Dorothy - II

AMERICAN CASSANDRA: Excerpt from book proposal, 1986

If you had met Dorothy Thompson in 1938 or 1939, in the years just prior to World War II, you would have seen her at the height of her fame and influence, when she was "known to the corner druggist,” as Jimmy Sheean said, “the taxi driver, the hairdresser and the headwaiter;" when her mail was delivered in special trucks and her name was as familiar to the American people as Franklin Roosevelt’s, Babe Ruth’s, or J. Edgar Hoover’s. At her peak, she fielded up to 700 requests a week to appear at rallies, dinners, club meetings, and graduation ceremonies, was profiled in Time, The Nation, Scribner's, Harper's, Collier's, and The New Yorker, and broadcast every Sunday night over the NBC radio network in “a kind of topical swing session" that allowed her to talk about any subject she chose. She was "an American oracle with a classical bent,” "the voice of Christendom ringing across the world in turmoil," "a molder of opinion, a power in the land," combining "the seeing eye of Cassandra and the appearance of Brunnhilde with the gusto of General Patton and the holy fire of a crusading apostle."

“I’ve always wanted to be blonde,” Dorothy confessed in a moment of weakness. “Blonde and kittenish.” No one could tell if she was joking. She appeared at Radio City, Town Hall, Carnegie Hall, and Yankee Stadium. She turned up on committees of every description and gave lectures on topics as far removed as Viennese cooking and the Bill of Rights. She organized conferences and headed boards, issued statements and won honorary degrees. She was so widely known and so universally in demand that journalist Heywood Broun admitted to envy in the pages of The New Republic.

"Possibly I speak out of a certain prejudice,” said Broun. “Some months ago I had an engagement to talk at the New School and was unable to attend on account of illness. I ran into a man who went and asked him who took my place. `Who do you think?' he said. `Dorothy Thompson.'" She was satirized by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in Woman of the Year, while every wit, pundit, and political stuntman in America was busy constructing epigrams at her expense. Dorothy was "the only person in the United States," said The Saturday Evening Post, "who makes a career out of stewing publicly about the state of the world." The Times of London quipped that she had "discovered the secret of perpetual emotion," while Alice Roosevelt Longworth, in a line that has been famous ever since, declared that she was "the only woman in history who has had her menopause in public and made it pay."

"On the Record," the newspaper column that turned Dorothy Thompson into a national institution, was commissioned in 1936 by Helen Rogers Reid, the president and guiding spirit of the Republican-leaning New York Herald-Tribune, the voice of the “Eastern Establishment.” Mrs. Reid had wanted "a column about politics, wars, and domestic and international concerns written so that women could understand it and would not always have to be seeking information from their husbands." Such, at least, was the explanation of the husbands. More to the point, Helen Reid regarded the world of the 20th century as too dangerous a place to be defined and interpreted only by men. She never waited for Dorothy to catch on with Tribune readers but put her immediately at the top of the opinion page, “fully formed from the head of Zeus.”

It was another bold stroke in a career that had begun almost by accident in the middle of the Atlantic when Dorothy sailed to Europe in 1920 with nothing but $150 and vague ideas about visiting Russia, “the socialist paradise.” On the voyage abroad she fell in with a group of Zionist leaders on their way to a conference in London; from there she talked her way into print, winding up in Vienna for the first three years of her newspaper apprenticeship.

"She blazed through five revolutions,” The New Yorker wrote, “not counting the Vienna food riots;" walked ten miles in evening gown and slippers to cover an uprising in Poland; slipped through the doors of the Eszterházy castle near Budapest to win an exclusive interview with the deposed Emperor of Austria; and shed with relief the prudish conventions of her American Methodist upbringing. Moving to Berlin in 1924, she found a social, intellectual, and sexual paradise, "an orgy of freedom," as she expressed it, "of sunshine, harvest, love, lewdness, tenderness, satire and gargantuan mirth. These were the brilliant, feverish years when Berlin was, in a cultural sense, the capital of the world. These were the days when the German mind was open to every stream of thought from every part of the earth.” Here, Dorothy Thompson became fully herself, a woman of erudition and sophistication, great analytical capacity, humanitarian warmth, and supreme self-confidence. Here, too, she formed an implacable hatred of the force that ultimately destroyed the scene of her personal liberation: Nazism.  

She had just turned 34 when she met Sinclair Lewis at a party in Berlin and he proposed to her on the spot. "I have been looking for you for years," he said. "Will you marry me?" It was one of the most publicized unions of the 1920s, an intense, frequently intoxicated partnership that entered the realm of legend almost before it was consummated. Rebuffed at their first meeting, Lewis followed Dorothy all over Europe, wherever she went to hunt down news, professing love and proposing marriage in interviews and speeches, at banquets and parties, in airplanes and bars from London to Rome, pursuing her finally into the Kremlin, where she had gone to cover the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution. An anxious but well-meaning delegation of writers and dignitaries was waiting to welcome the author of Main Street to the Soviet Union. What had brought Sinclair Lewis to Moscow?

"Dorothy," said Lewis.

But what did he hope to find on his trip? What had he come to see?

"Dorothy. Just Dorothy." They were married in London in 1928 and for a brief period Dorothy was content to surrender her own career for Lewis, motherhood -- her son was born in 1930 -- and a reputation as the brightest hostess in literary New York. She divided her time among a spacious duplex on Central Park West, a mock Tudor mansion in Bronxville, and the splendid, century-old "Twin Farms" in Barnard, Vermont -- the town, the place, the state of mind she would call her own for the rest of her life. Here Dorothy began writing again and composed the first of her masterful pieces on the rise of fascism in Germany. From 1931 to 1935 she contributed more than twenty pieces on the subject to The Saturday Evening Post, some of them as long as 10,000 words. She had long been recognized as the most meticulous reporter among her colleagues, the least interested in scoops and stunts, the most concerned with ideas, trends, movements, drifts. Good foreign correspondence, she said, consisted of "the type of dispatch that would give the complete social, diplomatic and economic history of a country if assembled over a period of years."

It was as a Post correspondent that Dorothy now held press accreditation in Berlin, and as a Post correspondent that Adolf Hitler, in 1934, made her famous internationally by ordering her expulsion from the country. Their personal war had begun in 1932, when, after years of seclusion from the foreign press, Hitler granted her an interview. She emerged from seeing him with one of the most stunningly mistaken predictions of her career.

"When finally I walked into Adolf Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel," she wrote, "I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something less than fifty seconds I was quite sure I was not. It took me just that long to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog." Hitler was "weak," she said, "ill-poised," "unmartial," "undignified," "awkward," "insecure," "frustrated" and "sick. ... There was something irritatingly refined about him. I was willing to bet that he crooks his little finger when he drinks his tea. ... Not, somehow, what one would expect from a man for whom The Deed is everything." Dorothy did all but call Hitler a sexual degenerate, and she wasn’t so "wrong" about him that he failed to retaliate. She recognized her error immediately and for two years, without cease, harangued the new Fuehrer and his corps of “wavy-haired bugger boys” as a menace not just to Germany but all of Western civilization. The Nazi Foreign Office actually established something called the “Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad” to monitor her writings. In 1934, just after the sweeping purges of the “Night of Long Knives,” the Gestapo arrived at her hotel in Berlin with expulsion orders. She was given forty-eight hours to leave the country and departed the next day in a blaze of publicity:

My offense [Dorothy wrote] was to think that Hitler is an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against 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 to one.

"Well," said Dorothy, "it was too bad. I hadn't been in Germany all that long. In such a short time, you don't see much." She was an international celebrity when she returned to the United States, and for the next eleven years, until the Axis defeat, she rode an "ascending comet" of public approbation that took her to the top of her profession and beyond, carrying her ultimately, as critic, friend and adviser, into the White House, the State Department, the U. S. Army, the O. S. S., Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, the Vatican, the House of Commons, and even the firing chambers of the Maginot Line.

"She was vowed," said Jimmy Sheean, "with an absolute sincerity, to the destruction of Adolf Hitler ... and the moment her chance came she rose with meteoric suddenness into the position of an American oracle, one of those very few people who have the corporate, general permission to tell people what to think. Her natural aptitude for the task was enormous, but there have been few or none in the whole history of American journalism who have made such use of the power of opinion in an immense crisis."

When Helen Reid signed Dorothy Thompson for the creation of "On the Record" it was neither known nor intended that the column would become the leading American organ of the anti-fascist crusade. In "On the Record" she proved as comfortable discussing the major issues of world economics and the New Deal as she was addressing United States' foreign policy, military affairs, the ups and downs of capital and labor, the genius of Toscanini, and the butterfly collection of the Emperor of Japan.

"The universe was centered in her sights from the start," a critic explained. "She took virtually every phase of human life under her supervision, untroubled by any inner doubts and adopting from the first an air of authority which her clients found irresistible." Wondrously unselfconscious, defying the rules of any classification, "On the Record" was an unqualified success, "an endless procession of passionate certainties," couched in richly indignant prose and striving to cover as much ground as was possible in the circumstances.

"Men are apt to wear a puzzled frown when they read Miss Thompson's column," said The New Yorker in a two-part profile. "The elastic quality of her thinking and her fearless prose style confuse them, and one male reader pointed with astonishment not long ago to a single column of about 1700 words in which Miss Thompson had contrived to comment definitely on thirty different subjects." It was said of Dorothy Thompson in these years that she could rearrange the map of Europe as easily as another woman might whip up a sponge-cake, and if men were bewildered, women were delighted. There was never any way of telling how many of her readers were women; what is certain is that she came to be regarded, within a very short time, as "the archetype of the American woman rampant ... emancipated, articulate and successful, living in the thick of one of the most exciting periods in history and interpreting it to millions."

                     She hops the nearest battle wagon

                      And yells for blood in a gallon flagon,

                      For which the pinker literati

                      Just adore our slightly Dotty.

Her parties were famous. To be summoned by Dorothy Thompson, the saying went, was like being asked to lecture before the French Academy: you had the best audience in town and your words were bound to turn up in print. She was the mistress of a private "brain trust," a varied network of political theorists, economists, journalists, editors, cabinet ministers, agrarians, playwrights, publishers, and Broadway producers, who gave their advice to her free of charge and were often, but not always, credited directly in her column. (Much criticized for "brain picking," Dorothy answered that no one person could be expected to know everything and that only a man would try; the brains, she said, were "to the best picker," and it was only too bad there weren't more of them.) Her parties went on normally until three and four in the morning, but by ten the next day she was already at work, racing through five or more newspapers as she lay chain-smoking in bed, `phoning London or Paris or San Francisco or Hong Kong for news and comment, dictating to three private secretaries and frequently surrounded by children -- her own and other people's -- who ran in and out of her bedroom and brought information to her from different encyclopedias. In The Saturday Evening Post Jack Alexander left a picture of Dorothy at work that entered the national imagination indelibly. She had agreed to an interview with a lady reporter:

She was sitting up, in negligee, in a bed that was strewn with newspapers, books, cablegrams and letters, and she was dictating her column for the next day. A secretary, seated at a typewriter, pecked out the dictation. Miss Thompson, talking as if addressing a mass meeting, was trying out phrases and sentences in various combinations until she was satisfied with their ring. She talked at a giddy clip, simultaneously brushing her hair in jerky sweeps. She used gestures for emphasis, waving the hairbrush in the air or bringing it down smartly on her free hand.

Fascinated by the spectacle, the visitor sat down near the door. When the column was finished, the secretary left the room and a maid came in with a breakfast tray of prunes, toast and coffee, and set it down across Miss Thompson's knees. The interviewer opened with a casual remark about a move which Germany had made the day before. The effect was as if she had touched off the fuse to a string of firecrackers. Miss Thompson, who thinks and has freely stated that Hitler is a maniac, launched into a rousing diatribe against Der Fuehrer and all other dictators. She delivered herself so forcefully that at times the tray rattled and the prunes jumped about in their saucer.

The caller was so taken by the sight of the volcanic columnist in eruption that she forgot to bring up a list of questions which she had prepared in advance. She came away convinced that she had seen one of the natural wonders of America at close range.

This was the role, as the enemy of dictators and the embodiment of freedom, that Dorothy Thompson took for her own in 1930s America. It was an era of fundamental transition in the United States, a time of economic hardship, social and political realignment and fierce, deep-seated isolationist sentiment. In this atmosphere she was held by a great many people to be a pernicious influence, an alarmist, a hysteric, and even the agent of a foreign power.

"Her admirers say that hers is the dilemma of the voice crying in the wilderness," The New Yorker observed after the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in 1939, "of every far-seeing patriot who must holler to be heard and must create panic in some places in order to bring peace to all. Other people, alarmed by her belligerence in print, see her as a dangerous warmonger and incendiary. They point to statistics which show that almost every second column she has written in the last two years has contained an incitement to war." Twin Farms, in the meantime, and the whole countryside around Barnard and Woodstock, Vermont, were transformed into something Sinclair Lewis was pleased to call "Mittel-Vermont," a haven for some of the more prominent exiles of the Nazi period, the writers, thinkers, artists, and statesmen who had helped Dorothy Thompson in the first days of her career and had turned to her now as a friend in need. So far-reaching was her influence that in 1938 President Roosevelt called the international conference on refugees at Évian largely in response to an article she had published in Foreign Affairs. That same year she broadcast an appeal to all nations concerning the plight of Herschel Grynszpan, the young Jewish exile whose murder of a Nazi official in Paris became Hitler's excuse for the Kristallnacht and who was now standing trial for his life.

"Who is on trial in this case?" Dorothy asked. "I say we are all on trial. I say the Christian world is on trial. I say the men of Munich are on trial, who signed a pact without one word of protection for helpless minorities ... We who are not Jews must speak, speak our sorrow and indignation and disgust in so many voices that they will be heard." Her own voice was heard one night at Madison Square Garden in one of the most extraordinary scenes that New York could remember. She had "dropped in," as she put it, on a rally of the German American Bund, where twenty-two thousand fascist sympathizers were spouting their poison to national attention. She took her seat in the front row of the press gallery and commenced to interrupt the speakers with strident gales of raucous laughter, so humiliating and infuriating the pride of American Nazism that she had to be escorted out of the building by the police for her own safety. It was a moment, an event, that outstripped any the public had come to expect even from the woman they called "Cassandra."

"Don't forget," said Dorothy Thompson, "the main thing about Cassandra was that she was unfortunately right." As the thirties drew to a close, more and more of her countrymen were inclined to see what she meant.

"There are things in my heart that you do not dream of," she wrote to Sinclair Lewis after their final separation, "things that are compounded of passion and fury and love and hate and pride and disgust and tenderness and contrition, things that are wild and fierce." In the thousands of letters she sent through the years she provided no finer description of the forces that propelled her, the forces that had brought her to the summit of her own and her country's aspiration. There was no longer any distinction to be made between her public and her private lives. She was the cause she was fighting for. "I am not at all surprised," Jimmy Sheean concluded, "that Sinclair Lewis felt bewildered and afraid before the tornado of her destiny. Her effect upon public policy was, by 1940, absolutely terrifying, and as we all know it made Red's hands tremble when he spoke of it.”