Dorothy Thompson

See also Dorothy Thompson (disambiguation)

File:Dorothy-thompson.jpg

Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson (July 9, 1893 - January 30, 1961) was an American journalist, nicknamed "the blue-eyed tornado" who gained international celebrity when she became the first journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. In 1939, Time magazine called her one of the two most influential women in America, second only to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Her ability to "get the scoop" when it came to interviewing Hitler, her candid talk in her columns and radio addresses, and her tireless efforts for war refugees all earned her enormous popularity with Americans seeking to understand their role in the world prior to World War II.

Her biographer said of her, "she was the voice of courage and exceptional fluency." For her dedication to reporting the truth and awakening Americans to the realities of Nazism, she rightfully earned the title in the 1930s of "First Lady of Journalism."

Early Life and Career

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, the daughter of British born Methodist minister Peter Thomspon and of Margaret Grierson who died in 1901 when Dorothy was only eight years old. She enjoyed a close relationship with her father and throughout her life the influences of Christian conservatism can be seen in her world view and her reportage. However, when her father remarried, Dorothy, who did not get along with her new stepmother, moved to Chicago to live with an aunt. She continued on after high school to attend Syracuse University and upon graduation began work as a suffragette activist in Buffalo, New York . She campaiged successfully for the passage of a state consitituional suffrage amendment in New York. This step furthered the suffragette cause on the national level which ultimately awarded women the right to vote.

It was Dorothy's sense of adventure that then led her to Europe where she nearly stumbled into the role of foreign correspondent. Freelancing and selling her articles to the American Red Cross, among others, she secured an interview with Terence MacSwiney, then mayor of Cork, Ireland, who was in the midst of his fatal hunger strike against British rule. Soon the Philadelphia Public Ledger hired her as their Berlin bureau chief. She was noted for being the first woman journalist to hold a high level position in that field overseas, which she remarked on as being, "nothing extraordinary."

Foreign Correspondent and Nazi Germany

It was on an assignment from Cosmopolitan Magazine that Thompson snared an interview with Adolf Hitler and created the stir that caused her expulsion from Germany. In a remark that turned out to be gross understatement, but one that still infuriated the Fuhrer, she said she was totally unimpressed with his “utter insignificance” and, that she “considered taking smelling salts” to keep from fainting. Later Thompson would regret the fact that she wrote him off as "insignificant" and she worked especially hard to make sure Americans understood the danger he represented to world stability.

Her explusion only served to enhance her celebrity and back in the United States Thompson began her popular thrice weekly column "On the Record" for the New York Herald Tribune. The column, popular for its strident and straight forward rhetoric, was syndicated to nearly 200 hundred newspapers. She also began writing a monthly column for the Ladies Home Journal and in 1937 she went on the radio giving weekly commentary on world events.

She felt that her best writing occurred during this period when she astutely interpreted world events in terms of the threat of fascism. She attacked the pro-isolationist views of Charles Lindbergh and the America First movement prior to World War II. Additionally, her radio addresses brought attention to the plight of refugees and her article, "Refugees, A World Program" helped to initiate an international conference in France on behalf of those suffering in Europe after the war.

Marriages

In 1922, while working as a correspondent in Europe, Thompson met and married Hungarian Jewish intellectual Josef Bard whom she met in Budapest. She was in Hungary achieving an early career coup by gaining an exclusive interview with the deposed King. According, to the story, she was able land the interview by "diguising" herself as a Red Cross worker. The marriage did not survive, however, her move to Berlin and her subsequent promotion there to Chief of Bureau Staff for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post.

In 1928, she married Sinclair Lewis who purportedly followed her around Europe asking for her hand in marriage. Lewis's biographer (Lingeman, p. 323) has said of Thompson that she "married a creative genius who also happened to be an alcoholic." Their son, actor Michael Lewis, was born in 1930; her and Lewis divorced in 1942. Her highly publicized relationship with Lewis was the inspiration for Katharine Hepburn's and Spencer Tracy's iconic performances in the film Woman of the Year (1942).

Once commenting on how her career eclipsed both of her prior marriages, Thompson said, "...The world was my first love and I have a faithful heart,".

Thompson remained married to third husband, Maxim Kopf, the Austrian artist, whom she married in 1943, for the rest of their lives together.

Dorothy Thompson, whose influenced steadily declined after the war years, died in Lisbon, Portugual in 1960 of a heart attack while visting her daughter-in-law. She was buried in a cemetery near Twin Farms, the rural Vermont home she shared with Sinclair Lewis and son, Michael. One of her last written articles, written the year that she died, and which was highly praised by her biographer, was a tribute to Sinclair Lewis published in Atlantic Monthly.

The Grynszpan Affair

In 1938, Dorothy Thompson championed the cause of a 17-year old Polish-German immigrant to France, Herschel Grynszpan, who assassinated of a German diplomat, in a desperate reactionn to the treatment Jews were receiving in Nazi Germany. The event served as a catalyst for German propaganda and trigger the catastrophic events of the Kristallnacht the beginning of a major progrom to deport Jews to concentration camps.

Thompson's broadcast on NBC radio was heard by millions of listeners, and lead to an outpouring of sympathy for the young assassin. Under the banner of the Journalists' Defense Fund, over $40,000 USD was collected, enabling famed European lawyer Vincent de Moro-Giafferi to take up Grynszpan's case. The assassination inspired the composer Michael Tippett to write his oratorio A Child of Our Time as a plea for peace, and as a protest against the persecution of the Jewish people in Nazi Germany.

Who is on trial in this case? I say we are all on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities. Whether Herschel Grynszpan lives or not won't matter much to Herschel. He was prepared to die when he fired those shots.

Therefore, we who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard. This boy has become a symbol, and the responsibility for his deed must be shared by those who caused it.

Quotations

• As far as I can see, I was really put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. My offense was to think that Hitler was just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime in the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to save the German people— an old Jewish idea. To question this mystic mission is so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an American, so I was merely sent to Paris. Worse things can happen. (1934)
• No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him "Führer" or "Duce." But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of "O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!" (1935)

• Courage, it would seem, is nothing less than the power to overcome danger, misfortune, fear, injustice, while continuing to affirm inwardly that life with all its sorrows is good; that everything is meaningful even if in a sense beyond our understanding; and that there is always tomorrow.
• It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• "Dorothy Thompson." Feminist Writers. St. James Press, 1996. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 20007.
• "Dorothy Thompson." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reprodued in Biography Resource Center.Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Glae, 20007.
• "Dorothy Thomspon." Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 7: 1961-1965. American Council of Learned Societies, 1981. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007.
• "Dorothy Thompson." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 29: American Newspaper Journalists. 1926-1950. Gale, 1984.
• Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis, Rebel From Main Street. New York: Random House (2002).

External links

• American Cassandra: The Life Of Dorothy Thompson
• Brief bio
• Brief bio
• Radio broadcast on Hitler's invasion of Poland (3 September 1939)

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