Dorothy Thompson was born in
Lancaster, New York, in 1893, the eldest of three children of Peter (1863–1921) and Margaret (Grierson) Thompson (1873–1901). Her siblings were Peter Willard Thompson (1895–1979) and Margaret Thompson (1897–1970, later Mrs. Howard Wilson). Her mother died when Thompson was seven, leaving Peter, a
Methodist minister, to raise his children alone. Their father soon remarried; Dorothy did not get along with his new wife, Elizabeth Abbott Thompson. In 1908, her father sent Thompson to
Chicago to live with his two sisters to avoid further conflict. In Chicago she attended
Lewis Institute for two years and earned an
associate degree before transferring to
Syracuse University as a junior. At Syracuse, she studied politics and economics and graduated
cum laude with a
bachelor's degree in 1914. Because she had had the opportunity to be educated, unlike many women of the time, Thompson felt that she had a social obligation to fight for
women's suffrage, which would become the base of her ardent political beliefs. Shortly after graduation, Thompson moved to
Buffalo and became involved in the women's suffrage campaign. During her time in the suffrage movement, Thompson also did advertising and publicity work in New York City and contributed op-eds on social justice to
The New York Times and the
New York Herald Tribune. In 1920, she went abroad to pursue a journalism career.
Journalism in Europe and Thompson during their honeymoon caravan trip in England, 1928 Thompson boarded a ship to London in June 1920 to become a foreign correspondent, submitting articles to
William Randolph Hearst's
International News Service (INS).
Ireland was in political ferment, so she went there, and on August 12 was the final person to interview the
Sinn Féin independence leader
Terence MacSwiney, who later that day was arrested for
sedition; he died in prison on a
hunger strike two months later. While working in
Vienna, Thompson became 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 Evening Post appointed her head of its Berlin bureau. 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 got involved in a
lesbian affair with German author
Christa Winsloe, while still married, claiming "the right to love". Thompson's most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s. Biographer Kurth wrote: "Later, when the full force of Nazism had crashed over Europe, Thompson was asked to defend her 'Little Man' remark. 'I still believe he is a little man,' she replied. 'He is the apotheosis of the little man.' Nazism itself was 'the apotheosis of collective mediocrity in all its forms.' "
Expulsion from Germany Fellow correspondent and friend
William L. Shirer once commented on Dorothy Thompson's "love for Germany, which was passionate but — as she wrote once — frustrated." Her anti-Nazi journalism and, in particular, her depiction of Hitler in her book,
I Saw Hitler, led to her becoming the first American journalist to be expelled from Germany. On August 25, 1934, she received the expulsion order, delivered by a
Gestapo agent to her hotel room in the
Hotel Adlon, Berlin. She was given 24 hours to leave the country. The 1981
Broadway musical adaptation starred
Lauren Bacall as Tess. In 1941, Thompson wrote "
Who Goes Nazi?" for ''Harper's''. Instead of presenting the likelihood of a person adopting Nazism in racial or ethnic terms, she thought of it in terms of character qualities that could be found in any group of people.
Zionism and the State of Israel Thompson had been sympathetic to
the Zionist movement since she first travelled to Europe in 1920. During her visit, she had "endless discussions" about the movement with delegates who were traveling to the International Zionist Conference which was then being held in London. In the late 1930s, as Thompson emerged as a leading advocate for Jewish refugees who were fleeing from persecution in Europe, she grew close to the Zionist statesman
Chaim Weizmann and she also grew close to
Meyer Weisgal, Chaim Weizmann's lieutenant in the US. As
World War II unfolded, Thompson went from being a sympathetic commentator to being an outright advocate for the movement. She was a keynote speaker at the 1942
Biltmore Conference, and by the war's end, she was regarded as one of the most effective spokespersons for Zionism. However, Thompson's attitude towards the movement had already begun to shift, most especially after a 1945 trip to Palestine, because she grew more concerned about the activities of the movement's right-wing adherents. She was especially troubled by its escalating
terrorism against the British. After penning several columns which were critical of right wing Zionist terrorism, Thompson provoked a tremendous backlash that ultimately led her to cooperate with the leaders of the
Jewish anti-Zionist organization, the
American Council for Judaism. She wrote a critique of American Zionism in
Commentary in 1950, accusing Zionists of
dual loyalty. After her
Commentary article, the backlash against her grew more intense. This included accusations of
antisemitism, which Thompson strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, "almost a definition of
professional suicide." She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for
perpetual war. After she travelled to the Middle East in 1950, Thompson was involved in the founding of the
American Friends of the Middle East, an organization which was secretly funded by the
CIA.
Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote in 2017 that There can be no doubt that anti-Semitism was a theme in Thompson’s later writing. Pathologizing Jewishness, in particular, became habitual for her in the 1950s. By May 25, 1950, she is writing to
Maury M. Travis, darkly, of the “tragic
psychosis of the Jew”... In the
Commentary piece she warns: “We bring on what we fear. Any psychologist will tell you that a primary
neurosis is the fear of rejection and that when that neurosis takes hold of a person he unconsciously strives to create the conditions for that rejection.” The reference is to Jewish “neurosis,” but the passage also rather elegantly describes the logic of Thompson’s own fears. In what well may be a case of knowing your addressee, Thompson wrote to
Winston Churchill in 1951: “I have become convinced that the Jews, phenomenally brilliant individually and especially in the realm of abstract thought, are collectively the stupidest people on earth. I think it must come from cultural inbreeding—perhaps physical inbreeding also—in a desire to retain a homogenous, in-group society in the midst of ‘aliens.’ ==Personal life==