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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.