“He is formless, almost faceless, a man whose countenance is a caricature, a man whose framework seems cartilaginous, without bones. He is inconsequent and voluble, ill poised and insecure. He is the very prototype of the little man.”

Guess who? No, not that one. One of his predecessors, dangerously underestimated in these early words written by Dorothy Thompson, one of America’s most urgent, eloquent voices against Nazism. Her description of Hitler, as cited above, and her later flaming resistance against all things fascist led her to be thrown out of Germany in 1934, after having been one of the first successful female correspondents for the American media in Europe.

The woman was a marvel. Self-made, in many respects, suffragists, radio journalist, book author, political activist, she was a public speaker, on air for 15 nights and days straight after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. She became a source of facts and opinions for millions of American women who now had an alternative to what they were regaled with by their husband.

Her 1941 essay in Harpers, Who Goes Nazi?, is one of the most astute psychological assessments from a non-psychologist that I have read. Ever. She basically invents (or describes?) an upper-middle class dinner party with various and diverse guests (notably absent, alas, any person of color, which is probably historically an accurate scenario) and predicts for each person how likely they would join the Nazi movement if arriving on our shores. (It is no co-incidence that one of her three husbands, Nobel prize – winner Sinclair Lewis, wrote one of his famous novels, It can’t happen here, during their short marriage.)

If you took that essay and simply replaced the historically fixed term Nazi with a contemporary equivalent of immoral, unethical politician, you might have a perfect fit between the types of people she describes and those threatening an end to democracy who we are currently observing here and many European countries. Think impeachment and removal. Or the absence thereof, as the case may be….

Just as I worried in yesterday’s blog, I worry here: why don’t we learn from history? When it is all laid out for us in perfectly witty, insightful, premonitory writing?

“It’s fun—a macabre sort of fun—this parlor game of “Who Goes Nazi?” And it simplifies things—asking the question in regard to specific personalities. Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.”

Who Goes Nazi?

*

One more remarkable item of courage and honesty associated with this path breaker: the woman who was on the cover of Time, declared together with Eleanor Roosevelt as undoubtedly the most influential women in the U.S., played by Kathrin Hepburn in Woman of the Year, and an early ardent supporter of Zionism, changed her views after visiting Palestine in 1945. Subsequently,

“She ran into difficulties, including accusations of anti-Semitism, which she strongly rebuffed, after being warned that hostility toward Israel was, in the American press world, “almost a definition of professional suicide”.^[10][11] She eventually concluded that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war.^[12]“

She was silenced indeed, as are so many contemporary journalists in this country, who follow suit. Here is a 4 minute trailer to a documentary about her, laying out what happened to her career and livelihood, with lectures canceled, newspaper assignments withdrawn and a general shunning initiated by those who could not tolerate any criticism at all of the state of Israel. And the official accusation was, of all things, being too soft on Germany…. something taken out of thin air, to persuade a public open to that villain schema at that time. Sounds familiar?

Photographs today are from my Oaks Bottom Tuesday walk taken last week.

Music is in honor of Beethoven’s birthday yesterday, a brilliant, pure, fear-acknowledging and fear-conquering piece that seems in line with Thompson’s character, the Streichquartett #14.