Dorothy Thompson: She Tore Through Europe “Like Richard Harding Davis in an Evening Gown”

It was good to see The Saturday Evening Post bring Dorothy Thompson back to life with this piece about her prescient warnings about the rise of Adolf Hitler, her warnings about homegrown fascism, and how that all got her thrown out of Germany. In Undaunted, she tears through Europe like a “blue-eyed tornado” in one description, like “Richard Harding Davis in an evening gown” in another. Within six months, she established herself as a bonafide foreign correspondent and before long was running the European operation for the Philadelphia Ledger from her post in Berlin.  In the 1920s, ’30s, and beyond, she and Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times had like journalistic pre-eminence. No gender qualifier applied.