In a column last month, I introduced readers to Dorothy Thompson (1893-1961). Now I’d like to return to the subject and give her views a closer look.
Thompson became the first American journalist to interview Hitler (in 1931) and the first to be expelled from Nazi Germany (in 1934). As a radio broadcaster, widely syndicated newspaper columnist, and foreign correspondent, she earned a reputation as America’s “First Lady of Journalism” by 1940.
Thompson’s blistering attacks on political and economic authoritarianism abroad mirrored what she often said about similar developments here in America. She feared the rise of demagogues anywhere, including in our own democratic republic. Here is one of her especially cogent observations:
No people ever recognize their dictator in advance. He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument — the Incorporated National Will. … When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, nor will they call him “Führer” or “Duce.” But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of “O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!”
Thompson was suspicious of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, begun in 1933, from its very inception. She stirred up a fuss many times for pointing out elements of the New Deal that prevented economic recovery for years.
Many writers and artists of the day supported FDR’s federally funded make-work schemes such as the Works Progress Administration because those schemes included money for writers and artists. Dorothy Thompson was not one of them. She wrote,
The WPA artistic projects are full of people who have no better claim to be actors, writers, designers, painters, or sculptors than I have to being a locomotive engineer… (The writer) doesn’t need a “project,” and if he really has anything to say, he will shun the project as he would the plague.
In 1937, fresh from reelection the year before, FDR aimed at the Supreme Court. Its opposition to many of his New Deal measures prompted him to propose his famous “court-packing” plan. Dorothy Thompson threw everything but the kitchen sink at the power-grabbing scheme (which fortunately failed).
If you’re interested in a short list of biographies on Thompson, as well as some links to audio and video recordings of her, shoot me an e-mail. Meantime, I close with another of her wise observations:
So far, private enterprise and political democracy have gone hand in hand. When one has perished or been rigidly controlled, the other has perished also. The only countries left in the western world where science is free, where art is uncontrolled, where men can write, speak, and think as they please, where the individual enjoys security in his person, against arrest without warrant and trial by jury without indictment, are capitalist countries. … (W)here private enterprise has been abolished or placed under complete state control, civil liberties have been abolished, too.
Lawrence W. Reed, a resident of Newnan, is president emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education. His most recent book is “Was Jesus a Socialist?” He can be reached at lreed@fee.org.
