The Press: Cartwheel Girl

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This week half the universities and colleges in the U. S. were bestowing honorary degrees on such personages as William Lyon Phelps, Evangeline Booth and Major Bowes (see p. 58), without honoring Dorothy Thompson. This week Foreign Correspondent Anne O’Hare McCormick was introduced at the New York World’s Fair as the Woman of 1939, a distinction which might have gone to Dorothy Thompson. Seven million, five hundred and fifty-five thousand readers of 196 newspapers scanned them in vain for the column called On The Record, whose author is Dorothy Thompson. Five and a half million radio listeners who on Monday nights at 9 o’clock hear Dorothy Thompson discuss politics had to get along with Commentator Gabriel Heatter. This week, after three years of one of the most phenomenally successful careers in U. S. journalism, Dorothy Thompson knocked off work for a month and hopped a plane for California, turning down all proffered honors and showed a plump pair of legs to the millions of women who think of her as something between a Cassandra and a Joan of Arc.

When Dorothy Thompson was about ten her stepmother used to call her and her younger brother and sister into the parlor and make them bow and curtsey to visitors. One day Dorothy came in doing a cartwheel, displaying her panties to six ladies of the Methodist Church. That habit has persisted and is one reason why mercurial Miss Thompson will never be the first woman President, although she and Eleanor Roosevelt are undoubtedly the most influential women in the U. S.

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. Besides her columns she has written six books, ranging from her famous 100%-wrong guess on Germany in 1932 (I Saw Hitler) to her most recent effort to educate the U. S. electorate (Dorothy Thompson’s Political Guide). Her opinion is valued by Congressional committees. She has been given the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by six universities, including Columbia, and has received a dozen medals and special awards for achievement. She is the only woman ever to have addressed the Union League Club, the Harvard Club of New York, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. She is prodigiously informed, self-confident and inconsistent.

Three years ago Dorothy Thompson had won some fame as a foreign correspondent, most of it confined to her professional colleagues. Her book on Hitler was best known for its flat statement that he would never come to power (“Oh, Adolf! Adolf! You will be out of luck”), and her book on Russia was best known as the inspiration for Sinclair Lewis’s renowned brawl with Theodore Dreiser, whom he accused of plagiarizing it. She had written a few articles for The Saturday Evening Post and was considered an intelligent journalist, but she was a reporter and no pundit. Then, in March 1936, Mrs. Ogden Reid, super-clubwoman vice president of the New York Herald Tribune, hired her to write a column. It was to run on the same page as Lippmann’s Today and Tomorrow, three times a week, and it was expected to present the woman’s point of view toward such public matters as women could be expected to grapple with.

Dorothy Thompson surprised everybody, including her employer and herself, by turning out a column that was sensationally informative. To a sound reportorial instinct she added an astonishing capacity to read and absorb vast quantities of printed matter. She re-established contact with old friends in Europe, who gave her inside gossip. As Mrs. Sinclair Lewis she had become a hostess to Manhattan literati; now she invited to her house more and more experts on foreign and domestic politics, economists, historians and educators, whose minds she assiduously pumped. She had tremendous energy and insatiable curiosity; she wrote lucidly and was not afraid to pour into her column whatever emotion she felt. Her warmth and sincerity, her hatred of Fascism wherever she saw it (it was usually in Europe in those days) and the passionate indignation with which she wrote of injustice to the defenseless soon gave her a following far beyond the circulation of the Herald Tribune. Her column, quickly syndicated, spread through the hinterland. She appealed to women because she wrote like a woman. She appealed to men because, for a woman, she seemed surprisingly intelligent.

Today, after writing nearly a million words for On The Record, she has lost some followers and gained more. Liberals have regretfully come to the conclusion that she is a conservative, a fact which she freely admits. Conservatives do not altogether trust her, fear she might become a liberal under a Republican regime —as well she might. Radicals hate & fear her, think she is a potential Fascist herself. But to those Americans who live in the smaller cities and towns, and especially to the women, Dorothy Thompson is infallible—not so much because of what she thinks as because of what she is. To these women she is the embodiment of an ideal, the typical modern American woman they think they would like to be: emancipated, articulate and successful, living in the thick of one of the most exciting periods of history and interpreting it to millions. What they do not see, although it shines through everything she writes, is that she is also restless, dissatisfied and nostalgic for the past, when life must have been simpler for everybody. If Dorothy Thompson were a contented woman, she would not be so influential as she is.

Education of a Columnist. She grew up in upstate New York, in towns whose names she still repeats lovingly: Lancaster, Clarence, Tonawanda, Hamburg, Gowanda. Her father was a minister who moved from parsonage to parsonage. Dorothy loved him and hated her stepmother, who appeared on the scene soon after her mother’s death, when the future columnist was seven. At 14 she was sent to Chicago to live with an aunt, who saw her through school and junior college. Then she went to Syracuse University because the tuition was free to children of Methodist ministers. When she took her A. B. in 1914 she was a chubby, grave-faced maiden of 20. She had had an unhappy childhood and she had to earn her living.

She went to Manhattan, took teachers’ examinations and flunked in English grammar (Mr. Lewis still has to correct her speech). She tried writing short stories, then drifted into social work. She disliked it (“I loathe the social workers’ jargon, the way they discuss people in case loads”). So she got a job addressing envelopes in the woman’s suffrage headquarters in Buffalo, and that gave her the chance she wanted. Soon she was stumping all over upper New York State. She was husky and exuberant, she needed a cause, and the pay left her something to send home. She used to get up at five or six in the morning to catch the milk train and loved it. She loved the rough-&-tumble arguments she got into, the job of talking down the mayor and the local minister and the village trustees until they let her speak. In one town she always got a contribution from a rich old woman who said she couldn’t see any sense in the suffragette movement but gave money to it because it was such a good show. That was why Dorothy Thompson liked it. And she was part of the show.

She left suffrage work after three years to take a copywriting job in a Manhattan advertising agency. She hated that, too, and went to Cincinnati to help start an experiment in preventive medicine. Her employers sent her back to New York and the next thing she knew she was in love. When that seemed to be turning out badly she ran away to Europe, as everybody did in 1920.

She crossed on a liner with a shipload of Zionists, and by the time the boat reached England she was full of the Zionist cause. This got her a job covering the Zionist conference in London for International News Service and made her a newspaperwoman. To her new career she brought the same mixture of romanticism and vitality that had made her a successful suffragette. She got the last interview with Hunger Striker Terence McSwiney before he struck out in Cork, Ireland. She got the only interview with Empress Zita in Budapest after the second Karlist putsch failed. She borrowed $500 from Sigmund Freud to go to Warsaw and covered the Pilsudski revolution in evening dress. She was almost shot in Bulgaria. In Vienna she established a salon of sorts and entertained politicians, refugees, psychoanalysts, novelists, musicians and spies. In Budapest she married a Hungarian named Josef Bard, who was just as restless as she.

By the time she went to Berlin in 1924, as chief of the Philadelphia Public Ledger bureau, she had a Richard Harding Davis reputation. But she had the good sense to stop trying for scoops and to study the temperament and philosophy of the German people. She made such a thorough job of it that she still knows Germany as well as she knows the U. S. Hostile critics have said she knows it better.

When she met Sinclair Lewis in 1927 Dorothy Thompson was restless again. She had just divorced the elusive Josef Bard and Lewis was being divorced by his first wife. After their marriage in 1928, she plunged into her new career as wife of the No. 1 U. S. novelist as energetically as she had followed her previous ones. She helped to rebuild a house in Vermont and filled it with guests. She set up an establishment in Bronxville that soon became famous as a salon. She called herself Mrs. Sinclair Lewis. She had a baby. For two years she hardly read a book. She wrote some articles and short stories, but they were not enough to keep her busy. Following her inevitable pattern, she was restless and dissatisfied again. The columnist’s job Saved her from boredom and turned her burgeoning energy into the channels from which she could derive the most personal satisfaction. And the ideas she had absorbed since childhood became her credo as a columnist.

Columnist’s Credo. Dorothy Thompson thinks: a) that Roosevelt is headstrong (so is she) but b) has “a real world sense” (and so has she); c) that WPA is unhealthy (it smacks of social work); d) that the democratic ideal is most nearly realized in Vermont (“where the town meeting is still a living, functioning institution,” i. e., where democracy functions as in the past); e) that the New Deal is incipient Fascism (she sees dictators in every closet); f) that government should be decentralized (her first seven years in small towns were happy); g) that “the educated female is, in general, dewomanized” (but not Dorothy Thompson).

She has been accused of being an oppositionist, of having no program of her own. Dorothy Thompson has a program for herself. It is aristo-democratic, polysyllabic and not so very clear. Excerpts:

“All my instincts and most of my intelligence incline me toward conservatism. I distrust any program which does not carefully take into account the nature of man. I believe that fundamental, biological inequality is a fact of nature. I also believe that the instinct to preserve society is one of the highest sublimations of the erotic instinct plus reason and intelligence. The democratic idea, of the value of every human soul and the right of every human being to protect his own interests in so far as they do not too drastically infringe upon the interests of others, is not in the least incompatible with the aristocratic conception, provided the latter is removed from the field of privilege. A good society should produce a natural leadership of the biologically and mentally superior. The best society—and here I agree with Walt Whitman—is the one which produces the largest number of healthy, happy, cooperative, competent human beings.

“The injustice and disorder of our times comes from the fact that individuals and groups have gratified their appetites by instruments of political power. . . . I do not think . . . that this country would produce a higher general level of physical and economic well being if it were governed by trade unions monopolizing the political power, than it is when governed by the owning classes monopolizing political power.

“I judge any program by whether I think it tends to distribute power and bring about equilibrium, whether it tends to destroy privilege, whether it subjects itself to reason and measures itself by criteria—the chief criterion in the economic field being the release of productive energy. My program, which is the program of a journalist, and not the program of a person with any political ambitions whatsoever, is to try to make more people think along these lines.”

Columnist’s Day. The job of conducting a column requires a peculiar admixture of journalistic talents. A columnist must be receptive and selective, absorptive and digestive, and have the trick of verbal catharsis. The successful columnist must be both an introvert and an extravert, a reporter and an exhibitionist.

Dorothy Thompson wakes up at ten o’clock and reads furiously for two or three hours in bed. Along about noon she gets up, dresses fast, then dictates her column. She has three secretaries, named Madeleine, Madeline, and Madelon (she distinguishes them by their last names). One is always at the Herald Tribune answering mail and digging up research and one or two go to her apartment to help her while she works. Miss Thompson seldom goes to her office because the telephone never stops ringing.

She usually has a luncheon date, to make a speech, receive a medal or talk politics with somebody. After lunch she reads some more, paces around her apartment, with a pencil and a pad of yellow paper in her hand, and generally gets curious about something and starts telephoning people. She runs up tremendous telephone bills calling Washington and London. At teatime people start dropping in: friends, ex perts and refugees. She almost always goes out to dinner, or has a flock of people to her apartment. She seldom talks anything but world affairs and seldom stops talking them. Her husband has been heard to shush her after hours of it. When she is alone again late at night, if she is worked up about something, she will sit down and write a column at white heat, and these columns are usually her best.

Dorothy Thompson believes the U. S. should be governed by the Cabinet, and nowadays she has her own private cabinet which governs the thinking of her column. Her chief adviser on economic problems is Alexander Sachs, an economist who works for Lehman Corp. and used to be head of NRA’s economic research division. On foreign affairs she consults Hamilton Fish Armstrong, John Gunther, Quincy Howe. If she wants to know what the British are doing she calls Harold Nicolson in London. About France she talks to Raoul de’ Roussy de Sales, U. S. correspondent for Paris-Soir. On Central Europe she calls any of her hundreds of refugee friends. On national issues she is likely to get most of her ideas from the opposition. One of the chief criticisms leveled at her is that she rarely consults anybody inside the labor movement, but she wrote a vigorous column in defense of Harry Bridges after talking to Frances Perkins.

For writing her column, speaking over the radio, doing a monthly article for the Ladies’ Home Journal and delivering lectures, Dorothy Thompson was paid $103,000 last year. Her business expenses were $25,000 and she contributed $37,000 in taxes, which left her $41,000 to live on. She gave 20% of that away.

When Dorothy Thompson goes out and digs up a story she almost always gets her facts right. Last week, starting her month’s vacation, she planned to do a good deal of digging before returning to New York. Next month she will go to Europe and write On The Record from there. This will be good news to those wno have detected in some of her recent writings the personal pontifications of a Lippmann, the intransigence of a Broun and the peskiness of a Westbrook Pegler.

But even those who consider her opinionated will not deny that she has influenced many people to think about problems that were once too much for them, that she can do more for a cause than almost any private citizen in the U. S., and that when she meets a situation face to face she reacts with warmhearted, gushing humanity. She has not been content to inveigh against Hitler, but by one radio speech raised $40.000 which has gone to aid German refugees. She has a real enthusiasm for great political ideas and is not ashamed to show it in her column. And in the no longer lusty profession of journalism she is one figure of dominant vitality.

Mrs. Lewis now lives apart from her husband, although they are on extremely good terms. Their nine-year-old son, Michael, goes to school in Arizona and Mrs. Lewis’ trip to the Coast last week was for the purpose of seeing him. They get along well together and precocious Michael is one of the few people who can stand her off in an argument. He knows her mental processes so well that he has his comeback ready before she has finished talking.

To the career of being a mother Dorothy Thompson devotes herself with gusto. She does everything that way. She eats enormous meals and loves heavy Viennese food. Two hours after a big dinner at her house sandwiches are brought in. She smokes in chains and drives too fast. She dresses sloppily most of the time, but when she decided about two years ago that she needed more feminine clothes she went down to Bergdorf-Goodman’s and bought a bunch of $250 evening dresses.

She always has a literary passion. Last year it was The Federalist, this year Walt Whitman. Some day she is going to quit journalism, which she says she detests, and write a couple of novels. She writes poetry now, and last year she wrote a play. It wanted a little more work.

She is a plump, pretty woman of 45, bursting with health, energy and sex appeal. She thinks, talks and sleeps world problems and scares strange men half to death. This is too bad because she likes men better than women, and when she takes a train she rides in the smoking car.