byKatharine Hepburn in the filmWoman of the Year (1942), was loosely based on Dorothy Thompson.
Her marriage to Sinclair Lewis was the subject ofSherman Yellen's Broadway playStrangers,[32] where she was played byLois Nettleton. The play opened on March 4, 1979, and closed after nine performances.
In the TV seriesWorld on Fire,[33] the character of Nancy Campbell, played byHelen Hunt, was loosely based on Dorothy Thompson's experience as a broadcaster in Berlin.
In the novelThe War Begins in Paris[34] by Theodore Wheeler, a fictional version of Thompson makes several cameos in scenes that depict American journalists who are covering the start of World War II from Paris.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)Down to the railway station next clay to see Mrs. Lewis off on the Etoile du Nord went practically every foreign correspondent in Berlin.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)For Thompson, there was a clear moral and political continuity between her support of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s and her advocacy for the Palestinians in the early 1950s. Others disagreed. Amid accusations of anti-Semitism, she lost friends, work, and political influence. Today, many see the silencing of a bold humanitarian advocate in her story, and it is not difficult to understand why." - "Her later anti-Zionism and pro-Arab stance, and the accusations of anti-Semitism that both attracted, have clouded the fact that her understanding of the politics of the refugee situation was remarkably consistent.
