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Dorothy
Thompson was one the most influential journalists in American history. In
the mid-1930s, having already forged a precedent-shattering career in
print as a reporter, foreign bureau chief, and nationally syndicated
columnist, Thompson went on the radio with her passionate and politically
charged commentary. From 1936 to 1945, as the world first balanced on the
edge of war then plunged full-bore into armed conflict, Thompson’s
eloquent and well-informed views were regularly broadcast to millions
over NBC (both the Red and Blue Networks) and, later, the Mutual Network.
The volume of mail sent to Thompson’s office after one of her radio
addresses was so immense it required delivery in special sacks. In 1939
she made the cover of Time
magazine at an NBC mike. The article said that, after Eleanor Roosevelt,
Thompson was “undoubtedly the most influential” woman in the United States. At a time when America had scant comprehension of
the extent of Fascism’s evils, Thompson warned her audience, with
frightening prescience, what would happen if Hitler and other Fascist
leaders remained in power. In 2005, forty-four
years after her death, Thompson resurfaced in the news as part of a
debate over the paucity of female journalists with genuine national
opinion-making power.
Thompson was
born in Lancaster, New York, on July 9, 1893, to Peter Thompson, a Methodist minister, and
Margaret Grierson. Thompson’s mother died when
she was seven. Her father remarried, but Thompson did not get along with
her stepmother, whom she later described as afflicted with “an allergy to
children.” The headstrong young Thompson was sent to live with her
father’s two sisters in Chicago. It was there she attended
the Lewis Institute, which had such high educational standards that
Thompson was able to enter Syracuse University in 1912 as a junior. Aware
that a college education was a privilege available to few women, Thompson
early on was imbued with a sense of social obligation. “We owed
something,” she said of herself and female classmates, “something above
and beyond what others owed. . .”
She began
giving back with her first job out of school, as an organizer for the
women’s suffrage movement. Through the job, based in Buffalo, New York, she made invaluable
contacts and exercised her innate interest in working for a just cause.
The suffrage movement, she later said, was “the last romantic political
movement this country ever had.”
Eager to
forge a career as a writer, Thompson at first tried fiction, with no
success, then traveled to Europe hoping to make it as a foreign stringer for
American newspapers. On one occasion after another, the right place at
the right time was wherever Thompson happened to be. “Nothing prosaic
ever happened to her,” said a fellow reporter. On a trip to Ireland in 1920 to look up
relatives, Thompson happened to interview the leaders of the Sinn Fein
movement, including Terence MacSwiney, Lord
Mayor of Cork. He died two months later
while on a hunger strike in jail. His interview with Thompson was his
last—and her first major scoop as a freelance correspondent.
Others
followed, most notably her inside account in 1921 of an attempt by the
grandnephew of Emperor Franz Josef to reclaim the Hungarian throne. Her
story, which she scored by sneaking into the palace in Budapest dressed
as a Red Cross nurse, made papers all over the world, and landed her a
full-time job as correspondent for the Philadelphia
Public Ledger. She later was named Central European bureau
chief for both the Ledger and
the New York Evening Post. 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.”
Because of
her experiences living in and/or covering events in Austria, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union, Thompson later was able
to comment with acute and personal insight on the developments that led
to the war. As her reputation grew, her circle came to include notable
writers of other kinds, including Sinclair Lewis, who in 1928 became the
second of Thompson’s three husbands.
Thompson
moved back to the United States with Lewis in 1930, the
same year the couple’s only child Michael Lewis was born, and the year
Lewis won the Nobel Prize in literature. It was also in 1930 that Thompson
and Lewis bought a three-hundred-acre Vermont property called Twin Farms
that became her place of refuge. For the next several years, she returned
regularly to Europe for work, filing for such disparate publications
as Foreign Affairs
and Cosmopolitan. She
interviewed Hitler for the latter. Thompson was later criticized for
questioning whether a man of such “startling insignificance” could
actually become Germany’s dictator. But she
recognized in Hitler (whom she called the “very prototype of the Little
Man”) precisely what Hannah Arendt would later
label “the banality of evil”—the rise of Fascism as the malevolent
triumph of mediocrity. In 1934 Thompson also had the distinction of being
the first foreign journalist thrown out of Germany by Hitler.
In 1936
Thompson began writing “On the Record,” a syndicated newspaper column
that made her a household name. At the height of her fame, the column was
carried by 170 papers, and was read by eight to
ten
million people a day. She soon became a well-known public speaker as
well, and since her speeches were sometimes broadcast, the radio networks
came calling. CBS was the first to approach her,
but NBC made a better offer, and she began making regular fifteen-minute
broadcasts. “She had a way of punching her words on the air that was
nothing short of electrifying,” wrote Peter Kurth in American Cassandra, “and her
voice had by this time taken on a kind of thirties fruitiness that led
one critic to describe it as ‘an intriguing blend of Oxford and Main
Street.’”
When Thompson
first became a radio regular, she primarily discussed well-known
personalities such as Charles Lindbergh and Justice Hugo Black. After war
broke out in Europe in 1939, however, she became so stridently
anti-Fascist in her on-air commentary that one of her sponsors, General
Electric, issued a statement pointing out that her views were her own.
(Early on, her comments were softened by airing alongside music by an
all-girl orchestra on a show called The
Hour of Charm.) When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Thompson went on
the air for fifteen consecutive days and nights. She also delivered
anti-Hitler commentary in German that was broadcast into Germany over shortwave radio. The
only time she cancelled a regularly scheduled broadcast was on November 13, 1944 when she learned that Wells Lewis, her
beloved stepson, had been killed in the war.
Though
Thompson remained a well-known figure for the rest of her life, some of
her later causes, including a stand against Zionist extremism, were not
popular. Her greatest moments were as America’s strongest voice against
Fascism during the years preceding the country’s entry into World War II.
It was then, through radio, that she became, in the words of another
journalist, “an American oracle, one of those very few people who have
the corporate, general permission to tell people what to think.”
Cover of Time magazine
AMERICAN CASSANDRA:
THE LIFE OF DOROTHY THOMPSON
www.peterkurth.com
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