Dorothy Celene Thompson

Background

Dorothy Thompson was born in Lancaster, New York, in 1893. She was the daughter of Peter Thompson, a British-born Methodist minister, and of Margaret Grierson. She grew up in upstate New York towns, where her father served. Her mother died in 1901, and two years later Peter Thompson married Eliza Abbott, his church's organist. So poorly did the rebellious Dorothy get along with her dour stepmother that in 1908 she was sent to Chicago to live with her father's sisters.

Education

In Chicago she enrolled in the Lewis Institute, where she earned high grades and, in 1912, an Associate of Arts degree. She then entered Syracuse University as a junior and graduated with a B. A. in 1914.

Career

While at Syracuse, Thompson became active in the women's suffrage movement. After graduation, she worked out of Buffalo for the New York State Suffrage Association, which successfully campaigned for a state constitutional suffrage amendment.

In December 1917 she and a friend, Barbara De Porte, moved to New York City. After briefly holding a dull job at a religious publishing house, Thompson was hired as publicity director for the Social Unit, an urban-poverty program. But she left the project when, by her own account, she fell in love with its administrator, Wilbur Phillips. She and De Porte sailed for Europe in June 1920.

Europe proved to be Thompson's gateway to journalism. She obtained an interview with Terence MacSwiney, the lord mayor of Cork, Ireland, during his fatal hunger strike against British control of Ireland; and later she persuaded the Paris bureau chief of the Philadelphia Public Ledger to designate her an unpaid correspondent in Vienna. There she met Marcel Fodor of the Manchester Guardian, who became her journalistic mentor. Under his tutelage, she did so well that she was placed on salary. She and Fodor achieved a minor coup in the fall of 1921 by disguising themselves as Red Cross workers to obtain an exclusive interview with the deposed king of Hungary.

Early in 1925 Thompson was named to head the Berlin bureau of the New York Evening Post and the Public Ledger. Although she was probably the first woman to head a major American news bureau overseas, she dismissed her attainment as "nothing extraordinary. "

Her second marriage interrupted, but did not halt, Thompson's career. She continued to lecture and to write for magazines. In 1931, on assignment from Cosmopolitan, she interviewed Adolf Hitler and concluded that he could never take power in Germany – a prediction she repeated in her subsequent book, "I Saw Hitler!" (1932). When she returned to Germany in August 1934 she was expelled not only because she had attacked the Nazis' anti-Jewish campaign but because she had belittled Hitler, who was now chancellor.

Back in the United States, the expulsion enhanced her status as a celebrity. Beginning in March 1936 she began a thrice-weekly public-affairs column, "On the Record, " published and syndicated by the New York Herald Tribune. The column – crisp, outspoken, even strident, but always in the political center – was eventually carried by 170 newspapers. In May 1937 she also began a monthly column for the Ladies' Home Journal. Later that year she went on the radio, offering a weekly commentary in a voice that was described as "an intriguing blend of Oxford and Main Street. "

Thompson increasingly focused her attention on the threat of Nazism as the international crisis of the late 1930's deepened. In a November 1938 broadcast she brilliantly defended Herschel Grynzspan, the Jewish adolescent whose assassination of a German diplomat in Paris was used by the Nazis as justification for the infamous Kristallnacht. In 1939 she created an off-the-air sensation by guffawing loudly at a pro-Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden, New York.

After war broke out in Europe in 1939, she attacked American isolationism. She denounced national hero Charles A. Lindbergh for his isolationist views and his contacts with the Hitler regime. Filing from Paris only days before it fell in May 1940, she called for a national-unity ticket in the 1940 election, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt to run with the internationalist Republican Wendell L. Willkie.

Roosevelt scoffed at the idea. When Willkie won the Republican nomination, she supported him, but late in the campaign switched to Roosevelt because, she concluded, the Axis powers wanted his defeat. This caused the Republican Herald Tribune to suppress one of her columns and, after the election, to drop her contract. She moved to the Bell Syndicate, and in New York her column subsequently appeared in the Post.

Thompson then moved beyond journalism to political activism. Early in 1941 she founded Ring of Freedom, an organization that aimed to put the country on a "war footing. " Later that year, Ring of Freedom joined a coalition that created Freedom House, a liberal internationalist organization based in New York City. Thompson was its second president. Late in World War II, she broke with Freedom House on a political issue (her opposition to dismemberment of Germany) and a personal one (Freedom House's preemption of her plan for a memorial to Willkie).

At the end of World War II, Thompson took a position that estranged her from her former constituencies and began what she later called her "decline. " After a 1945 visit to Palestine, she supported the case of the Palestinian Arabs and opposed Zionist terrorists. Although she had a long record of support of Jewish causes, she was accused of being anti-Semitic. The New York Post, which claimed to speak for the city's Jewish community, dropped her column in March 1947. In 1951 she became head of the anti-Zionist American Friends of the Middle East, which was backed by oil interests and, perhaps unknown to her, by the U. S. Central Intelligence Agency. Not until the Bell Syndicate issued an ultimatum, in 1957, did she leave the Friends organization.

In her final years, Thompson had only a fraction of the influence she had enjoyed in the early 1940's. In 1958 Kopf died and she gave up her column. At sixty-five, she appeared to have lost will and energy. Yet she rallied for an article that her biographer considered her finest – a tribute to Sinclair Lewis that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1960. In December 1960, in poor health, she flew to Lisbon to visit her daughter-in-law, and died there.

Achievements

• She 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 radio during the 1930s. She was sometimes called "the first lady of American journalism".

Works

More photos

• book

  • Refugees: Anarchy or Organization?

    (Dedication reads: "To my friends in exile, amongst them s...)

  • Dorothy Thompson's Political Guide: A Study of American Liberalism and Its Relationship to Modern Totalitarian States

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • Once on Christmas,

    (A classic Christmas book from 1938 and still sweet.)

  • I Saw Hitler!

    (Memoirs of a woman who saw Hitler)

  • The New Russia
  • Let the record speak,
  • The Courage to Be Happy -- First 1st Printing

Views

Quotations: "Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live. "

"A little more matriarchy is what the world needs, and I know it. Period. Paragraph. "

"The most destructive element in the human mind is fear. Fear creates aggressiveness; aggressiveness engenders hostility; hostility engenders fear, a disastrous circle. "

"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. "

"Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict - alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence. "

Connections

She met Josef Bard, a Hungarian Jewish intellectual, whom she married in Budapest early in 1922. Divorce proceedings began in 1927. That year she met the novelist Sinclair Lewis, then at the crest of his career. After a few weeks of his energetic courtship, she agreed to marry him. In 1928 both of their divorces became final; they were married in London on May 14, after she had resigned from her Berlin post. They had one son.

As Thompson's prominence increased her marriage to the short-tempered, vain, heavy-drinking Lewis deteriorated. He disliked her public role and accused her of neglecting those close to her. They were divorced in January 1942. Within a year and a half, she met, proposed to, and married Maxim Kopf, an Austrian-Czech painter.

Father:

Peter Thompson

Mother:

Margaret Grierson

Spouse:

Maxim Kopf

Spouse:

Sinclair Lewis

Spouse:

Josef Bard

References

• Dorothy Thompson: A Legend in her Time
• American Cassandra: The Life of Dorothy Thompson
• Dorothy Thompson and German Writers in Defense of Democracy (Kulturtransfer und Geschlechterforschung)