Dorothy Thompson was a journalist and social commentator, most well known for being the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany. Her striking journalism was so widely well received that in a 1939 article Time magazine wrote that “she and Eleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S.” Though many of her views are considered as controversial today as they were in her own time, it can not be denied that Thompson was a poignant and powerful voice for her generation.
As seems to be the pattern with many of our famous bi writers, Thompson had a rather turbulent childhood. She was born in Lancaster, New York state, on July 9th, 1893. When she was only seven, her mother passed away, leaving her father to raise three children on his own. Though he soon remarried, Thompson and her stepmother did not get on, and by the time she was fourteen, she had been sent to live with her aunts. As a teenager, she dreamed of attending one of the Seven Sisters colleges, though her family could not afford this. Instead, she studied at Syracuse University on a scholarship for children of the clergy.
In 1914, Thompson began working for the New York State Woman Suffrage Party. Though she began by doing clerical work, she was soon running organization events and planning campaign strategies. When New York State adopted women’s suffrage in 1917, she moved to New York City, briefly working for a publisher and then another organization, the National Social Unit. Wishing to make true her dreams of becoming a foreign correspondent, she made the transatlantic move to London. Her work was soon picked up by The New York Evening Post. She never stayed in one city or country long, moving several times over the coming years to Venice, Hungary, and finally, Berlin. It was here she would get her great break; the interview that would cement her place in the history of journalism.
Thompson met with Adolf Hitler in 1931, only a year before he would become Germany’s leader. Thompson claimed she sought an audience with Hitler for over seven years, desperate to know what was so important about the political hopeful. However, when they finally sat together, she wrote she was surprised at “the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog”. Her insults did not stop there. She continued, “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, insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man. The eyes alone are notable. Dark gray and hyperthyroid — they have the peculiar shine which often distinguishes geniuses, alcoholics, and hysterics.” Hitler remembered this act of disrespect. In 1934, Thompson was approached by a member of the Gestapo (Hitler’s secret police) and was given a 24-hour warning in which to depart from Germany. Her banishment made headline news across Europe and the rest of the world.
Thompson was married three times during her lifetime, though her most notable husband was Nobel prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis. The two married in 1928 and lived in Vermont for a period, where they had their son Michael Lewis. They eventually divorced in 1942. During her time in Berlin, she had an affair with German author Christa Winsloe while still married, claiming "the right to love". In 1934, when Thompson became the first American journalist to be expelled from the country, the pair fled Nazi Germany. They spent a period of time in Italy, and eventually emigrated back to the US. However, Winsloe hated her time there and left Thompson to return to Europe.
Another stance Thompson was very vocal about during her lifetime was Zionism, a movement that originally advocated for the creation of a Jewish nation. When Thompson first traveled to Europe in the 1920s, she was sympathetic to the Zionist cause, having had “endless discussions” on the journey over with delegates traveling to the International Zionist Conference being held in London. By the late 1930s, she had gone from a supportive commentator to an outright supporter of the movement, raising awareness of Jewish persecution in Nazi Europe. However, after the war, she took a trip to Palestine. It was there she began to grow concerned over the movement’s right wing and the building terrorism toward the British.
After this trip, she penned a series of columns expressing her fears over the Zionist movement, for which she received extreme backlash. Many accused her of anti-Semitism, which she strongly denied. Eventually, she took a firmly anti-Zionist stance, advocating for Palestinian refugees and pointing out the hypocrisy of the Zionist movement when it came to displacing and oppressing these predominantly Muslim people as Nazi Europe had only a decade earlier. Her honesty when it came to changing her stance on Zionism, though unpopular with much of American society, only demonstrates her integrity as a journalist.
Unfortunately, despite her work against Nazism and Zionism, Thompson was still incredibly racist in her views toward black people. During the 1936 presidential race, she wrote of black voters: “[...] notoriously venal. Ignorant and illiterate, the vast mass of N****** are like the lower strata of the early industrial immigrants, and like them are 'bossed' and 'delivered' in blocs by venal leaders, white and black.” Thompson could be stubborn in her beliefs, and from my research, it doesn’t seem she ever acknowledged or apologized for this overt racism.
The later years of Thompson’s life were far less exciting. She toured colleges across the USA as a journalism lecturer and continued with her column until the death of her third husband, Maxim Kopf, in 1958. She had a strained relationship with her only son, partially due to her absence during his childhood, and partially due to his alcoholism and failing marriage, of which Thompson took her daughter-in-law’s side. On January 30th, 1961, Thompson died of a heart attack whilst visiting her daughter-in-law in Lisbon, Portugal. She was 67 years old.
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