‘Everyone is terribly kind’: Dorothy Thompson at War
Deborah Friedell, 19 January 2023
She received so much post, much of it hate mail, that it had to be delivered to her on special trucks; three secretaries, all called Madeline, helped her sort through her letters and turned the most threatening ones over to the FBI. In front of the White House, a group of women attempted to hang her in effigy: they said that they were all mothers, and that Thompson wanted ‘to give away a million boys’ lives in blood and pain’. Senators from Idaho, Montana and North Dakota called for her to be investigated as a ‘British agent’. How else to explain her comment, during the Battle of Britain, that if ‘democracy perishes in Britain, it will not be because the British people did not fight Hitler with all they had; it will be because … the world’s greatest democracy and brother free nation allowed them to perish without adequate aid’? It didn’t help that her father, a Methodist minister in upstate New York, had been born in Durham: proof of her divided loyalty.