5.16.2026 – formless, faceless, he …

formless, faceless, he …
seems the very prototype
of the little man

This drawing was published in the New Yorker Magazine on May 16, 1936.

90 years ago today.

I am sorry to have to admit I had to look up Dorothy Thompson.

According to Wikipedia, Dorothy Celene Thompson (July 9, 1893 – January 30, 1961) was an American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, in 1934, and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s. Thompson is regarded by some as the “First Lady of American Journalism” and was recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Wow and I had to look her up.

Again, according to Wikipedia, “Thompson’s most significant work abroad took place in Germany in the early 1930s. In Munich, Thompson met and interviewed Adolf Hitler for the first time in 1931. This would be the basis for her subsequent book, I Saw Hitler, in which she wrote about the dangers of him winning power in Germany. Later, in a Harper’s Magazine article in December 1934, Thompson described Hitler in the following terms: “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.”

And I thought, what would Ms. Thompson thought of the current man is office?

For some reason, I think she might have written:

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.

Works.

Really works, doesn’t it?