August 25, 1934: Dorothy Thompson, then America's leading female journalist, is expelled from Nazi Germany. Her crime was writing unkindly of the country's head of government, Chancellor Adolf Hitler.
Dorothy Celine Thompson was born on July 9, 1893 in the Buffalo suburb of Lancaster, New York. Her mother died when she was 7, and she didn't get along with her father's 2nd wife, so at age 15, she was sent to Chicago to live with his sisters. She graduated from the journalism program at Syracuse University, still one of the best in the country. After working for women's right to vote, she went to Europe to further her journalism career.
She covered the Irish War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War. In 1925, she was promoted to Chief of the Central European Service for the Public Ledger, and in 1927 became head of the Berlin bureau of the New York Post. According to her biographer, Peter Kurth, Thompson was "the undisputed queen of the overseas press corps, the first woman to head a foreign news bureau of any importance."
From 1923 to 1927, she was married to expatriate Hungarian writer Joseph Bard. In 1928, she married another journalist, and the man who was then America's foremost novelist, Sinclair Lewis. In 1930, she gave birth to a son, Michael. The Lewises divorced in 1942.
In 1931, Thompson secured a rare audience with Adolf Hitler, the leader of Germany's rapidly ascending Nazi {arty, at the Kaiserhof Hotel in Berlin. For one of her three permitted questions, Thompson asked Hitler a direct challenge: "When you come to power, will you abolish the constitution of the German Republic?"
Hitler's response was shockingly direct: "I will get into power legally. I will abolish this parliament and the Weimar constitution afterward. I will found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above, discipline and obedience below."
Thompson believed he was telling the truth about his dictatorial ambitions, yet she couldn't fathom that he would be successful. The very idea struck her as absurd: "Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to vote away their rights."
She later said, "When I walked into Adolf Hitler's salon in the Kaiserhof Hotel, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something like fifty seconds, I was quite sure that I was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog."
She recognized that Hitler was a masterful propagandist and orator in front of a crowd but she wasn't prepared for how pathetic he appeared one on one. "He is inconsequent and voluble, ill-poised, insecure. He is the very prototype of the Little Man," she wrote after their meeting.
Within a year, Thompson learned the devastating lesson of how easily democratic citizens could be persuaded to relinquish their rights to a would-be dictator who channeled their anxieties into hatred of a demonized 'other' while promising national greatness. After his election in 1933, Hitler began to crush his political opponents, rapidly militarize German society, and persecute targeted groups.
Hitler was sufficiently threatened by her work that he reportedly demanded the creation of a "Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad" to rush translations of her articles to him. On August 25, 1934, the Nazi government expelled her from the country, making her the 1st American journalist banned from Nazi Germany.
She turned her expulsion into a rallying cry, writing in The New York Times, "My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man... 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... 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 merely was sent to Paris."
Returning to America, Thompson embarked on what became a phenomenon in itself -- a one-woman crusade determined to awaken America and the Western world to the real and present menace of the rise of far-right Fascism, and the terrible war that might be needed to stop its spread throughout the entire West. Thompson was one of the most widely read and heard journalists in America at the time, reaching millions through her influential "On the Record" column and nightly NBC radio broadcasts. In her broadcasts and columns, she often championed Jewish refugees, and consistently emphasized Hitler's attack on Jewish people as central to understanding the Nazi threat.
In 1939, she made headlines for attending the rally of the German American Bund, an organization of American Nazis, at Madison Square Garden in New York, where she was seated in the press box, and began to laugh loudly and disruptively during speeches. After being escorted out by police, she returned to her seat where she was surrounded by a dozen Bund stormtroopers, then proceeded to cause a second scene by shouting "Bunk!" (meaning "lies") at the stage.
"I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in Germany," she told a reporter after leaving the event. "Tonight, I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf Hitler." It was precisely those words' utterance at home that alarmed her most. She had spent a good part of her career watching how fascism could, improbable as it might first have seemed, sweep over a nation.
"Her point was this can happen anywhere," University of London professor Sarah Churchwell, who has studied Thompson's work, explained. "You have to strengthen your democratic guardrails. You have to ensure that you don't let this happen to you because complacency is the enemy. And that is what she wrote about over and over and over again, banging the drum. Warning people, take this seriously. This isn't a joke. And nobody is immune to it."
But she wasn't as enlightened as this made her sound: Although she was initially complimentary toward Jews, she became disillusioned over the tactics that led to the creation of the State of Israel, and became considerably less kind to them. Her surviving writings about black people were also rough by today's standards.
She lived long enough to see the triumph of freedom in 1945. In 1943, she married for the 3rd time, to expatriate Austrian painter Maxim Kopf. The marriage lasted until his death in 1958. Sinclair Lewis died in 1951. Dorothy Thompson continued to report, including from Europe, and was in Lisbon, Portugal when she died on January 30, 1961, at the age of 67. Michael Lewis, son of Dorothy and Sinclair, became a stage actor, but was killed in a plane crash in 1975, only 44 years old.
Dorothy Thompson once wrote:
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 for expressing the Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned...
But 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... through whose leadership alone democracy can be realized. And nobody will ever say "Heil" to him, or "Ave Caesar," 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!"
In 2016, Donald Trump proved her right.
UPDATE: But in 2024, in making his comeback, Trump dropped hints that he would be a dictator, and lost no votes because of it, thus proving her wrong.
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August 25, 1934 was a Saturday. This was the opening day of the English soccer season, and defending Champions Arsenal traveled from North London to Hampshire on the South Coast, but could only manage a 3-3 draw against Portsmouth at Fratton Park. Arsenal would go on to win their 3rd straight Football League Division One title, anyway.
And these baseball games were played:
* The New York Yankees split a doubleheader with the Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium. The Indians won the opener, 5-3. Monte Pearson, later to pitch for the Yankees, outpitched Johnny Murphy, usually a reliever. Earl Averill hit 2 home runs, and Bill Knickerbocker added 1 for the Tribe. Babe Ruth went 0-for-4, but had an RBI on a bases-loaded walk, then sat out the nightcap.
The Yankees won that game, 9-3. Johnny Broaca went the distance for the win. Tony Lazzeri and Frank Crosetti hit home runs. Over the 2 games, Lou Gehrig went 3-for-7 with a walk and 4 RBIs.
* The New York Giants beat the St. Louis Cardinals, 7-6 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. In a rare bad moment for him that season, Dizzy Dean came in to pitch in relief, but blew the save and was the losing pitcher, falling to 22-6 (he finished 30-7), while Hal Schumacher won in relief, advancing to 19-5 (he finished 23-10). Giant player-manager Bill Terry went 1-for-4. Mel Ott went 1-for-3 with 2 walks and an RBI.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers lost to the Chicago Cubs, 4-3 at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Johnny Babich took a 4-hit shutout into the bottom of the 9th, but ran out of gas, allowing 3 singles and a double. The winning run scored when Stan Hack grounded back to reliever pitcher Tom Zachary, who made a bad throw to 3rd base, allowing Billy Jurges to score.
* The Chicago White Sox swept a doubleheader from the Boston Red Sox, 3-2 and 8-7 at Fenway Park in Boston. Both games went to 11 innings. In the 1st game, Gordon Rhodes walked Marty Hopkins with the bases loaded, forcing Luke Appling home with the winning run. In the 2nd game, Jimmy Dykes singled Appling home with the winning run. Lefty Grove started the game, but lasted only 2 innings. Jimmie Foxx did not play in the doubleheader.
* A doubleheader was split at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The St. Louis Browns won the 1st game, 5-4. The Philadelphia Athletics won the 2nd game, 3-2.
* The Detroit Tigers beat the Washington Senators, 4-2 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Hank Greenberg went 2-for-4 with a home run and 2 RBIs. Lynwood "Schoolboy" Rowe won his 20th game against 4 losses. He finished 24-8 as the Tigers won the American League Pennant.
* A doubleheader was split at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Pirates won the 1st game, 4-1. The Philadelphia Phillies won the 2nd game, 12-8. Over the 2 games, Arky Vaughan went 4-for-9 with an RBI, Paul Waner went 4-for-9 with a solo home run and a walk, and Lloyd Waner went 2-for-9 with a walk and an RBI.
* And the Boston Braves beat the Cincinnati Reds, 9-6 at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. Wally Berger (2 runs) and Hal Lee (1 run) singled home the go-ahead runs in the top of the 13th inning.
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