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There is something ugly about this piece, about the idea that you can see into someone's soul and just know that they'd be a Nazi if they could. To be honest, the tone of it reminds me of the stereotypical pre-Anschluss German who privately scrutinizes the faces of party guests for hints of Jewish or Roma heritage, and flatters himself for his keen eye in discerning their inferiority. For what it's worth, when the article’s author Dorothy Thompson was in her twenties, she was a fiery activist for women's suffrage, which was deeply intertwined with the temperance movement of that era. (Many temperance groups shared the same leadership as women's suffrage groups, and both shared a core idea that women were inherently less coarse and crude than men and that the burden fell on women to transform the debased, violent world men had created.) Thompson toured New York state giving barnburner speeches promoting women's suffrage, and promoting temperance figures as well, like Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, a popular keynote speaker for the New York Woman Suffrage Party and prominent member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The W.C.T.U. is the political organization most responsible for bringing us the 18th Amendment prohibiting the production, sale, and transport of alcoholic beverages in the United States. The Volstead Act passed to enforce Prohibition ultimately resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens who were gunned down in the crossfire of speakeasy raids, or who drank liquor poisoned deliberately by the Feds. Not quite Nazism, but government agents murderously enforcing philosophies of moral purity are perhaps not so far away, either. All this was going on in 1919; Thompson moved to Europe in 1920, the year Prohibition came into effect, leaving behind the violence and chaos she'd helped bring to power. It's doubtful she wanted things to turn out quite the way they did. She meant to support only the good people and the good idea of women's suffrage, yet somehow some bad people and bad ideas came along for the ride. Indeed, some of the good people with the good ideas were also the bad people with bad ideas. There might be a better moral in this than the notion that Nazis are a separate breed of people we can know by second sight. |