Dorothy Thompson (1893 -1961)

 

Dorothy Thompson (1893 -1961)

Background

Dorothy Thompson was born on July 9, 1893, Lancaster, New York, to British immigrants.  She grew up in a religious household, her father was  a Methodist minister and frequently took her to visit to parishioners across the suburbs of upstate New York.  according to https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/personal-story/dorothy-thompson  At age 7, her mother died of sepsis. Soon after, her father remarried. However, Thompson and her stepmother didn’t see eye to eye. A few years later Thompson went to live with her aunts in Chicago , where she attended junior college called the Lewis Institute.

 

Thompson was a very bright student, and showed a passion for literature and discourse. She continued her education at Syracuse University and in 1914, she received her Bachelors degree. Thompson devoted herself to feminist pursuits. Her first job straight out of college was stuffing envelopes for the women's suffrage party,

 

         

Interesting Facts

In 1920, the 19th Amendment(granted women the right to vote), was ratified. Dorothy then decided to become a journalist and headed to Europe to look for a good story. In 1921, Thompson posed as a Red Cross medical assistant and infiltrated the inner circle of  the former King Karl I, a Hapsburg (German royal family) who sought to reclaim the Hungarian throne. She was the only journalist to report on the event from the inside. She accepted a full-time job as the Vienna correspondent and central European bureau chief for the Philadelphia Public Ledger.

 

In 1925, Thompson became the  New York Evening Post’s European bureau chief. She wrote aggressively insightful articles about the unstable political situation on the continent, specifically on the rise of  the emerging dictator of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party  Adolf Hitler.

 

Thompson married novelist Sinclair Lewis, Thompson was stuck between a pastoral life with him at a farmhouse in Vermont and international assignments for the Evening Post. She was fascinated by the situation in Germany. By 1931 she spent much of her time writing, and extensively researched, incisive articles about the explosive rise of national socialism in Germany. Later that year, the Nazi party invited Thompson to interview Hitler for the Cosmopolitan Magazine.  She expanded the interview, publishing it along with her impressions in a book, I Saw Hitler!, which was released before Hitler was appointed German chancellor in 1933. She critised Hitler saying  that the interview was difficult because one could not carry a conversation with Hitler. She also stated that he always spoke as if  he were addressing a mass meeting .A hysterical note creeped into his voice, which rose sometimes almost to a scream.  She described him as giving  the impression of a man in a trance.

 

Thompson’s harsh criticism angered Hitler, he ordered her to leave Nazi Germany in 1934. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from the country by the Nazi regime. Back in America, Thompson devoted herself to publicly opposing the Nazis, and continued to take risks to oppose Nazism. In 1939, she disrupted a rally of American Nazi sympathizers, the German-American Bund, laughing during their speeches. She eventually had to be rescued by police. Thompson toured the country, lecturing the American public about the situation in Europe and passionately denouncing fascism in her popular radio broadcasts. She wrote a hugely popular political column, “On The Record,” three times each week from 1936 until 1958, and established herself as what one biographer has called “the leading American voice in the war against fascism.”

 

Her legacy

Thompson’s despair  affected what she wrote in her Ladies’ Home Journal column, the one public place where she wrote about gender roles, though only occasionally even there. Although as a professional journalist Thompson always downplayed the pertinence of sex to individual capacity or achievement, she identified deeply as a woman and believed women and men had essentially different needs and roles to play in sexual and family relationships.

 

Through the 1930s she energetically opposed the damaging (and misplaced Depression-provoked outcry against married women stealing men’s jobs and insisted eloquently on wives’ need and right to have paid employment of their own. American efforts to eliminate married women’s public and private employment fed her suspicions about creeping fascism.

 

Although  She became obsessed with the dangers of Hitler and fascism and advocated immediate American involvement in the war. Her voice was powerful. From 1936-1958 Thompson’s newspaper column ‘On the Record’ ran three times a week in over 170 papers, reaching an estimated audience of ten million people.  In 1958 Thompson was called the First Lady of American Journalism and began her memoirs, but got no further than her school years. She died on January 20, 1961 in Lisbon, Portugal, while visiting her grandsons.

Sources :

https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/americans-and-the-holocaust/personal-story/dorothy-thompson

https://legacyprojectchicago.org/person/dorothy-thompson#:~:text=She%20became%20obsessed%20with%20the,audience%20of%20ten%20million%20people.

https://lithub.com/a-good-journalist-understands-that-fascism-can-happen-anywhere-anytime/

 

 

 

EOTO#3 Women Pages

 

Women’ pages

The first women’s page appeared in the New York World in the 1890s.

Women’s pages quickly became essential for newspapers that featured society coverage, food and fashion.

By the 1950s and 60s, a new breed of women’s page editors arrived on the scene. There were journalists such as Dorothy Journey, Vivian Castleberry and Marj Paxson. These women remade the women’s pages giving them a “political bite.”

“Fake news”

Molly Iving told Mills that Castleberry and her Dallas Times-Herald reporters “got away with murder because the male editors never bothered to read it.”

Woman’s pages were writing about birth control and abortion but it wasn’t considered ‘real news’.

 According to Kimberley Voss, an associated professor of journalism at the University of Central Florida, “Woman’s Pages were simply fluff”. However, Voss also points out that they were doing good journalism, they were just wearing hats and white gloves because that’s what society required of them. Voss believes that women pages were quite revolutionary because, “they found a way to  play by the rules and get things done”. Voss said. However, the  growing feminist movement felt that women’s issues were as important as the stories on newspapers’ front pages. One example of this is when  Gloria Steinem  complained when she was profiled by a women’s page editor though . Voss also  notes that two years after Steinem spoke out against the women’s page, she admitted that she had been wrong, that there was a place for women’s pages.

The Transitions

 The first paper to transition was the Washington Post, on January 6, 1969. Ben Bradlee, editor at the Post, told mills that the reason for the change was to “treat women as people and not as appendages to men,” as well as organize the paper between work and leisure, rather than men and women .

Jean Taylor who became the editor of the Los Angeles Times “view” section a year after its 1970 founding, complained to Mills that it was women who considered her section as unimportant. “We artificially had to put esteem into women's sections by bringing men in, by running stories all people would be interested in.'' This also included hiring male writers. Marj Paxson was laid off in 1970, after getting an award for her work at the St. Petersburg Times’s women’s section [now the Tampa Bay Times]. She was then hired as women’s editor of the Philadelphia Bulletin. However her job there  disappeared in favor of a “Focus” section with a male editor. She told Mills, “We were not considered capable of directing this new kind of feature section. That was man’s work.”

Feminist Movement

Feminist continue  to rightly complain of being pushed out of the more “serious” sections and worry about being discussed alongside the day’s fashions leads to more focus on their clothes and makeup, than their ideas, and stories on “woman's issues” that hit front pages are often still written by men. They provide space for women to talk to each other, since we’re still too often left out of the conversation in front of male audiences.

 

 

 

 

Good Night and Good Luck

 Good Night, And Good Luck 

The movie we watched during our last class was phenomenal. There were several reasons why I thought that this film was good.

 

          One of the reasons why this film stood out to me was that it was filmed in mostly black and white, it focused strictly on those few months in 1954, it also highlights Edward Murrow, along with his courage, and high standards,  and took place indoors mostly within the CBS headquarters in NY. However, the film has some of its flaws. The film showed nothing about Murrow's early background, or his private life at that time.

 

Based on what I saw in the film, it is safe to say that McCarthy was betrayed as an arrogant, deceitful figure. The film then transitioned to October 1953. Murrow and his news team which includes producer and Fred Friendly, come upon a story from Dexter, which is about the Air Force choosing to discharge lieutenant, Milo Radulovich because his father was accused of communist ties.

Overall, the purpose of “Good Night and Good Luck in my opinion was solely focused on Murrow’s hesitations about the misuse of technology is true in today’s era of informational misrepresentation. The film ends with Murrow's iconic welcome, “Good night, and good luck.” However, as Murrow underlines to his audience at the banquet that bookends the film, the responsibility to demand truth from political turmoil ultimately rests on citizens themselves. Perhaps “good luck” is a nod to this dual responsibility and privilege that individuals possess to demand more from the systems and institutions that surround them.

The film holds great significance because it takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in the 1950s. It records the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow  and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the Permanent Sub-committee on Investigations (Government Operations Committee). With a desire to report the facts and enlighten the public, Murrow, and his dedicated staff – headed by his producer Fred Friendly (George Clooney) and Joe Wershba (Robert Downey Jr.) in the CBS newsroom resisting corporate and sponsorship pressures to examine the lies and scaremongering tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his communist ‘witch-hunts.’

EOTO reflections the black press

 EOTO Continued 

Based on all of the presentations we launched for our second EOTO project , there was at least one presentation that stood out to me 

If I recall, there were two groups that did a presentation on a topic called “The Black Press”. Based on the information that I gathered from watching two presentations there were some important things that I learned. The Black Press advanced black literature, reported black crimes, advocated for the African American community, sought to increase literacy and awareness of world events for black people, advertised black products, and hired influential writers. although  publications only lasted for 2 years, the black press reached 11 states and other editorials focused on antislavery, racial discrimination, and other injustices, more importantly, the black press depicted African Americans in a intellectual and positive light. 

This press is generally defined as black-owned and operated newspapers that focus on the interests and concerns of African Americans. In recent years, the black press has been the topic of books, scholarly and trade articles, monographs, and television documentaries. The press black paved the way for the establishment for over 40 black publishers by the start of the civil war. What makes the black press really essential is that they embraced the newspapers as a sign of their freedom, and as a source of information about their people and their communities. The black press of the Reconstruction era dedicated itself to building communities the of free black men and women in both the North and South.

Other most fascinating facts

According to https://nnpa.org/black-press-history over the years there were a list of publishers, editors, journalists, and cartoonists which included the greatest names in American history, such as  Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells Barnett, Langston Hughes, Romare Bearden, James Weldon Johnson, Mary McLeod Bethune and Daisy Bates.

Frederick Douglass The North Star, 1847

According tohttps://niemanreports.org/articles/timeline-of-the-black-press/

The North star was founded by Fredrick Douglass and Martin Delany. Published in Rochester, New York, the North Star advocated for the abolition of enslavement and covered politics in Europe, as well as literature and culture. other important papers included, The California Eagle, founded by John J. Neimore, and Charlette Bass became the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles-based paper in 1912, making her the first female African-American newspaper publisher in the U.S. She established an activist tradition  campaigning   against D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation.” The Eagle also advocated for an end to segregation in housing, jobs, and transportation.