Dorothy Thompson

Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson during their honeymoon caravan trip in England, 1928

After working for women’s suffrage in the United States, Thompson relocated to Europe in 1920 to pursue her journalism career. She was interested in the early Zionist movement. Her big break occurred when she visited Ireland in 1920 and was the last to interview Terence MacSwiney, one of the major leaders of the Sinn Féin movement. It was the last interview MacSwiney gave before he was arrested days later and died two months after that.[6] Because of her success abroad, she was appointed Vienna correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger. While working in Vienna, Thompson focused on becoming fluent in German. She met and worked alongside correspondents John Gunther and G. E. R. Gedye. In 1925, she was promoted to Chief of the Central European Service for the Public Ledger. She resigned in 1927 and, not long after, the New York Post appointed her head of its Berlin bureau in Germany.[4] There she witnessed firsthand the rise of the National Socialist or Nazi party. 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."

During this time Thompson cultivated many literary friends, particularly among exiled German authors. Among her acquaintances from this period were Ödön von Horváth, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig and Fritz Kortner. She developed a close friendship with author Carl Zuckmayer. In Berlin she even got involved in a lesbian affair with German author Christa Winsloe, while still married, claiming "the right to love".[7]

Thompson's most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s.[3] While working in Munich, Thompson met and interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931. This would be the basis for her subsequent book, I Saw Hitler, in which she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany.[2] Thompson described Hitler in the following terms: "He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man."[8]

Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her "Little Man" remarks; it seemed she had underestimated Hitler.[6] The Nazis considered both the book and her articles offensive and, in August 1934, Thompson was expelled from Germany. She was the first American journalist to be kicked out.[9]

Dorothy Thompson House, New York City, New York

In 1936 Thompson began writing "On the Record", a New York Tribune syndicated newspaper column.[3] It was read by over ten million people and carried by more than 170 papers. She also wrote a monthly column for the Ladies' Home Journal[3][4] for 24 years (1937–1961); its topics were far removed from war and politics, focusing on gardening, children, art, and other domestic and women's-interest topics.

Around the same time as she started "On the Record", NBC hired Thompson as a news commentator. She began in 1936 and remained with NBC until 1938. Her radio broadcasts went on to become some of the most popular in the United States, making her one of the most sought after female public speakers of her time.[3] When Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Thompson went on the air for fifteen consecutive days and nights.[5]

In 1938, Thompson championed the cause of a Polish-German Jewish teenager, Herschel Grynszpan, whose assassination in Paris of a minor German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath, had been used as propaganda by the Nazis to trigger the events of Kristallnacht in Germany. Thompson's broadcast on NBC radio was heard by millions of listeners, and led to an outpouring of sympathy for the young assassin. Under the banner of the Journalists' Defense Fund, over $40,000 USD was collected, enabling famed European lawyer Vincent de Moro-Giafferi to take up Grynszpan's case.

In 1939, Thompson was featured on the cover of Time, with an accompanying picture of her speaking into an NBC radio microphone. The article was captioned "she rides in the smoking car" and it declared that "she and Eleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S." She was one of the most respected women of her age. The article explained Thompson's influence: "Dorothy Thompson is the U.S. clubwoman's woman. She is read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their political opinions from their husbands, who got them from Walter Lippmann."[1] In Woman of the Year (1942) Katharine Hepburn played Tess Harding, a character directly based on Thompson. The Broadway musical is based on Thompson as well, this time played by Lauren Bacall.[2]

In 1941, Thompson wrote "Who Goes Nazi?" for Harper's Magazine.[10] She was a keynote speaker at the Biltmore Conference, and by war's end was regarded as one of the most effective spokespersons for Zionism. Thompson switched her views round radically after a trip to Palestine in 1945, and ran into difficulties, including accusations of anti-Semitism, which she strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, "almost a definition of professional suicide".[11][12] She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war.[13]

Thompson died 1961, aged 67, in Lisbon, Portugal and is buried in the Town cemetery, Barnard, Vermont.[14]

• Dorothy Thompson, the Journalist Who Warned the World About Adolf Hitler by Kristin Hunt.