Fighting Words: The Bold American Journalists Who Brought the World Home Between the Wars

by Nancy F. Cott

Overview

From a Harvard historian, this riveting portrait of four trailblazing American journalists highlights the power of the press in the interwar period.


In the fragile peace following the Great War, a surprising number of restless young Americans abandoned their homes and set out impulsively to see the changing world. In Fighting Words, Nancy F. Cott follows four who pursued global news — from contested Palestine to revolutionary China, from Stalin's Moscow to Hitler's Berlin. As foreign correspondents, they became players in international politics and shaped Americans' awareness of critical interwar crises, the spreading menace of European fascism, and the likelihood of a new war — while living romantic and sexual lives as modern and as hazardous as their journalism.


An indelible portrayal of a tumultuous era with resonance for our own, Fighting Words is essential reading on the power of the press and the growth of an American sense of international responsibility.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541699335
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.60(d)

About the Author

Nancy F. Cott is a professor of American history at Harvard University and the former director of the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of six previous books, including Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

List of Maps vii

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 Original Rover Boy 7

Chapter 2 Blue-Eyed Tornado 33

Chapter 3 Luckiest Young Upstart 61

Chapter 4 The Freest Man on Any Newspaper 85

Chapter 5 With Her Whole Heart 111

Chapter 6 Moscow Passage 145

Chapter 7 Shadows over Europe 169

Chapter 8 Two Big Books 197

Chapter 9 Antifascism Loud and Clear 229

Chapter 10 War Outside and War Inside 265

Chapter 11 The Age of Adjustment 297

Coda 321

Acknowledgments 327

Permissions 331

Abbreviations Used in Notes 333

Notes 335

Locations of Archives Cited in Notes 387

Index 389

Editorial Reviews

"Full of evocative detail, with a sophisticated grasp of the politics of the time, it reanimates a harum-scarum journalistic age all the more appealing for its raffish ambition and often misguided idealism."—Wall Street Journal

“Geopolitics jostles with affairs, adventures, marriages, break-ups and break-downs, births, deaths, careers and friendships. At its core are the influence and responsibility of journalists.”—Times Literary Supplement

"What induced a generation of brilliant young writers to report to the United States from the farthest reaches of a war-torn world? In Fighting Words, the peerless historian Nancy F. Cott recovers the sense of adventure, and, equally, of responsibility, that drove some of the most talented journalists of their generation to cover the rise of authoritarianism. In between the wars, an era uncannily like our own, they explained the world to Americans, and Americans to the world."—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States

"The golden age of American foreign correspondence was the years between the World Wars. Reporters had freedom to see and report (Americans were liked overseas then); many acquired years of experience doing so. Nancy Cott gives us vivid portraits of four of the best. Their stories are a reminder why we need independent eyes and ears abroad."—John Maxwell Hamilton, professor at Louisiana State University, and Global Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center for Journalists

"A gripping tale of the fiercely bright, ambitious, and romantic young Americans who set the US newspaper world ablaze in the 1920s and 1930s with their eyewitness reports on fascism, war, and revolution. Nancy Cott brilliantly explores political passion, journalistic bravery, love and betrayal, the anguish of repressed sexuality, and the consequences of speaking truth to power. A triumph of historical writing."—Gary Gerstle, author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Revolution to the Present

"This study of four illustrious, intrepid journalists and foreign correspondents reads like a gripping novel, rife with world-wide adventure, uncommon courage, complicated personal relationships, vices, generosities, and transgressive sexual affairs. At the same time, it provides an insider view of the most consequential events of the 1920s and 1930s — the Chinese revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, Zionism, the rise of fascism and, not least, the technological transformation of journalism. It's a page-turner, showing how the personal and the political intersect, illuminating how the world changed so drastically in these decades."—Linda Gordon, author of The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition

"Fighting Words offers a thrilling rewriting of the Lost Generation narrative: American men and women who went in search of meaning and found it in journalistic encounters around the world. Cott's subjects approached the decades after World War I with curiosity rather than fear, engagement rather than retreat. Together, they helped to teach the American public how to think about the vital and harrowing events of the interwar years. This beautifully written book allows us to see that history unfold through their eyes."—Beverly Gage, author of The Day Wall Street Exploded

From the Publisher

2019-11-26
In an informative group biography, Cott (History/Harvard Univ.; Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, 2001, etc.) focuses on four foreign correspondents whose reporting, from 1920 to the 1940s, enlightened Americans about global events.

As the author notes, journalism was alive and well during this period; in 1920, 2,500 newspapers circulated 32 million copies each day. Large cities had four or more dailies in addition to Sunday papers, weeklies, monthlies, and many foreign-language and ethnic-group papers. Ninety-five percent of Americans read newspapers. Jobs in journalism were easy to get, and many young men and women—Hemingway, for one, went to Paris as a reporter for the Toronto Star—took the opportunity to travel, supported by a newspaper back home. Drawing on considerable archival and published material, Cott profiles Dorothy Thompson, Vincent James Sheean, John Gunther, and Rayna Raphaelson as representative of their profession. Excepting Raphaelson, whose career was cut short by her death in her early 30s, the other three serve well to illuminate the perils and triumphs of gathering foreign news. Raphaelson rebelled against the expectations of her upper-middle-class Jewish family to sail to China with no newspaper experience or job connections, but through dogged efforts, she reported fearlessly about China's and Russia's political upheavals. Nevertheless, her influence was never as broad as that of the other three writers, whose dispatches from Russia, Germany, Europe, and Palestine led to regular columns (Thompson, for example, contributed "On the Record" for the Herald Tribune, reaching some 8 million readers), radio broadcasts, lectures, and book deals. Sheean's memoir Personal History, adapted as the 1940 movie Foreign Correspondent, gave rise to other memoirs in which journalists recounted their witnessing of international events. Gunther's ambitious Inside Europe vividly portrayed Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. The book sold nearly 1,000 copies per week and was translated into 14 languages. Like Sheean and Thompson, Gunther became a celebrity and "a trusted source for whatever in the world Americans wanted to know."

A revelatory history of a time when journalism was respected and vital.

Kirkus Reviews