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/