So I went to see not a little political leader, but a probable dictator “as certain to come to power as that I stand here,” he had told some newspaper men a few days before. A man who owns an army. A man who terrorizes the streets. A man who predicts the constitution of a new dangerous, and awakened Germany.[...]

He is formless, almost faceless: a man whose countenance is a caricature; a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequential and voluble, ill-poised, insecure—the very prototype of the Little Man.
    -Dorothy Thompson, I Saw Hitler (1932)

She was "the most influential woman" in the United States, after Eleanor Roosevelt -- "and it may be said of Miss Thompson," said Time, "that she came up over a rockier path." Her thrice-weekly column, "On the Record," originating in The New York Herald Tribune, was syndicated to more than 200 papers in America; she was heard nightly on the radio by tens of millions of people; and during just one week, in 1937, she was obliged to turn down 700 invitations to speak to them in the flesh -- at rallies, conventions, clubs, forums, dinners, commencements, business "roasts" and so on.

That same year, Dorothy Thompson received honorary degrees from six colleges and universities (among them Dartmouth, Columbia, Tufts and Syracuse, her alma mater), and became the first woman ever to address the Harvard Club and the Union League. She was profiled in The Nation and The New Yorker, Collier's, Scribner's and The Saturday Evening Post, while every wit, wise-guy and political stunt-man in America made jokes at her expense.

"Dorothy Thompson is perhaps the only person in the United States who makes a career out of stewing publicly about the state of the world," said Jack Alexander, a well-known magazine writer of the time. "She ingests the cosmos and personalizes its pains."
    -Words of Warning: Dorothy Thompson's 1930's journalism still rings true (Peter Kurth, October 27, 2004, Seven Days)

"With a clang like a powerfully swung hammer, she beat upon general confusion of mind till the will to defend democracy was forged."
    -Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The saturnine man over there talking with a lovely French emigree is already a Nazi. Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His brilliant gifts won for him successively government positions, partnership in a prominent law firm, and eventually a highly paid job as a Wall Street adviser. He has always moved among important people and always been socially on the periphery. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner.

He is a snob, loathing his own snobbery. He despises the men about him—he despises, for instance, Mr. B—because he knows that what he has had to achieve by relentless work men like B have won by knowing the right people. But his contempt is inextricably mingled with envy. Even more than he hates the class into which he has insecurely risen, does he hate the people from whom he came. He hates his mother and his father for being his parents. He loathes everything that reminds him of his origins and his humiliations. He is bitterly anti-Semitic because the social insecurity of the Jews reminds him of his own psychological insecurity.

Pity he has utterly erased from his nature, and joy he has never known. He has an ambition, bitter and burning. It is to rise to such an eminence that no one can ever again humiliate him. Not to rule but to be the secret ruler, pulling the strings of puppets created by his brains. Already some of them are talking his language—though they have never met him.

There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal—a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him—intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll.

I think young D over there is the only born Nazi in the room. Young D is the spoiled only son of a doting mother. He has never been crossed in his life. He spends his time at the game of seeing what he can get away with. He is constantly arrested for speeding and his mother pays the fines. He has been ruthless toward two wives and his mother pays the alimony. His life is spent in sensation-seeking and theatricality. He is utterly inconsiderate of everybody. He is very good-looking, in a vacuous, cavalier way, and inordinately vain. He would certainly fancy himself in a uniform that gave him a chance to swagger and lord it over others.

Mrs. E would go Nazi as sure as you are born. That statement surprises you? Mrs. E seems so sweet, so clinging, so cowed. She is. She is a masochist. She is married to a man who never ceases to humiliate her, to lord it over her, to treat her with less consideration than he does his dogs. He is a prominent scientist, and Mrs. E, who married him very young, has persuaded herself that he is a genius, and that there is something of superior womanliness in her utter lack of pride, in her doglike devotion. She speaks disapprovingly of other “masculine” or insufficiently devoted wives. Her husband, however, is bored to death with her. He neglects her completely and she is looking for someone else before whom to pour her ecstatic self-abasement. She will titillate with pleased excitement to the first popular hero who proclaims the basic subordination of women.