On Oct 22, 2024, at 4:03 PM, neohiopal-request@lists.neohiopal.org wrote:

Send NEohioPAL mailing list submissions to
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When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
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Today's Topics:

  1. CAT IN THE HAT AUDITIONS @ PGT (Breanna Antoniades)
  2. PLEASE read this regarding an existential threat...
     (Fred Sternfeld)
  3. TUITION-FREE MFA ACTING TRAINING IN NEOHIO! (Donald Carrier)
  4. Olmsted Falls Middle School presents ?We Will Rock You? (Oct
     24-26) (Eric Bartkowski)
  5. Play On! Auditions at Aurora Community Theatre
     (services@auroracommunitytheatre.com)
  6. A Christmas Story at Cleveland Play House (Marketing)
  7. The Cherry Orchard: Case Western Reserve/Cleveland Play House
     MFA Acting Program Production (Marketing)
  8. Re: PLEASE read this regarding an existential threat...
     (Jim Volkert)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2024 17:10:28 -0400
From: Breanna Antoniades <breannalmorton@gmail.com>
To: post@neohiopal.org
Subject: [NEohioPAL] CAT IN THE HAT AUDITIONS @ PGT
Message-ID:
<CACRYUdmCZCOz3RjuZOskKjrc6jv_9iR-xZwoxt9=d6cf6ODpgw@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

The Players Guild Theatre Proudly Presents:
THE CAT IN THE HAT
Based on the 1957 Children?s Book
Written by Dr. Seuss
Adapted by Katie Mitchell

Producing Artistic Director Josh Erichsen
Directed by Tess Burgler
Production Manager Breanna Antoniades
Stage Manager Max Lord-Fry

Auditions: Friday, November 22, 6:00-9:00pm and Saturday, November 23,
11:00-2:00pm

ALL AGES WELCOME!

Callbacks: If necessary, schedule TBD.

Rehearsals begin Thursday, January 2, 2025 Rehearsals will run Mondays -
Fridays 7:00-10:00 PM
Performance dates are January 24 - 26, 2025 Friday and Saturday @ 7:30 PM,
Sunday @ 2:00 PM.

THERE ARE FOUR SCHOOL MATINEES: January 28, 29 and February 4, 5 at 10:30
AM.

**This is a reduced rehearsal period, partially because of the length of
the script and partially to best use the time of our artists. As such, you
should be prepared to memorize lines very early in the rehearsal process.
Scripts for memorizing will be provided directly after casting is complete
so actors can familiarize themselves with the text during the month of
December and come to January rehearsals ready to roll. Please do not
audition if you cannot commit to quickly memorizing content for this
condensed rehearsal period.**

NON-TRADITIONAL CASTING WILL BE CONSIDERED FOR ALL ROLES

Please prepare a comedic monologue (bonus points for Shakespeare or
something else in verse!)

Those wishing to audition can make an appointment for an audition time by
signing up online HERE.
<https://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C0F4EABAB23A4FCC34-50478605-catinthe> (Role
descriptions listed on signup link).

For parking, please park in the student lot 107 next to the Fine Arts
Building on Kent State University at Stark?s Campus.

The Players Guild Theatre is located at 6000 Frank Ave NW, North Canton, OH
44720 in the Kent State University at Stark Fine Arts Building on floor one.


*Breanna Antoniades*
Production Manager

Players Guild Theatre
6000 Frank Ave NW
North Canton, OH 44720
www.playersguildtheatre.com
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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 11:14:17 -0400
From: Fred Sternfeld <fredsternfeld@neohiopal.org>
To: post@neohiopal.org
Subject: [NEohioPAL] PLEASE read this regarding an existential
threat...
Message-ID:
<CAMVHxstG9Tx7rq-X4JDaFeQ3K8bsXjTZ8WpbjRLm+FQiudySZQ@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hello Everybody,

As you know, we normally try to keep the Neohiopal list to items that are
more obviously performing arts related and away from politics. I would
argue that the possible election of certain politicians are an existential
threat to free speech and therefore an existential threat to the arts.

So I pass this article from Heather Cox Richardson to you.

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Fred

-------------------------

From Heather Cox Richardson

<https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/about>...

October 21, 2024 (Monday)
On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living
in the United States would be ?bloody.? He also promised to prosecute his
political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives,
donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ?a
fascist to the core?the most dangerous person to this country.?
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he
thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign
adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ?radical
left lunatics? on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about
?the enemy from within,? specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and
former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as ?bad
people.? Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that
broke the 2019 story of Trump?s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that
led to Trump?s first impeachment.
Trump?s references to the ?enemy from within? have become so frequent that
former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has
called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that
his construction of those who oppose him as ?enemies? might sweep in
virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The
Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled ?What (Really)
Happens If Trump Wins?? Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler?s January 30, 1933,
oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the
constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first
prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler?s prominent political opponents.
By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition
political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and
students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of
Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for
those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations ?that he cannot
deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.? To
enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil
service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the
Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once
those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes
against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at
her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler?s secret
police, the Gestapo, ?politely handed me a letter and requested a signed
receipt.? She thought nothing of it, she said, ?But what a surprise was in
store for me!? The letter informed her that, ?in light of your numerous
anti-German publications,? she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that
expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to
become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924
she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York
Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported
on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry
novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel
Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing
strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi?s opponents
to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country
in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and
elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than ?the
future dictator of Germany? she had expected to meet, he was a man of
?startling insignificance.? She asked him if he would ?abolish the
constitution of the German Republic.? He answered: ?I will get into power
legally? and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution
and ?found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest
instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above,
discipline and obedience below.? She did not believe he could succeed:
?Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to
vote away their rights,? she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the
Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to
leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off
at the railway station with ?great sheaves of American Beauty roses.?
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had
gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when
she had left to marry Lewis, they offered ?many expressions of friendship
and gratitude.? But times had changed. ?I thought of them sadly as my train
pulled out,? she said, ?carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those
officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them
are ?migr?s and some of them are dead.?
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were
simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She
lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio
program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write
a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she
became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in
Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis?s bestselling 1935 novel It Can?t Happen Here, she
wrote in a 1937 column: ?No people ever recognize their dictator in
advance?. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the
Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always
think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots
and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned?. But when our dictator
turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will
stand for everything traditionally American.?
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach
between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: ?She is
read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their
political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political
commentator] Walter Lippmann.? The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two ?most influential women in the
U.S.?
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City?s Madison Square
Garden in honor of President George Washington?s birthday on February 20,
1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed
loudly during the speeches and yelled ?Bunk!? at the stage, illustrating
that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she
returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a
reporter: ?I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in
Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf
Hitler.?
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised
when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking
her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper?s Magazine titled ?Who Goes
Nazi?? she wrote: ?It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to
play at a large gathering of one?s acquaintances: to speculate who in a
showdown would go Nazi,? she wrote. ?By now, I think I know. I have gone
through the experience many times?in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I
have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy
itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know
those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.?
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between
democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or
nationality. ?Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,?
she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new
ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy
that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too
easygoing to join a struggle. ?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,? she wrote. ?Those who haven?t
anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don?t?whether it
is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or
however modern, go Nazi.?
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for
the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same
reason that Hitler?s power was growing. ?Chancellor Hitler is no longer a
man, he is a religion,? she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging Hitler,
in her own article about her expulsion she noted: ?My offense was to think
that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime against the
reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah sent by God to
save the German people?. To question this mystic mission is so heinous
that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I, fortunately, am an
American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things can happen?.?
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Message: 3
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:32:33 +0000
From: Donald Carrier <dcarrier@clevelandplayhouse.com>
To: "neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org" <neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org>
Subject: [NEohioPAL] TUITION-FREE MFA ACTING TRAINING IN NEOHIO!
Message-ID:
<CH2PR14MB3692F57140DF047C3C9AFA43B34C2@CH2PR14MB3692.namprd14.prod.outlook.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

RANKED AS ONE OF THE TOP 12 MFA ACTING PROGRAMS IN THE WORLD ? THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, 2024


The Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program will be seeing audition candidates in 2024 and 2025 through URTA (URTA.com) as well as through our own private auditions.



We are looking for committed young artists who possess a love of language, an empathy for the human experience, a vivid imagination and the desire to develop the necessary physical and vocal skills for a successful and sustained career in the ever-evolving performing arts scene.



FULL THREE-YEAR TUITION WAIVER, a generous yearly living stipend, healthcare and membership in AEA upon successful completion of the program.



We are one of the only MFA programs in the country that charges NO AUDITION FEES.



For more information and to register for an audition, please visit


https://www.clevelandplayhouse.com/education/cwrucph-mfa/auditions




AUDITIONING IN-PERSON IN CLEVELAND, DECEMBER 7 and 8, 2024.


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Message: 4
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 09:24:52 -0400
From: Eric Bartkowski <bartkowskie@gmail.com>
To: Jean Chewning via NEohioPAL <neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org>
Subject: [NEohioPAL] Olmsted Falls Middle School presents ?We Will
Rock You? (Oct 24-26)
Message-ID:
<CA+Ze4AJVToZaaWn3E1+VhNFH6_j51UD9xMGWdgkLo1waKbgbyg@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Hi everyone,

On behalf of the 47 6th-8th graders that make up the AMAZING Bulldog
Theatre Company at Olmsted Falls Middle School, I'd like to invite you to
our production of *We Will Rock You!*

Featuring chart-topping Queen songs including ?Another One Bites the Dust,?
?Bohemian Rhapsody,? ?Killer Queen,? ?We Will Rock You,? ?Somebody To
Love,? ?We Are the Champions,? and many more, this 70-minute adaptation of
the West End show follows two young rebels as they restore rock ?n? roll to
?the iPlanet? in a post-apocalyptic world. *We Will Rock You* is a musical
for our time: a fist-pumping, foot-stomping anthem to individuality.

Performances are *October 24, 25, and 26th at 7:00pm in the Olmsted Falls
Middle School Cafeteria (27045 Bagley Road, Olmsted Falls)*

Tickets can be purchased at the door ($5 for adults, $3 for students, free
for seniors, cash or check).

Consider bringing some additional money with you to the show for the
following opportunities:
* Bracelets, with proceeds benefiting the OFMS Rachel's Closet program.
* A Raffle for a *Fender Squier Stratocaster*, with proceeds benefiting the
BTC and Cleveland Public Theatre?s Act Now program.

Please let me know if you have any questions. Thank you for supporting live
theatre in our community!

Rock on,
Eric Bartkowski
(6th grade teacher and director of the Bulldog Theatre Company)


 *In the end we will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we
understand. We will understand only what we are taught.*
-Baba Dioum
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Message: 5
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 10:27:54 -0500
From: services@auroracommunitytheatre.com
To: Post <post@neohiopal.org>
Subject: [NEohioPAL] Play On! Auditions at Aurora Community Theatre
Message-ID:
<68312c6978029f95573d50b1701a149f@auroracommunitytheatre.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Auditions for Play On!
https://www.auroracommunitytheatre.com/upcoming-auditions

Directed by Brian Westerley

AUDITION DATES
Sunday, Nov. 17, 7-9pm
Tuesday, Nov. 19, 7-9pm

PERFORMANCE DATES
January 17 - February 8, 2025
Fri & Sat shows @ 7:30pm

One plucky community theater is about to produce a show called Murder
Most Foul, a new ?murder mystery play? with the same title as an Agatha
Christie novel but with no relation whatsoever. The director/theater
manager, Gerry, thought producing the play was a good idea since the
inexperienced playwright has agreed to let the company perform the show
for no charge. Gerry, however, had no idea what disasters awaited her:
the show is hilariously amateur, the ?murder mystery? plot doesn?t
really have a murder, and to top it off the playwright keeps changing
the story and script only two days from its premiere! It doesn?t help
that the cast is disgruntled, and the playwright accidentally deletes
the entire sound effect board. All of the disasters come to fruition in
Act III when the company performs the actual show with hilarious mishaps
at every turn. Play On! is a hilarious love letter to community theater.

?Play On!? is presented by arrangement with Concord Theatricals on
behalf of Samuel French, Inc. www.concordtheatricals.com

https://www.auroracommunitytheatre.com/upcoming-auditions


------------------------------

Message: 6
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:44:21 +0000
From: Marketing <marketing@clevelandplayhouse.com>
To: "neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org" <neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org>
Subject: [NEohioPAL] A Christmas Story at Cleveland Play House
Message-ID:
<CH2PR14MB3660A5D99F7EFDFC47686EB9CF4C2@CH2PR14MB3660.namprd14.prod.outlook.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

Cleveland Play House presents A Christmas Story, by Philip Grecian, directed by Jackson Gay based on the motion picture written by Jean Shepherd, Leigh Brown, and Bob Clark, running at the Allen Theatre November 30 - December 22.

Cleveland?s favorite holiday tradition is back by popular demand as an all new production! One boy. One holiday wish. And a world conspiring to make sure it doesn?t come true. The record-breaking show returns to the Allen Theatre in all its pink-bunny-suit, glowing-leg-lamp, triple-dog-daring glory. The perfect holiday treat for the entire family!
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Message: 7
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 17:45:58 +0000
From: Marketing <marketing@clevelandplayhouse.com>
To: "neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org" <neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org>
Subject: [NEohioPAL] The Cherry Orchard: Case Western
Reserve/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program Production
Message-ID:
<CH2PR14MB3660F56E536A256398BE1E01CF4C2@CH2PR14MB3660.namprd14.prod.outlook.com>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"

The Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Play House MFA Acting Program presents The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov, directed by Eleanor Holdridge, November 6 -16 in the Helen Theatre.

The Cherry Orchard follows a family of down-on-their-luck aristocrats as they grapple with the prospect of selling their beloved estate. As the cherry trees blossom, so do the complexities of love, loss, and the relentless passage of time. This theatrical masterpiece explores what happens when echoes of the past meet the inevitability of change. The Cherry Orchard reveals complex and colorful characters that blend humor and heartache as they encounter the absurdities that abound in simply leading one?s life. This literary classic by Anton Chekhov springs to life in a production featuring the Class of 2026.
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Message: 8
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 2024 14:06:32 -0400
From: Jim Volkert <bovolkert@gmail.com>
To: Fred Sternfeld <fredsternfeld@neohiopal.org>
Cc: post@neohiopal.org
Subject: Re: [NEohioPAL] PLEASE read this regarding an existential
threat...
Message-ID:
<CAJV3gurVvXQNmm1L0VpbkAaQDhJTbHqaAqhMOyW42drWQ_zhkQ@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Stay out of politics!

On Tue, Oct 22, 2024 at 11:17?AM Fred Sternfeld via NEohioPAL <
neohiopal@lists.neohiopal.org> wrote:

Hello Everybody,

As you know, we normally try to keep the Neohiopal list to items that are
more obviously performing arts related and away from politics. I would
argue that the possible election of certain politicians are an existential
threat to free speech and therefore an existential threat to the arts.

So I pass this article from Heather Cox Richardson to you.

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Fred

-------------------------
From Heather Cox Richardson
<https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/about>...

October 21, 2024 (Monday)
On Saturday, September 7, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
predicted that his plan to deport 15 to 20 million people currently living
in the United States would be ?bloody.? He also promised to prosecute his
political opponents, including, he wrote, lawyers, political operatives,
donors, illegal voters, and election officials. Retired chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told journalist Bob Woodward that Trump is ?a
fascist to the core?the most dangerous person to this country.?
On October 14, Trump told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that he
thought enemies within the United States were more dangerous than foreign
adversaries and that he thought the military should stop those ?radical
left lunatics? on Election Day. Since then, he has been talking a lot about
?the enemy from within,? specifically naming Representative Adam Schiff and
former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, both Democrats from California, as ?bad
people.? Schiff was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee that
broke the 2019 story of Trump?s attempt to extort Volodymyr Zelensky that
led to Trump?s first impeachment.
Trump?s references to the ?enemy from within? have become so frequent that
former White House press secretary turned political analyst Jen Psaki has
called them his closing argument for the 2024 election, and she warned that
his construction of those who oppose him as ?enemies? might sweep in
virtually anyone he feels is a threat.
In a searing article today, political scientist Rachel Bitecofer of The
Cycle explored exactly what that means in a piece titled ?What (Really)
Happens If Trump Wins?? Bitecofer outlined Adolf Hitler?s January 30, 1933,
oath of office, in which he promised Germans he would uphold the
constitution, and the three months he took to dismantle that constitution.
By March, she notes, the concentration camp Dachau was open. Its first
prisoners were not Jews, but rather Hitler?s prominent political opponents.
By April, Jews had been purged from the civil service, and opposition
political parties were illegal. By May, labor unions were banned and
students were burning banned books. Within the year, public criticism of
Hitler and the Nazis was illegal, and denouncing violators paid well for
those who did it.
Bitecofer writes that Trump has promised mass deportations ?that he cannot
deliver unless he violates both the Constitution and federal law.? To
enable that policy, Trump will need to dismantle the merit-based civil
service and put into office those loyal to him rather than the
Constitution. And then he will purge his political opponents, for once
those who would stand against him are purged, Trump can act as he wishes
against immigrants, for example, and others.
Ninety years ago, as American reporter Dorothy Thompson ate breakfast at
her hotel in Berlin on August 25, 1934, a young man from Hitler?s secret
police, the Gestapo, ?politely handed me a letter and requested a signed
receipt.? She thought nothing of it, she said, ?But what a surprise was in
store for me!? The letter informed her that, ?in light of your numerous
anti-German publications,? she was being expelled from Germany.
She was the first American journalist expelled from Nazi Germany, and that
expulsion was no small thing. Thompson had moved to London in 1920 to
become a foreign correspondent and began to spend time in Berlin. In 1924
she moved to the city to head the Central European Bureau for the New York
Evening Post and the Philadelphia Public Ledger. From there, she reported
on the rise of Adolf Hitler. She left her Berlin post in 1928 to marry
novelist Sinclair Lewis, and the two settled in Vermont.
When the couple traveled to Sweden in 1930 for Lewis to accept the Nobel
Prize in Literature, Thompson visited Germany, where she saw the growing
strength of the fascists and the apparent inability of the Nazi?s opponents
to come together to stand against them. She continued to visit the country
in the following years, reporting on the rise of fascism there, and
elsewhere.
In 1931, Thompson interviewed Hitler and declared that, rather than ?the
future dictator of Germany? she had expected to meet, he was a man of
?startling insignificance.? She asked him if he would ?abolish the
constitution of the German Republic.? He answered: ?I will get into power
legally? and, once in power, abolish the parliament and the constitution
and ?found an authority-state, from the lowest cell to the highest
instance; everywhere there will be responsibility and authority above,
discipline and obedience below.? She did not believe he could succeed:
?Imagine a would-be dictator setting out to persuade a sovereign people to
vote away their rights,? she wrote in apparent astonishment.
Thompson was back in Berlin in summer 1934 as a representative of the
Saturday Evening Post when she received the news that she had 24 hours to
leave the country. The other foreign correspondents in Berlin saw her off
at the railway station with ?great sheaves of American Beauty roses.?
Safely in Paris, Thompson mused that in her first years in Germany she had
gotten to know many of the officials of the German republic, and that when
she had left to marry Lewis, they offered ?many expressions of friendship
and gratitude.? But times had changed. ?I thought of them sadly as my train
pulled out,? she said, ?carrying me away from Berlin. Some of those
officials still are in the service of the German Government, some of them
are ?migr?s and some of them are dead.?
Thompson came home to a nation where many of the same dark impulses were
simmering, her fame after her expulsion from Germany following her. She
lectured against fascism across the country in 1935, then began a radio
program that reached tens of millions of listeners. Hired in 1936 to write
a regular column three days a week for the New York Herald Tribune, she
became a leading voice in print, too, warning that what was happening in
Germany could also happen in America.
In an echo of Lewis?s bestselling 1935 novel It Can?t Happen Here, she
wrote in a 1937 column: ?No people ever recognize their dictator in
advance?. He always represents himself as the instrument for expressing the
Incorporated National Will. When Americans think of dictators they always
think of some foreign model. If anyone turned up here in a fur hat, boots
and a grim look he would be recognized and shunned?. But when our dictator
turns up, you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will
stand for everything traditionally American.?
In less than two years, the circulation of her column had grown to reach
between seven and eight million people. In 1939 a reporter wrote: ?She is
read, believed and quoted by millions of women who used to get their
political opinions from their husbands, who got them from [political
commentator] Walter Lippmann.? The reporter likened Thompson to First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt, saying they were the two ?most influential women in the
U.S.?
When 22,000 American Nazis held a rally at New York City?s Madison Square
Garden in honor of President George Washington?s birthday on February 20,
1939, Thompson sat in the front row of the press box, where she laughed
loudly during the speeches and yelled ?Bunk!? at the stage, illustrating
that she would not be muzzled by Nazis. After being escorted out, she
returned to her seat, where stormtroopers surrounded her. She later told a
reporter: ?I was amazed to see a duplicate of what I saw seven years ago in
Germany. Tonight I listened to words taken out of the mouth of Adolf
Hitler.?
Two years later, In 1941, Thompson returned to the issue she had raised
when she mused about those government officials who had gone from thanking
her to expelling her. In a piece for Harper?s Magazine titled ?Who Goes
Nazi?? she wrote: ?It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to
play at a large gathering of one?s acquaintances: to speculate who in a
showdown would go Nazi,? she wrote. ?By now, I think I know. I have gone
through the experience many times?in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I
have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy
itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know
those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.?
Examining a number of types of Americans, she wrote that the line between
democracy and fascism was not wealth, or education, or race, or age, or
nationality. ?Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi,?
she wrote. They were secure enough to be good natured and open to new
ideas, and they believed so completely in the promise of American democracy
that they would defend it with their lives, even if they seemed too
easygoing to join a struggle. ?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,? she wrote. ?Those who haven?t
anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don?t?whether it
is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or
however modern, go Nazi.?
In Paris following her expulsion from Berlin, Thompson told a reporter for
the Associated Press that the reason she had been attacked was the same
reason that Hitler?s power was growing. ?Chancellor Hitler is no longer a
man, he is a religion,? she said.
Suggesting her expulsion was because of her old article disparaging
Hitler, in her own article about her expulsion she noted: ?My offense was
to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man, after all. That is a crime
against the reigning cult in Germany, which says Mr. Hitler is a Messiah
sent by God to save the German people?. To question this mystic mission is
so heinous that, if you are a German, you can be sent to jail. I,
fortunately, am an American, so I merely was sent to Paris. Worse things
can happen?.?

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