Lowell Thomas Part I: More Than a Disembodied Head
How one raconteur created the myth of Lawrence of Arabia, invented travelogues and shaped America’s view of the world.
Is it possible that one of the most famous men of the 20th century could be largely forgotten already?
There was a time when everyone in America — and very likely across the globe — knew the name, face, and especially the voice of Lowell Thomas. Such is the fleeting nature of fame that he only came to my attention as a tiny head on the View-Master packets I collect.
But Thomas was so much more than a disembodied head! He was an explorer, lecturer, journalist, and broadcaster with an incredible talent for self-promotion.
Thomas is best remembered today as the man who turned T.E. Lawrence into a legend, into “Lawrence of Arabia” — an epic saga that was only sorta true and would eventually be immortalized in the 1962 epic film starring Peter O’Toole.
Thomas also effectively invented the video travelogue, paving the way for innumerable writers and an entire genre of television shows. He was a man so well-traveled and accomplished — and so eager to tell us all about it — that his autobiography spans two books and his many, many travel adventures are told via the 50-plus books he wrote and published over his many years of life.
Born in 1892, Thomas spent his childhood in the mining boom town of Cripple Creek, Colorado. He got a BS from Valparaiso University in Indiana. After college, he moved back to Colorado and worked in a local mine. In 1912, he got an BA and an MA at University of Denver and met his wife Frances Ryan. They would stay together for the next 58 years, until her death.
In 1913, Thomas moved to Chicago to work as a reporter and part-time educator. He also found a smart way to fund his travel: He convinced railroad executives to underwrite a trip to the Pacific Northwest in exchange for articles that highlighted the merits of traveling by rail.
Next on his journey was Princeton, where he applied for and received a fellowship. He took several trips to Alaska between 1914 and 1916, taking a camera along to document the journey. From those travels, he developed a multimedia travelogue that included film, slides and narration. He was invited to give a lecture to congress and, long story short, Thomas was asked to head the See America First campaign that was created to encourage domestic travel during WWI. That was canceled once America joined the war, so Thomas’ role evolved. It would now be on him to travel to the front and create content that would rally Americans to the war effort.
By the age of 23, Lowell Thomas had earned five university degrees, worked as an editor or reporter on six major newspapers, filmed adventures in Alaska, written nationally syndicated columns on his travels, and secured a position teaching at Princeton in the speech department he helped create. — From Clio
In 1917, Thomas took his wife, Frances, and a colleague, Harry Chase, to France. They didn’t find much in the way of compelling stories at first, so the trio moved on to Italy. From there Thomas and Chase went to cover the British war effort in the Middle East while Frances stayed behind and worked with the Red Cross.
It was during this leg of the trip that Thomas flew in an airplane for the first time. Imagine traveling so broadly before air travel took hold as a common means of transport?! In Egypt, Thomas and Chase mounted a movie camera to the cockpit of a biplane and filmed the Great Pyramids of Giza. It was during this time that Thomas met T.E. Lawrence. Chase took photos, they both shot short films and Thomas also cooked up a story that was a bit more than the realities on the ground.
Lawrence, a man with an ability to ‘back into the limelight’ as Thomas described it, was both fascinated and embarrassed by the American’s accounts. ‘I resent him: but am disarmed by his good intentions,’ he wrote British novelist E. M. Forester in 1925 after Thomas published With Lawrence in Arabia. ‘He is vulgar as they make them; believes he is doing me a great turn by bringing my virtue into the public air.’ Thomas’s claims were ‘red-hot lying’ Lawrence told Forester, yet he didn’t mention that during the autumn of 1919 he had met regularly with Thomas in London and contributed to his articles, and even posed in Arab costume for Harry Chase. Part of Lawrence’s motivation was to use Thomas to support his efforts to secure self-determination for Arab nations. Thomas’s striking visual images presented the Arab revolt as Lawrence wanted it to be viewed: as a struggle against oppression and for national independence. Presumably, Lawrence could have easily asked Thomas to tone down his more fantastic descriptions.”
There had been illustrated travelogues, Thomas, himself, had shown films he took in Alaska and talked about the gold rush and the wilderness there. But now he imagined a presentation format that would mix stills and film dramatically synchronized to his voice as he told his stories from the platform supported with live music. The technique took practice to achieve. At first Thomas and his projectionist up in the booth, Harry Chase, were totally out of sync. Thomas might be exalting fierce Arab cavalry while a close up of a donkey might be on the screen. They could not hear or see each other. For a time Thomas’ wife, Frances, had to stand on the catwalk outside the booth and bang on its door when it was time to change the visuals. But they arranged a lightbulb signal and Chase came up with a dramatic technique of dissolving from one visual to the next. — From Clio
Once back in the states, Thomas hired a painter to help make the lantern slides Chase took come to life. The travelogue that resulted took a few iterations before it became a big hit. Thomas, however, was clever and keenly aware of his audience. He leaned into the things that worked and dumped stuff that didn’t. After a series of refinements — with some feedback from his friend Dale Carnegie — Thomas built a show that became a hit in New York, then London, then Australia and even as far away as New Zealand.
“[Lowell] Thomas provided a war-weary Allied public with a romantic campaign to celebrate. He gave them a ... modern-day knight in white robes racing around Arabia, instead of gruesome images of corpses draped over barbed wire and young men mangled by machine-gun fire and massive artillery barrages. His program perhaps helped to offset memories of some of the horror of modern mechanized trench warfare and the hypocrisy of the Paris Peace Conference. — Joel C. Hodson’s Lawrence of Arabia and American Culture: The Making of a Transatlantic Legend
By mid-October the show moved to the huge Albert Hall where Thomas performed to 10,000 people a day. All the Lords and Ladies, Queen Mary, Prime Minister Lloyd George and Winston Churchill attended, and came back to see the performance. More than a million people attended the London show and it was shown to millions more on Thomas’ tour of the English-speaking world. Lawrence became a household name and the first superstar created by audiovisual media. — From Clio
Thomas signed his first book deal around the time his travelogue was gaining traction in 1919. And that’s when his career really took off.
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