Background

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, on July 9, 1894. When she was ten her mother died, and she correctly predicted that her father, a Methodist minister, would marry Eliza Abbott, the church organist. When she rebelled against her stepmother, her father, whom she adored, required her to memorize and recite Bible passages as punishment. His critiques of her recitations undoubtedly contributed to her future speaking effectiveness.

Education

Thompson went to live with an aunt in Chicago to resolve the conflict with her stepmother. There she attended high school and Lewis Institute where she was quite popular and captain of a basketball team, but hardly a brilliant scholar.

Thompson entered Syracuse University in 1910, worked her way through college, and planned to become a teacher, but she failed in grammar.

Career

Thompson began her career working as a foreign correspondent and acting chief of the Berlin bureau of the Philadelphia Public Ledger but made many of her best-known scoops as a freelance writer, including her famous interview with Adolf Hitler in 1931.

Thompson began her career as a publicist, not a journalist. She became a publicist and lecturer in the suffrage movement for three years. She then spent several years as publicity director for a reform organization financed by members of the liberal-philanthropic establishment in Cincinnati. It was only after she and a companion left for Europe aboard the S.S. Finland in 1920 that Thompson began working as a reporter, and even then, she earned her regular bread and butter as a publicist for the Red Cross.

Thompson scored her first major coup early in the 1920s when she published the story of Charles Hapsburg’s attempt to win back the empire ruled by his granduncle, Emperor Franz Josef. As head of the Philadelphia Public Ledger’s Berlin office from 1924 to 1928, she became the first woman to lead “a major American news bureau overseas,” Mengedoht explained. She also explored the first ten years of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in her collection The New Russia.

Although Thompson resigned her position with the Ledger shortly after completing her Russian trip, she nonetheless remained an important figure in American journalism. In articles for the Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, she documented and interpreted the alarming events in central Europe. In 1931, on an assignment from Cosmopolitan, Thompson interviewed Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany. The interview was expanded into / SAW Hitler! (1932). She grossly underestimated Hitler’s significance and stated her belief that he would never rise to power.

Thompson made up for her lapse in judgment during the 1940s, when she became one of America’s foremost opponents of fascism. She helped political refugees from Europe find shelter in the United States, sometimes welcoming them into her own home.

As Hitler’s troops rolled across Europe, Thompson’s crusading intensified: she wrote, lectured, and initiated freedom organizations. In an effort to provide timely news to Europeans, Thompson delivered a weekly shortwave broadcast in German, addressed to an imaginary friend named Hans. A compilation of these messages is found in her book Listen, Hans (1942). After the war she became involved in Arab-Israeli politics, first supporting, then opposing the creation of the state of Israel.

Achievements

• Dorothy Thompson is notable as the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and as one of the few women news commentators on the radio during the 1930s. She is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism. "

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Dignity of Chartism

    (This is the first collection of essays on Chartism by lea...)

  • Listen, Hans

    (In the spring of 1942 Dorothy Thompson began broadcasting...)

  • Dorothy Thompson and Rose Wilder Lane: Forty Years of Friendship, Letters, 1921-1960

    (The correspondence of these two prominent women reveals t...)

  • Dorothy Thompson's Political Guide

    (A Study of American Liberalism and Its Relationship to Mo...)

    1938
  • Let the record speak 1939
  • Refugees: Anarchy or Organization? 1938
  • Once on Christmas 1938
  • I Saw Hitler! 1932

Religion

Dorothy Thompson was conservative in her religious views.

Politics

Thompson's public statements were sometimes contradictory: primarily a conservative (she preferred the word "preservative"), she denounced the New Deal, but she approved wide-scale economic planning. After she helped her friend Wendell Wilkie gain the Republican nomination in 1940, she shocked close friends and the public when she endorsed Roosevelt for a third term (1940), arguing that he knew the world better than any other democratic leader, except for maybe Churchill.

Thompson made trips to Europe to observe war developments in several countries, but could not return to Germany, having been expelled from there by Hitler because of her negative views on Nazism. She continued to write dramatically of the dangers of Nazism to Western democracies and challenged the views of Charles Lindbergh and other isolationists.

As Nazi troops swept across Europe, Thompson insisted that "we, who are not Jews" must speak out while anti-Semitic groups accused Jews of trying to drag America into Europe's war. As if to punctuate her views, she talked her way through police lines into the German-American Bund meeting to salute their leader Fritz Kuhn. As anti-Semitic orators lashed out against Jews and "Jew-loving" Roosevelt, Thompson repeatedly burst into laughter and shouted "bunk" until she was escorted out by police.

Views

Quotations: "Age is not measured by years. Nature does not equally distribute energy. Some people are born old and tired while others are going strong at seventy. "

"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. "

"It is not the fact of liberty but the way in which liberty is exercised that ultimately determines whether liberty itself survives. "

Personality

Dorothy could be as ruthless as she was kind and gentle; lavish with her resources, time, and attention, yet selfish with them at other times; and she was logical, but also emotional. Despite these contradictions, her career was an early demonstration that a bright, committed, and hard-working woman could succeed in a traditionally male profession. Through her spoken and printed commentary on current news, Thompson's was the most powerful voice for several decades.

Among her acquaintances were Ödön von Horváth, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Fritz Kortner. She developed a close friendship with author Carl Zuckmayer.

Quotes from others about the person

• “Dorothy was a respected virtuoso of her craft. Vitality was the outstanding quality of her writing, her broadcasts, and her life. For those who read her column in the New York Herald Tribune and listened to her broadcasts, she was a voice of courage and exceptional fluency.” - Jo R. Mengedoht, Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor
  
  “Although many Thompson anecdotes became distorted in the retelling, it was clear from the start that she had a gift for walking in where news was breaking and for pursuing the story without regard to the effort or danger involved. She seemed to enjoy nothing more than an unscheduled jaunt to an unlikely or perilous place.” - Jo R. Mengedoht

Connections

Dorothy was married three times, most famously to the second husband and Nobel Prize in literature winner Sinclair Lewis.

In 1923, she married her first husband, a Hungarian, Joseph Bard; they divorced in 1927. Thompson married Lewis in 1928 and acquired a house in Vermont. They had one son, Michael Lewis, born in 1930. The couple divorced in 1942. She married her third husband, the artist, Maxim Kopf, in 1945, and they were married until Kopf's death in 1958.

In Berlin she even got involved in a lesbian affair with German author Christa Winsloe, while still married in the U.S., claiming "the right to love".

Father:

Peter Thompson

Mother:

Margaret (Grierson) Thompson

Son:

Michael Lewis

husband:

Maxim Kopf

Ex-husband:

Joseph Bard

18 May 1892 – 1975

Ex-husband:

Sinclair Lewis

February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951

Acquaintance:

Ödön von Horváth

Acquaintance:

Thomas Mann

6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955

Acquaintance:

Bertolt Brecht

10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956

Acquaintance:

Stefan Zweig

28 November 1881 – 22 February 1942

Acquaintance:

Fritz Kortner

12 May 1892 – 22 July 1970

colleague:

John Gunther

August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970

colleague:

George Eric Rowe Gedye

27 May 1890 - 21 March 1970

Friend:

Carl Zuckmayer

27 December 1896 – 18 January 1977

References

• Dangerous Ambition: Rebecca West and Dorothy Thompson Born in the 1890s on opposite sides of the Atlantic, friends for more than forty years, Dorothy Thompson and Rebecca West lived strikingly parallel lives that placed them at the center of the social and historical upheavals of the twentieth century. In Dangerous Ambition, Susan Hertog chronicles the separate but intertwined journeys of these two remarkable women writers, who achieved unprecedented fame and influence at tremendous personal cost.
  2014
• Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in her Time
  1973
• American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson
  2012