Thérèse Bonney: “Photofighter”
Photographer Thérèse Bonney was already in Europe when World War II began. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, she sent thousands of pictures of France back to the United States through her syndication service, the Bonney Service, including spreads on European modernism and on American expatriates in Paris. By her account, she reached 150 newspapers, including ten major daily papers. (To put this in context, the five big news services with which she competed supplied photographs to 2000 newspapers and 150 Sunday supplements.)
In September, 1939, Bonney traveled to Finland to photograph preparations for the 1940 Summer Olympic Games. As a result, she was one of the few phototjournalists in Finland when the Soviet Union invaded on November 30. Bonney remained in Finland until the brutal "Winter War" ended on March 13, 1940. Many of her images from the war appeared as a photo essay in Life.
Bonney was horrified by the brutality of World War II. Once she left Finalnd, she traveled through the French countryside on what she called "truth raids," in which she documented the plight of children and adults made homeless by the Nazi invasion. She also photographed several Nazi and Vichy concentration camps and Nazi accumulations of looted art.
She looked for multiple ways to reach her audience. In addition to syndicating her photographs in American newspapers, she self-published two influential books of photographs, War Comes to the People and Europe's Children, and held one-woman shows at museums in the United States and Europe.
She received the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d’Honneur from the French government and the Order of the White Rose of Finland for her work She was also the heroine of a wartime comic book, Photofighter. Now there's glory for you!
Just a reminder: My publisher, Beacon Press, is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!
Dorothy Fuldheim: An Exception to (All) The Rules
Women reporters faced a new kind of journalism after World War II. The long-standing prejudice against women newscasters in radio* was even more pronounced in the newly developing world of television—and would remain so for decades.**
There is always an exception.
Dorothy Fuldheim (1893-1989), a retired schoolteacher who was born the same year as Sigrid Schultz, broke all the rules about women on television. After several years of working on air for a local radio station she became the first news anchor on Cleveland’s first commercial television station WEWS in 1947 at the age of 54. Ten years later, she handed over the anchor job to others and became the host of a popular afternoon interview program. Her guests included John, Robert and Ted Kennedy, the Duke of Windsor, historian Arnold Toynbee, Madame Chaing Kai-Shek, Willy Brand, Helen Keller and Muhammad Ali. WEWS also used her as a roving foreign correspondent. She won an award from the National Overseas Press Club for an interview she did with in Hong Kong with two American prisoners released by Communist China in 1955.
Fuldheim found herself at the center of controversy in 1971 when she denounced the Kent State shootings as murder on the air. “ And who gave the National Guard the bullets?” she demanded, tears streaming down her face. “ Who ordered the use of them? Since when do we shoot our own children?” The station received hundreds of calls and thousands of letters from listeners who thought the Guard action was right. Fuldheim offered to resign. WEWS kept her on the air.
Fuldheim finally gave up the show when she suffered the first of two strokes at the age of 91. Speaking after Fuldheim’s death in 1989, Barbara Walters called her “the first woman to be taken seriously doing the news.”
*Network officials believed Americans had no objection to hearing women read ads or discuss“women’s issues.” (By which they meant recipes, housework, fashion, and childcare, not the barriers to entry that limited women’s access to education, jobs, and political office.) Those same officials were sure audiences did not want to hear a female voice deliver the news. Because. Stayed tuned in coming weeks for the stories of women who made it on the air despite those objections.
**If you’re interested in the history of women on television, I strongly recommend Cynthia Bemis Abrams’ podcast/blog Advanced TV Herstory
My publisher is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!
Madame Geneviève Tabouis: A French Thorn in Hitler’s Side
I first came across French columnist Geneviève Tabouis in a letter from Sigrid Schultz, to the Chicago Tribune’s owner and publisher Robert McCormick written on May 17, 1939,* in which she outlined Hitler’s plans for a Nazi-controlled Europe. After outlining how Hitler intended to divide up Europe, she told McCormick “Friends of mine were present when Hitler explained to them how he plans to 'force England on her knees' should she try to prevent Germany from taking the land Hitler claims for his people. It sounds phantasmic, yet I feel it my duty to write to you about this. My source has always proved absolutely trustworthy and what seemed phantasmic to us became hard reality much quicker than even Hitler’s aides expected.”
Hitler’s plans for scaring the British into agreeing with his demands included the air bombardment of London. Schultz admitted that she wasn’t the first reporter to have heard about Hitler’s air bombardment plan: “One of the Paris 'sensation mongers', Madame Tabouis, wrote about this bombardment plan against London. She was branded insane. I did not believe it myself, but I now know that Hitler has repeatedly spoken to his closest aides along these lines.”
I was curious to learn more about this “sensation monger” who had beaten Sigrid to the punch with her “insane” prediction. It was rabbit hole time.
Tabouis was born on February 23, 1892—eleven months prior to Schultz—and like Schultz she was the daughter of an artist. (Her relatives on her mother’s side were French diplomats and senior military officers.) After brief periods in which she raised silkworms and kept a frog, she became obsessed with history and poetry. She studied at the Sorbonne for three years. (I can’t help but wonder if she and Sigrid crossed paths there given their shared interest in history.) She then attended the school of archaeology at the Louvre. (Somewhat earlier than Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt.) She was particularly interested in Egypt and was proud when she had learned enough hieroglyphics to use them to write a letter to her favorite dance partner.**
Her life took a turn away from ancient history during World War I. *** She was married in 1916 and had two small children thereafter. During this period, she became fascinated by politics and attended political debates in the French Chamber of Deputies the way some women went to afternoon matinees. Her uncle, French diplomat Jules Cambon, recognized writing talent in her letters. With his encouragement, and access to his circle of contacts, she began to write short, amusing articles about people and events for two provincial newspapers.
In the 1930s, Tabouis became first a columnist for L’Oeuvre, a popular left-wing French paper and later its foreign news editor. Her columns were chatty, engaging, and smart. They were soon syndicated throughout Europe.
Tabouis was one of the first French journalists to speak out against Hitler and the Nazis. For week after week through the 1930s, she turned out columns in which she reported on Hitler’s political moves, speculated on his motives, and predicted his actions with uncanny accuracy. Her columns regularly sent him into rages; her predictions occasionally disrupted his plans.
She fled Paris shortly before the German army arrived and took asylum in the United States. She was tried for treason in absentia.
In New York, Tarbois wrote for the Daily Mirror and founded a weekly French-language magazine, Pour La Victoire, which run through the war. After the war, she returned to France , where she was honored as an Officier de la Légion d’honneur and Commandeur de l’order national du Mérite. After her death, she was lauded as the “doyenne of French journalists.”
*Several months before Germany marched into Poland and triggered World War II.
**Which makes me wonder whether he was able to read it. My sources don’t say. And perhaps that wasn’t the point.
***She picked the topic back up after the war. At the same time that she was building a career as an influential journalist, Tarbouis wrote and published popular biographies of Tutankhamen (1929), Nebuchdnezzar (1931), and Solomon (1936) as well as three books on contemporary politics and diplomacy. She once told her readers that she couldn’t remember an evening when she hadn’t worked, including weekends and Christmas. Her only form of relaxation was playing with her cats.
My publisher is giving away 25 copies of The Dragon From Chicago on Goodreads. You can sign up here through July 4. Good luck!