(3 of 6)
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.