Final EOTO: Dorothy Thompson

Dorothy Thompson was born in 1893, to British immigrants in Lancaster, New York; she studied at Syracuse University. She got married to a novelist named Sinclair Lewis in 1927, and divorced him later in 1937. She died at age 67 in Lisbon, Portugal of a heart attack in 1961. She was also considered to be one of the most influential female journalists in American history.

She started out her career working for the New York State Woman Suffrage Party, becoming a journalist shortly after the ratification of the 19th Amendment. She exhibited traits of the Girl Reporters of the late Nineteenth-Century in her reporting tactics. In 1921, she was the only journalist to report from the inside of former King Karl I's castle, by posing as a Red Cross nurse. It's how she established her reputation, got to become the Vienna correspondent, and the central European Bureau Chief for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York Evening Post. This made her the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any stature. After her wedding in 1928, she split her time between a domestic life in Vermont, and going international for reporting assignments. Dorothy was one of the leading journalists when it come to reporting on the National Socialism in Germany, she was able to have a sit down interview with Adolf Hitler himself, and published a book in 1931, "I Saw Hitler!" Here she described him as "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." The very obvious, fiery hate for Hitler led to her being sent back to America by the German government in 1934 as a warning to other journalists that critique of Hitler would not be tolerated. Her coverage on Hitler is what gave her the nickname of "the First Lady of American Journalism" in the United States. 

Thompson was later offered an opportunity as a radio broadcaster with the New York Herald Tribune, by Helen Rogers Reid in 1936 under their newspaper "Woman's Voice." She created a column that talked about a variety of topics, ranging from national to foreign politics, intellectual trends, social habits, cultural innovations, and historical change; she titled it "On the Record." This skyrocketed her to fame becoming known for her provocative articles, and using Grouse as a motif, satirical character. What really put her at the top of the news cycle though, was her ridiculing the speaker at a German American Bund Rally in 1939, but her intense stance on anti-zionism is also what lost her many followers postwar. She couldn't do it alone though, behind her was a team of three women secretaries and research assistants, along with a trusted group of male friends on retainer for insight or corrections on foreign affairs. This was highly unusual for a female reporter, but it might just be what separated Dorothy from the masses, and allowed her to shine so bright. 

Dorothy Thompson sought change in the world, she expressed her concerned for fascism in America, condemned anti-semitism, and extreme nationalism. In the 1930s and 40s she was urging her American audiences to turn their attention onto Nazi Germany and what was happening to democracy and Europe's Jews. She believed that the state was a "predatory instrument" and had an enlightening point of view on what work meant: "Work is an essential of life itself as necessary as bread and love...the chance to choose one's work, and pursue it, is the chance to become a more effective human being." She engrained this mantra in her soul, and was working til the very day she died. By 1937 she had received six honorary university degrees, invitations to speak at important forums, clubs, dinners, and commencements attended by hundreds of people. Her work ethic and strong moral code is her greatest strength, but when it came to keeping a job with the New York Tribune it was her weakness. Reid, the woman that originally offered Thompson the job, suppressed a column she had written when she switched her support from Willkie to Roosevelt in presidential election of 1940. Starting then she was urged to focus on nonpolitical subjects, which caused her to move to the New York Post saying that she felt "an unbridgeable hostility" towards her at the Tribune. 

Overall, Dorothy Thompson was a powerhouse of a woman, and will forever be remembered as one of the few people who saw the evil and danger in Hitler and the Nazis from the very beginning. She saw them for what they were, and did everything she could to make it known to the rest of the world. She was a fighter for good, and believed that "indulging in hatred and revenge would do more harm to oneself than to the enemy."