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REMEMBERING DOROTHY THOMPSON
BY PETER KURTH (published 10.26.04)
“Do you feel as I do -- a
fantastic, dream-like quality? … Something ominous … a sense of
sickness -- as though all the world and everybody in it, and you and I,
were sick in our nerves and in our brains and in our hearts?”
“Society is deranged. …
It is dominated by moral and emotional morons. … I want sabotage and
opposition … sabotage and opposition … sabotage and opposition, against
militarism in all of its forms.”
-- Dorothy Thompson, 1939
Funny,
isn’t it, that a woman who said such things should vote Republican
all her life?
Well,
damn it, she did. There was one
cantankerous exception, in 1948, when “the disaster of the
Peace,” as Dorothy Thompson regarded the outcome of World War II, led
her to cast her vote for Norman Thomas, the Socialist candidate. It was Thompson’s way of protesting
the lack of “serious ideas” in American politics, and it marked
the end of her eminence as a writer and pundit – “the best
reporter this generation has seen in any country,” as her colleague
John Gunther remarked, “and that is not saying nearly enough.”
What
could say enough? In 1939, as Adolf
Hitler made war on the world, Dorothy Thompson was featured on the cover of
Time, poised before an NBC radio
microphone over the caption, “She rides in the smoking
car.” She was “the most
influential woman” in the United States after Eleanor Roosevelt – “and it may
be said of Miss Thompson,” Time
observed, “that she came up
over a rockier path.”
Dorothy
Thompson was the model for "Tess Harding," the chic and sexy,
globe-trotting foreign correspondent and newspaper columnist, first
portrayed by Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year (1942) --
Hepburn's first film teaming with Spencer Tracy -- and later by Lauren
Bacall in the Broadway musical of the same name. Her thrice-weekly column, “On
the Record,” originating in The
New York Herald Tribune, was syndicated to more than 200 papers in
America; she was heard nightly on the radio by tens of millions of people;
and during just one week, in 1937, she was obliged to turn down 700
invitations to speak to them in the flesh – at rallies, conventions,
clubs, forums, dinners, commencements, "roasts" and so on.
And
you’ve never heard of her, have you?
Miss Thompson (r.) and Mrs. Roosevelt, 1942
Thought
not. But why? I was Thompson’s biographer, and
while I imagined that my book about her, American
Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy
Thompson (Little, Brown, 1990), must resurrect her in the public mind, it never did. The reviews were terrific, the features
prominent, the gratitude immense from her surviving colleagues and
friends.
“Dorothy
Thompson!” the reporter George Seldes cried to me one day –
“What a woman!” They had
been cub reporters together in Berlin in the 1920s.
Both had chronicled the rise of the Nazis for American newspapers,
but it was Thompson, not Seldes, who was the first to be kicked out of Germany when Hitler came to power. Indeed, she was the first foreign
correspondent in Europe to whom any such thing had happened. The German Foreign Ministry, on Hitler’s
order, actually established something called “The Dorothy Thompson
Emergency Squad,” whose job it was to translate and monitor every
word she wrote against the Nazi regime.
“Nazism
has once more demonstrated its utter inability to understand any mentality
but its own,” said The New York
Times in its front-page story about Thompson’s expulsion. This was in August 1934, in the wake of
the Night of Long Knives. But in its
essence, and its innocence, it might easily be a comment on the Bush regime
today -- love it or hate it, it has only one point of view. And anyone who knows Thompson knows on
which side of that she’d
have come down.
"As
far as I can see," Thompson remarked after leaving Berlin, "I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy. My offense was to think that Hitler is
just an ordinary man, after all.
This is a crime against the reigning cult in Germany, which says that Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by
God to save the German people -- an old Jewish idea.”
Thompson
had met and interviewed Hitler for the first time in 1931, in Munich, where
she was so bowled over by his “utter insignificance” that she
“considered taking smelling salts” to keep from fainting. In her columns, she worried a great deal
about "the Common Man. The
Common Man is important," she explained, "because there are so
many of him."
“There
was a lot of fussiness connected with the preparations,” she
remembered about her encounter with Hitler.
“Not, somehow, what one would expect from a man to whom The
Deed is everything. … I’ll bet he crooks his little finger when
he drinks his tea.” The Nazis
altogether she regarded as “a lot of wavy-haired bugger-boys,”
“pink-cheeked mediocrities” making “a fetish out of
brotherhood” and in thrall to a homoerotic exaltation.
“He
is formless,” she wrote about Hitler, “almost faceless, a man
whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems
cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble,
ill-poised, insecure. He is the very
prototype of the Little Man.”
What
else is George W. Bush? From where
– which segment of frustrated manhood – does his power
arise? “Looking at
Hitler,” Thompson said, “I saw a whole panorama of German
faces; men whom this man thinks he will rule. And I thought: Mr. Hitler, you may get, in the next
elections, the fifteen million votes you need. But
fifteen million Germans CAN be wrong.”
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, for that matter,
was "the apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its
forms." This remark anticipated by many years Hannah
Arendt’s more famous comment about “the banality of
evil,” but the idea was the same.
Only because Dorothy, at the end of World War II, threw her lot with
the Palestinians, as against Israel, has her contribution since been entirely
ignored. The creation of the Israeli
state, she feared, was “a recipe for perpetual war.”
And
you still haven’t heard of her, have you? She is lost to history -- the general
fate, I suspect, of any woman who makes waves without screwing people, and
the specific fate of a woman so famous in her time that her second husband,
Nobel Prize-winner Sinclair Lewis, author of Main Street, Babbitt, Dodsworth and It Can’t Happen Here, declared that if he and Dorothy
were ever divorced, he’d name “Adolf Hitler as
correspondent.”
The
houses the Lewises lived in during their summers in Vermont – two of
them, originally, called “Twin Farms” – have since been
reduced by fire to only one, and that one is now such a madly expensive
“bed-and-breakfast,” a “resort so upscale,” as a
recent AP travel story puts it, that you need at least $1000 a day just to
stay in one of its outbuildings – none of which were there when
Thompson was. And that's without
meals. And that's without wine.
Neither
will the Lewis estate allow the names of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair
Lewis to be used in any sort of promotion for this money-drenched
thing. There is -- or at least was
-- a plaque at Twin Farms, which George Seldes got up, announcing that
“in this house, Nobel Prize-winner Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here.”
OK, George, fine, wherever
you are. But you know and I know
that without “Miss Thompson,” Sinclair Lewis would never have
written or even dreamed about It
Can’t Happen Here. All his
biographers admit it; all of Dorothy’s are sure of it. And now that George Bush and his troops
have won “another four years,” it is Thompson’s words,
not Lewis’s, that need engraving on a plaque. Please, for starters, listen to
this:
“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!'" (1937)
-- Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961)
“I know now that there are things for which I am
prepared to die. I am willing to die
for political freedom; for the right to give my loyalty to ideals above a
nation and above a class; for the right to teach my child what I think to
be the truth; for the right to explore such knowledge as my brains can
penetrate; for the right to love where my mind and heart admire, without
reference to some dictator's code to tell me what the national canons on
the matter are; for the right to work with others of like mind; for a
society that seems to me becoming to the dignity of the human race.”
– Dorothy Thompson, 1937
********************************************************
A
DOROTHY THOMPSON SAMPLER
MUSEUM OF TELEVISION AND
RADIO: She Made It: Dorothy Thompson
Listen to a speech
by Dorothy Thompson, 1939
AMERICAN CASSANDRA: THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON
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