FOR YEARS—FOR DECADES, ACTUALLY—NEITHER AUNT Kassie nor anybody else outside the magic circle “found out” about Lorena Hickok. The fact of ER’s closest woman friend during the White House years was erased, distorted, and demeaned. Even photographs of intimate family dinners were cropped before publication to delete Hick. When included, she was not identified. More recently, when identified, she was framed by the most insulting stereotypes.
Hateful stereotypes aside, attractiveness—that mysterious chemical element that draws one to another—is after all in the eyes of the beholder. To her detractors, Hick was “without sexual attraction. She was five foot eight but weighed almost two hundred pounds.” She smoked cigars, cigarettes, and pipes. She acted and looked like “one of the boys…. In any case she was no vamp.”
In contrast to the stereotypes that have ridiculed her face and mocked her girth, Hick appealed to women and men. She may have acted and looked like “one of the boys.” She was, after all, the only woman in a very jealously guarded male environment. Because of her humor, her professionalism, and her warmth, her colleagues became her lifelong friends. She would have been very lonely if she were not “one of the boys.” Instead, she was surrounded by people who not only enjoyed her company but seemed not to mind that for over twenty years she was frequently given the best stories to cover. With them, she smoked, played poker, and drank–mostly bourbon on the rocks. She frequented saloons, enjoyed coffeehouses, and liked to entertain at home, to bake, and to cook.
Hick was fun to be with. Smart and generous, she told a good story; loved to listen to a good story; and was passionate about politics, sports, and music. She was a pro, who played the game to succeed; and she understood the need for costumes. She preferred trousers, flannel shirts, and high work boots, but only wore them in the country. At all other times she dressed for the occasion, and she dressed well. For concerts and the opera, she painted her nails, wore dangling earrings, coiffed her hair (which she generally wore long and pulled back), and applied makeup, especially bright-red coral lipstick—which she wore most of the time. In the office, she rolled up her sleeves to type. But she usually wore long, bright silk scarves to set off her dress or suit when she was out on assignment. She was portly, and frequently dieted. She also wore stockings and girdles—the old-fashioned kind that worked, and hurt. Her eyes were alert, warm, and frequently filled with merriment and mischief, as the most casual glance at photographs taken during the 1920s and 1930s shows. She had a strong, smiling face and was full-breasted; even into the 1950s, pictures of Hick in shorts highlighted truly shapely legs.
Since friendship and love are rarely about straight teeth or bony clavicles, one must pause to ask how it has served history to caricature Lorena Hickok, and why she was for so long disregarded. Like the disappearance of ER’s correspondence with Earl Miller, the answer in retrospect seems evident: Today, our generation continues to cringe and turn away from cross-class, cross-generational, or same-sex relationships. In this instance, however, both Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok saved their correspondence, although Hickok typed, edited, and then burned the originals of ER’s letters between 1932 and 1933 and many more of her own letters over the years. For all the deletions and restraint, the thousands of letters that remain are amorous and specific.
ER repeatedly ended her ten-, twelve-, fifteen-page daily letters with expressions of love and longing. There are few ambiguities in this correspondence, and a letter that was defined as “particularly susceptible to misinterpretation” reads: “I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.”
After a long separation, during which both ER and Hick counted the days until their reunion, Hick noted: “Only eight more days …Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips….”
The fact is that ER and Hick were not involved in a schoolgirl “smash.” They did not meet in a nineteenth-century storybook, or swoon unrequitedly upon a nineteenth-century campus. They were neither saints nor adolescents. Nor were they virgins or mermaids. They were two adult women, in the prime of their lives, committed to working out a relationship under very difficult circumstances. They had each already lived several other lives. They knew the score. They appreciated the risks and the dangers. They had both experienced pain in loving. They never thought it would be easy or smooth. They gave each other pleasure and comfort, trust and love. They touched each other deeply, loved profoundly, and moved on. They sought to avoid gossip. And, for the most part, they succeeded. They wrote to each other exactly what they meant to write. Sigmund Freud notwithstanding: A cigar may not always be a cigar, but the “north-east corner of your mouth against my lips” is always the northeast corner.
The romantic and passionate friendship between ER and Hick was neither idyllic nor perfect. Actually, it was a very bumpy ride. It was simply there—inevitable and undeniable. Alone in a sea of unknown and uncontrollable events, they were drawn to each other. Theirs was a powerful attraction, in the beginning based on work and political interests. ER admired Hick’s independence, her single-minded dedication as a journalist. They shared a world-view, and were ardently engaged by the political game.
Hick may have been “one of the boys,” but she was no man-hater. Like Eleanor Roosevelt, she was a team player, content to work for and with men—although she consistently promoted the interests of women. If she was perceived as a lesbian by those who knew her, FDR and Louis Howe nevertheless encouraged and appreciated her company and professional support. ER came to rely upon it.
In the fulfillment of their desire to be with each other, ER and Hick risked publicity, discovery, national scandal. Over the years, for three decades, they created a rare and loving friendship of absolute trust and amazing generosity. Their relationship passed through phases, some more distant than others. There were storms and hurt silences. But there was also laughter, pleasure, and respect.
WHO, THEN, WAS THIS WOMAN WHO TOUCHED ER SO PROfoundly? Self-created and self-defined, Lorena Alice Hickok was the foremost woman reporter in the United States, and one of the great American journalists of either sex. Her words and her work were highly esteemed. Her bylines were bigger, her salary was larger, and her reputation was greater than those of many of her contemporaries. She won awards, and front-page space. She was one of the most popular writers on the syndicate trail—popular especially in all those small towns throughout the country that were so like the ones in which she grew up.
The daughter of a butter-maker, she was born on a dairy farm in East Troy, Wisconsin. Her father, an abusive and violent man, continually searching for work, moved the family to a dusty little corner of South Dakota when she was ten. For the next three years, they lived in a succession of prairie towns, “each a little more forlorn than the last.”
Like ER, Hick turned to books and fantasies in order to deal with her childhood situation—which seemed to her “a confusing, kaleidoscopic series of strange neighborhoods, different schools, new teachers.” She was always the new girl in town and had to make friends over and over again. For a time she: considered herself an “introvert,” and sought refuge in an “enchanted” fantasy world where people rarely appeared. “The only fellow-human who ever really gained admittance was my sister Ruby. That was because she was so determined.” But there were always horses, dogs, cats, and assorted farm animals. Hick loved animals, and always believed they “could and did talk among themselves.” And she knew they loved her no matter how tall she grew, or how “round-shouldered” she became in order to seem shorter. By thirteen, Hick was the tallest in her class and was often “miserable.” Still, she knew, “cats and dogs didn’t care whether you were pretty or not!” But she was an excellent student who loved the theatre, and music most of all.
The first words of her unpublished autobiographical manuscript, written toward the end of her life, described her connection with music:
The first thing I remember is light—warm, yellow light, probably shining through a window.
With the light I have a fainter memory of a swaying motion and a soft, humming sound, a kind of formless music. And a feeling of drowsy contentment.
I could not have been more than a year old, perhaps less…. I may have been making the music myself. I have been told that I tried to carry a tune before I could talk. Ever since I can remember, through almost every waking hour, music has run through me, somewhere in the back of my throat. Old hymns, dance music, fragments of symphonies and operas, my own improvisations on familiar tunes…
I think I was perhaps three when I first experienced ecstasy. As I awoke from my afternoon nap, a breeze played through the branches of a tree outside the window, making the loveliest sound I had ever heard. I can still feel the sharp, almost painful thrill of pleasure that went through me.
Hick’s mother hated the continual moves, and was isolated and lonely in a dreadful place called Bowdle, “the dustiest and dreariest” of all the towns, which, Hick thought, “must have fitted to perfection my mother’s idea of hell.” Raised in southern Wisconsin, she longed for trees, hills, and especially lakes. When she heard that there actually was a lake in a nearby town, she persuaded her husband to rent a team of horses and a surrey for a Sunday picnic at that lake. “Instead of a lake, however, we found only a mud hole filled with rushes and surrounded by a grove of cottonweeds. Sitting there in the surrey, with the reins in her hands, she broke down and cried as though her heart were breaking.” She died that September, when Hick was twelve.
But Hick loved the prairie:
To me those wide, treeless spaces offered the promise of infinite and intoxicating freedom. You could run all the way to the very rim of the world if you wanted to! If I close my eyes, I can still feel the wind on my face and feel again the exhilaration, the sense of physical well-being it used to give me. The pale, tender green of the prairie in spring, with furry lavender crocuses nestling the grass, the deep blue—almost black—of the little ponds and water holes under an April sky, those golden autumns, the sunsets—now and then all my life I’ve had an acute nostalgia for them.
Long before her mother’s death, Hick’s father had been abusive. He whipped Hick cruelly, killed her dog, smashed her mother’s kitten against the barn “and clashed its brains out.” He was in many ways a maniacal brute. All through her childhood until her mother died, Hick wondered “why my mother, who was a grown-up, too, and just as big as my father, let him do the things he did.” Hick “learned very early not to look to my mother for protection…. At times she tried…. After one bad whipping I heard her remonstrating with him—he had beaten me with a stave out of a butter keg, and I had black and blue stripes all over my back and legs….”
Hick was puzzled until much later in life as to why her mother “always wept when he went away on one of his job-hunting trips and was so happy when he came back.” From the moment of Hick’s first memory of him, she disliked her father. Eventually her dislike grew “into bitter hatred.” He vowed “to break my temper. I wasn’t afraid of him. I only resented him.” As she grew older, “the whippings grew progressively more severe,” and Hick always said: “‘You wouldn’t dare do this to me if I were as big as you are.’”
After her mother died, Hick managed to send herself to school while working as a “hired-girl” in rooming houses and boarding houses, or as a live-in and unpaid servant girl, or, worst of all, for “an old lady” who needed a temporary cook for a crew of twelve threshers. She was shown “a kitchen on wheels, a kind of miniature caboose” with “a big stove that burned soft coal,” was “handed an alarm clock set for 3 a.m.,” and was to have the crew fed by five. Hick tried it for three days, but it was impossible:
I was a squirrel in a sweltering cage, running frantically round and round…. Dripping perspiration in clouds of steam and smoke and soot that caked on my skin and smarted in my eyes and nostrils, I struggled along …through an agonizing routine of boiling, baking, frying, through bushels of grimy potato peelings, through sliding avalanches of greasy dishes, with never enough soap or hot water, shoving hunk after endless hunk of filthy soft coal into that stove that never got enough. My mistress did not berate me. She only growled and, when I got too far behind, grudgingly gave me a hand.
During those years, she saw her father only sporadically. Once she accidentally saw him on a train when she was fifteen, and he berated her for being “an ungrateful daughter.” She left him on the train and never saw him again.
For the rest of her life, Hick’s childhood experiences enabled her to understand the needs and wants of people without power, without money or prestige. Though she retained a pious faith in the vast possibilities of “rugged individualism” and never acknowledged the reality of absolute powerlessness, she also believed that everybody sooner or later might need help. Since she herself had survived as a child because she had generous friends, she never refused to help anybody who came to her in need, whether friend or stranger.
Hick had nine jobs in the two years between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. But whenever she managed to stay in one place long enough actually to attend school, she was quickly seen to be a very special student. She won essay contests and was selected to represent Bowdle High School in a region-wide “declamatory contest,” in which she had also to sing. Her last job was with eccentric Mrs. O’Malley, “who was held in low esteem by the good women of Bowdle.” Married to the town’s less respectable saloon-keeper, she wore flamboyant costumes, painted her face, and drank. Hick considered her a seventy-year-old “bird of paradise” who stalked “defiantly about a barnyard populated by little brown hens.” She was gentle and kind, paid Hick a good salary, encouraged her to attend school, and made her dresses and hats, blouses and suits, many with laces, ribbons, and other fine trimmings. And she probably saved Hick’s life.
Mrs. O’Malley wrote a letter to Hick’s favorite relative, her mother’s cousin, “Aunt Ella.” “I still thought of Aunt Ella as the loveliest person I had ever known, but I doubted if she could take me to live with her.” Hick had not seen her since her mother died, three years before; and she had failed to answer Aunt Ella’s letters, which soon stopped. But as soon as Aunt Ella received Mrs. O’Malley’s message, she sent a check to pay for Hick’s railroad fare to Chicago. Hick finally had a home, and was happy with Aunt Ella, who sent her to high school in Battle Creek, Michigan. From there she went to Lawrence College in Wisconsin. But Hick was too old and too independent to be happy in such a sorority-obsessed environment, and quit to begin her career as a reporter.
Over the years, she tried to finish college, and attended the University of Minnesota while working at the Minneapolis Tribune. But the more her work absorbed her, the less involved she became with classes. Moreover, the dean of women insisted that she live in a college dormitory the year she became Sunday editor of the Minneapolis Tribune. She quit, and never graduated—which had no effect on her career.
Although Hick’s rise in journalism was rapid, she was not unique in the Midwest during the first years of the twentieth century: She aspired to be as successful as Edna Ferber, and by 1910 she was on her way. She went from her first job as a $7-a-week cub on the Battle Creek Journal to society editor for the Milwaukee Sentinel within a year. She was twenty-one. Hick loved Milwaukee. She loved the people she worked with, the operas she attended, the Viennese-style coffeehouse she frequented, and the thrill of having her first byline. In Milwaukee she met divas and politicians, suffragists and feminists.
She delighted a wide audience with her interviews of the remarkable and famous: The great pianist Ignacy Paderewski; Lillian Russell; and Nellie Melba, Britain’s premier contribution to grand opera’s golden age. (Allegedly, the British so loved the Australian prima donna of Covent Garden that they named the ice-cream dessert “peach Melba” for her.) Hick also wrote an unforgettable account of her attempt to interview Geraldine Farrar, certainly the most temperamental and perhaps the only slender diva of the fin de Steèle. An American by birth, Farrar began her operatic career in Berlin in 1901. By the time Hick sought her interview, Farrar practically owned the roles of Madame Butterfly and Tosca; and was, for fifty-eight performances, the New York Metropolitan’s most enduring Carmen. Hick was intrigued:
I always did admire prima donnas…. Yes, even though I know that genius is capricious…. Somebody told me that prima donnas were harder to reach than kings, ladies in harems or murderers about to be hanged.
Now I believe it.
After splashing through exactly 163 puddles of water and plowing through an acre or so of nice, rich mud, most of which clung to my best shoes, I arrived at the private car of the peerless Geraldine.
But the diva would not see Hick, who wore a new suit trimmed in monkey fur for the occasion. Her colleague Abe Altrowitz described the scene: “On the way she was caught in a downpour of rain.” As she waited in the foyer, Wiggles, the temperamental diva’s frisky pet terrier, began “to chew all the fur from my Sunday suit. He also kissed me—oh, the thrill of it! To be kissed by Geraldine Farrar’s dog!” But, the longer she waited, the more unbearable the situation. Her inexpensive suit trimmed with monkey fur began to dry, and to shrink. “And then she sensed an odor and realized that the monkey fur as it dried was giving off a most undesirable scent….” When Hick returned to her office, she “sat down at her typewriter and pounded out a scorcher.”
As the city editor started reading the story he exploded with laughter. He laughed long and loud and when he’d finished reading and laughing he told Hick such a crackerjack of a piece hadn’t come across the desk since Fido was a pup. The story was printed as written….
Later in the day the city desk telephone rang. The call was for Hick. She picked up the telephone.
At the other end was Miss Farrar’s manager.
He said Miss Farrar had enjoyed reading her story and would be very happy to see her between acts at the opera that night.
For answer Hick snapped into the telephone:
“You tell Miss Farrar for me to go to hell!”
And then she banged down the receiver.
What a gal she was!
Hick’s personal life in Milwaukee was also momentous—highlighted by her great friendship with another diva, the legendary Ernestine Schumann-Heink. One of the greatest contraltos in history, Schumann-Heink was vastly admired; her “great and dear friend” Johannes Brahms wrote his Lullaby, his Rhapsody, and his Sapphische Ode “most especially for you.” When she visited Brahms during his last illness, he said: “I wrote them for you, and now I give them to you. They are yours….” For decades Madame Schumann-Heink rarely gave a concert or cut a record without including Brahms’s Sapphische Ode. Her triumphant career took her to Bayreuth, Covent Garden, New York’s Metropolitan Opera House, and finally into radio and films.
Ernestine Schumann-Heink was married three times, had seven sons, traveled widely, and, according to one biographer, led “a colourful private life.” At some point, she met Hick. About that meeting there is only a sentence in the table of contents for Hick’s autobiographical proposal: “I begin long friendship with Ernestine Schumann-Heinck.” We also know that Schumann-Heinck gave Hick a sapphire ring surrounded by diamond chips to be worn on her little finger. It was that ring that Hick gave to ER in 1933, and which she wore until her death.
Evidently Hick left Schumann-Heink when she left Milwaukee for the Minneapolis Tribune, on her twenty-third birthday, 7 March 1917. According to Hick, Tom Dillon, the Tribune’s editor—whom she called “The Old Man”—taught her “the newspaper business, how to drink, and how to live.” Tom Dillon and his wife, Clarissa, called Riss, became two of Hick’s closest and lifelong friends. She would always call Minneapolis her home, and remained close with her Tribune colleagues throughout her life. After her death, Hick’s colleague Abe Altrowitz celebrated her days at the Minneapolis Tribune:
She was endowed with a vast body, beautiful legs and a peaches-and-cream complexion.
When she was pounding out a sob-story (tear-jerker), we’d see tears streaming down her cheeks. When it was a humorous piece, her entire vast body rippled with merriment. And she could write both kinds—and the straight news variety, too—with an excellence few could surpass, then or now.
During the Tribune years, Hick lived with Ella (Ellie) Morse, a part-time reporter on the society page. Ellie, petite and physically fragile, was two years older than Hick, and heir to a wheat-futures-and-realestate fortune. She adored Hick—and always called her “Hickey Doodles.” Hick and Ellie lived together for eight years in one of Minneapolis’s most elegant residences, where they entertained often and lavishly. For a time, they both took literature classes at the university while working at the Tribune at night. But all the while, Hick wrote feature stories that achieved more and more attention. She specialized in murder trials and political scandals; she interviewed Sinclair Lewis and the “rather frowsy Queen of Romania.” She became the first woman sports reporter, and won the admiration of all Minnesota’s football players. She traveled with them, and played some of the best poker. She was, moreover, loyal. Win or lose, they could count on her for a great story. In 1923, the Associated Press awarded her its best-feature-story-of-the-month award, for an article on President Warren G. Harding’s funeral train.
Nobody wanted her to leave the Tribune in 1926, when she and Ellie decided that, because of Hick’s recently diagnosed diabetes, they would go to San Francisco for a rest, and then maybe to Europe. Hick was thirty-two and had been working endless hours, practically nonstop, since she was fourteen. Ellie urged Hick to rest and write a novel. The 1920s were, after all, a period of new opportunities, new forms of expression, adventure, and travel.
Hick agreed to take a leave for one year. But in San Francisco Ellie met and eloped with a childhood friend, Roy Dickinson. Hick was devastated, although they remained friends and corresponded every week until Ellie’s death. Hick could not bear to return to Minneapolis alone, and decided to go to New York City, where she landed a job at the New York Mirror. Then, on 8 August 1928, Variety announced: “Lorena Hickok, byline sobbie on the Mirror is going to the Associated Press.” One of the most dazzling feathers in the AP’s cap, Hick was assigned the hottest features, the most scintillating beats. In addition to getting the top political stories, in 1932 she was selected to cover the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case.
When ER first met Hick, the reporter had friends, prestige, and money. She was happy, secure, and able to acknowledge frankly that she was one of the best. Tough and competitive, she nevertheless loved to laugh, and could laugh at herself. Most of Hick’s friends and colleagues remembered her laugh first: contagious and uncontained, her laughter simply warmed up a room. It was the mark of her personality.
Initially, ER was impressed by her reputation, her dedication to her work, and her discipline. As with Earl Miller, she identified with Hick’s triumph over a grim childhood. ER respected Hick; she appreciated her political savvy, and she enjoyed her passion, enthusiasm, and spontaneity. She could trust Hick, who never bothered with duplicity or flattery.
But there was one thing more. Hick was totally loyal to and entirely involved with ER. She was protective and encouraging, and, like Earl Miller, championed ER and promoted her best interests. Unlike Earl Miller, Hick devoted herself exclusively to ER, and for years put even her own professional needs to the side. Subsequently, ER wrote: “Every woman wants to be first to someone sometime in her life & [that] desire is the explanation for many strange things women do….”
For ER, “that desire” was for a time fulfilled by Hick. She wrote Hick during their first days of separation after the inauguration that she enjoyed nobody else’s company so much, missed nobody so much. On 7 March 1933, Hick’s fortieth birthday, ER wrote: “Hick darling, All day I’ve thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonite you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.”
ER had never felt loved in this way before. Hick made demands—more demands than ER was prepared to fulfill. Hick was jealous and willful, tempestuous and difficult, intensely emotional, and expressive. With Hick there was no reason to pine and long. That was a new experience for ER; she was no longer the one left lonely. She was wanted, and pursued. It was pleasant and yet frightening. Hick was exciting, rambunctious, uncontrollable. ER never knew what might happen next. Did she mind? Not really, at first.
ER’s friends were always amazed that she never told Hick to speak more softly, behave more decorously. It never occurred to her. Esther Lape and her circle considered Hick “a bit rough and tumble,” but were delighted and pleased that she made ER happy. ER’s other friends either grudgingly accepted or disapproved of Hick. Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman particularly resented her company and deplored her presence. They never mentioned her in their reminiscences, oral histories, or their interviews. Hick’s presence at picnics and around the dining-room table they all shared was simply ignored. Most of ER’s friends, both old and new, spoke and wrote for decades as if Hick simply did not exist.
Throughout their lives, their relationship was stormy, unpredictable, and somehow rather grand. The period of passion soared and mellowed, and did not last very long, though longer than either would have predicted. Still, their happiness seemed worth all the trouble. And their friendship ended only with death.
ER learned a lot from Hick. She sought her advice and welcomed her suggestions. It was Hick who recommended that ER hold press conferences restricted to women reporters. At the height of Depression unemployment, ER’s decision caused veteran journalist Ishbel Ross to observe: “Never was there such a gift from heaven for the working press.” It was Hick who suggested that ER publish the “diary” portion of her daily letters. Every day, ER sent [Hick ten-, twenty-page letters filled with hourly details of her workday. Hick said they were wasted on her; the entire nation would be interested in ER’s experiences and observations. “My Day,” ER’s popular daily column, began in 1936 and was syndicated to scores of newspapers throughout the United States.
The most intense phase of their relationship coincided with FDR’s election, and ER’s first published reference to Hick concerns their first postelection visit to Washington, in January, when ER went to make inaugural preparations and White House living arrangements: “I remember that trip very clearly. I had gone down with Lorena Hickok, who was then a reporter for the Associated Press and assigned to ‘cover’ me, and had spent the night at the Mayflower Hotel. In the morning we walked down Connecticut Avenue and then parted.” As ER walked the remaining steps alone to the White House portico, she “thought of the days when my husband was Assistant Secretary of the Navy and I used to drive by the White House and think how marvelous it must be to live there. Now, I was about to go there to live, and I felt it was anything but marvelous.”
According to Hick, they took the midnight train with Louis Howe and Elliott, and went to the Mayflower for breakfast and several meetings. ER’s first meeting was with FDR’s cousin (Aunt Kassie’s son) Warren Delano Robbins, then the State Department’s chief of protocol. He arrived with his wife to offer ER a ride to the White House in his State Department car, since she had spurned the White House car Mrs. Hoover had offered. Hick noted that Warren Delano Robbins was aghast when ER announced firmly that she intended to walk to the White House:
“But Eleanor, darling, you can’t do that! …People will recognize you! You’ll be mobbed!”
“Oh, yes, I can. Miss Hickok is walking over with me.”
Hick and ER walked down Connecticut Avenue and through Lafayette Park, and crossed Pennsylvania Avenue to the northwest gate to the White House. There Hick waited for ER while she was shown about the house by Ike Hoover, the head usher and resident of the place since the days of William McKinley and TR. ER’s visit with First Lady Lou Henry Hoover was brief but cordial. In record time, ER assigned rooms and considered the decorative changes needed to accommodate her large and active sons. She rejoined Hick in less than an hour, pausing for a photographer who snapped her picture as she emerged. ER later inscribed that photograph to Hick: “We were only separated by a few yards dear Hick & I wonder which of us felt most oddly!”
The rest of the day was equally rushed. They had a late lunch with Elliott and Louis Howe, where they discussed assassins and crises. When ER was asked what she would do if an assassin took aim at FDR, she replied: “I’d step in front of him, of course.” Elliott thought that a poor idea, since they would both be shot. But ER said, “Oh, but I have a weapon,” and exhibited from the interior of her handbag what looked like a bulky fountain pen. “You press this little thing here, and it shoots out tear gas,” she explained as she pointed it at a rapidly ducking Elliott. Hick wondered if ER had been looking for assassins throughout the campaign. She had noticed that whenever FDR spoke ER continually turned “her head this way and that, as if she were looking for something.” ER explained that she always looked for fire exits. “If a fire had broken out in one of those places, and the crowd started to panic, it would have been almost impossible to get Franklin out. Without his leg braces, two men can pick him up and carry him easily and quickly. But when he is wearing his leg braces, he is so awkward and unwieldy! He can’t move himself or be moved quickly.”
Later that afternoon, ER met with Ettie (Mrs. Jack) Garner, who asked ER if she might continue to be her husband’s secretary when he became vice-president, as she had been for all the years he had been in Congress, when she had cooked his lunch on an electric grill in his office. ER had replied that she “most certainly” thought it a good idea.
Indeed, the idea inspired ER. On her return to New York, she asked FDR if she could have a “real job and take over some of his mail.” It was ER’s only attempt to suggest some substantial work beyond the formal requirements of White House hostessing. But FDR only looked at her “quizzically.” He reminded her that Missy did his mail, and thought that she might feel that ER “was interfering.” It never occurred to ER that she would have far more mail of her own to worry about, and many other tasks as well.
In the beginning, neither ER’s role nor her place in the White House was clear. It was up to her to create them—a task made more complex by the emotional realities of her marriage, and the fact that FDR had invited Lucy Mercer Rutherford to the inauguration. He arranged a car for her, and she evidently spent some time in the White House on Inauguration Day. Perhaps she and FDR had some quiet time together when ER and the children attended the various inaugural balls. Perhaps ER knew nothing of the visit; or perhaps that was why it was so important to her to take Hick out to the statue of Grief at 7:45 A.M. the day before the inauguration.
To dash secretly about Washington that morning required some planning, and ER told Hick “to meet her with a cab at a side entrance to the Mayflower that opened into a little foyer off the main lobby [where] there was an elevator that went up to the presidential suite…. ‘There will be Secret Service men there,’ she said, ‘but I’ll tell them you’re coming, and I’ll try to be just inside the door when you drive up. I don’t want to be followed, and that early in the morning I don’t think we shall be.”
ER was there waiting, and “slipped out the entrance” as soon as Hick’s cab appeared. She instructed the driver to go out along R Street, to show Hick where they had lived, but there was “a large sign on the lawn: ‘Former Residence of Franklin D. Roosevelt.’ Hurriedly she told the driver to move on” to Rock Creek Cemetery. ER sat silently during the long drive across Washington, “wrapped up in her own thoughts—and memories.”
Once inside the protected sanctuary of the holly grove, ER and Hick sat on the curved stone benches before the statue of Grief in silence. Hick pondered ER’s mood, and the power of that statue:
As I looked at it I felt that all the sorrow humanity had ever had to endure was expressed in that face. I could almost feel the hot, stinging unshed tears behind the lowered eyelids. Yet in that expression there was something almost triumphant. There was a woman who had experienced every kind of pain, every kind of suffering …and had come out of it serene—and compassionate. Whatever bitter unhappiness, whatever agony of body or soul the viewer might be going through that woman had known….
When ER finally broke the silence, she spoke in hushed tones, “as though she were in church”: “‘In the old days, when we lived here, I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage it, I’d come out here, alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.’”
No longer alone, the First Lady-elect, accompanied by her First Friend, contemplated the past, and the monumental challenges of the White House.
That evening, ER telephoned Hick, who had been alone in her room at another hotel, from the presidential suite at the Mayflower: “Franklin is tied up. There’s a continuous stream of people coming and going…. Jimmy and Louis are with him. The other children are all out, and I’m alone. Would you mind coming over and dining with me?”
Dinner was sent up, but nobody was hungry. Jimmy and Louis Howe brought in the latest reports from around the country. “They were all bad.” The United States’ credit structure was paralyzed. All that week, in state after state, banks closed and locked their doors. Fear mounted as the savings of millions of Americans—workers, farmers, small-business families—seemed to be locked behind iron gates. The savings of countless others had simply evaporated as eighty-five thousand businesses failed. The national income in the United States had fallen from $81 billion in 1929 to $41 billion in 1932. Over thirteen million Americans were unemployed, more than 25 percent of the entire work force. Great cities began to default on their payrolls, including New York and Chicago. The Federal Reserve Board reported that a quarter of a billion dollars in gold had poured out of the system in the week before FDR’s inauguration.
On 2 March, the Federal Reserve reported that during the previous week the amount of money in circulation had risen $732 million and the Treasury gold reserves had declined $226 million. There was a $100-million loss attributed to hoarding. Panic began, and bank runs. By the evening of 3 March, twenty-seven states had limited withdrawals or closed their banks. President Hoover wanted FDR to issue a joint statement with him to end the panic. There were several possibilities: The federal government could guarantee bank deposits; issue bank certificates, or scrip; use the war power emergency act to control withdrawals, by declaring a bank holiday.
All that week, Hoover had made overtures to FDR. But FDR refused to act jointly with the lame-duck president, whose popularity was at an all-time low. FDR pointed out that Hoover could act alone until 4 March, and did not need his cooperation. At 11:30 P.M., with only thirty minutes left to his administration, President Hoover made one last effort to persuade FDR to issue a joint statement. He called FDR on the telephone at the Mayflower. But FDR urged him to do nothing, and allow the governors of each state to close their banks as necessary. As the clock chimed the midnight hour, Hoover told his aides it was all over, there was nothing more they could do.
Then FDR announced his plan: He would close the banks. Hoover never spoke to him again. The icy inaugural drive down Pennsylvania Avenue the next morning was an ordeal of silence and anguish.
During the discussions that preinaugural evening, ER worried: “Anything could happen.” “How much can people take without blowing up?” FDR sent in the final version of his inaugural speech before it went to the mimeographers. ER considered it “a good speech, a courageous speech. It has hope in it.”
This is a day of national consecration…. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and prosper.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance….
A friend of ER’s had given her a copy of Thoreau, which she gave FDR. “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear,” Thoreau wrote. FDR had it with him in his room at the Mayflower when he revised his speech.
It was a vigorous speech. It aimed at the unemployed, the hardworking, the frightened and angry citizens who easily agreed that the breakdown of the nation’s banking system was caused by the “practices of the unscrupulous money changers.” Those men lacked vision. “When there is no vision the people perish.” “The money changers have fled far from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore the temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”
FDR called for an end to crude standards of “material wealth,” “pride of place and personal profit.” There were other values—spiritual, ethical, and creative values—that needed to be nurtured and would ensure more meaningful success: Family farms must be protected; foreclosures must be prevented. Work must be created; unemployment must end. The banking and investment systems must be regulated; a sound national economy must be established.
FDR introduced a new international policy: “I dedicate this Nation to the policy of the good neighbor.” Above all, FDR promised bold, strong executive action to move the nation out of its decline, to end despair, and to prevent upheaval. He would ask Congress for broad emergency powers to end the economic chaos, “to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.”
Hick had a preview of it all. She was in Washington, after all, on assignment. She had arranged with FDR and Louis Howe to do the first Inaugural Day interview with a First Lady in United States history. That evening, Hick bore witness to the biggest story of her career and simply passed it by: With a single phone call, she could have scooped the bank holiday, or Hoover’s call, or any paragraph of FDR’s stirring speech. Later, she realized the enormity of her own situation, the change that had occurred at that moment in her life. There “I was, a newspaper reporter, right in the middle of what that night was the biggest story in the world. And I did nothing about it…. scoops and my career did not seem important that night, even to me…. My suffering, my sense of guilt came later.”
Shortly after that pre-inaugural night, Hick confided her dilemma to Louis Howe. But he was hardly comforting: “A reporter,” he advised, “should never get too close to the news source.” Hick never discussed her situation with anybody else. But she realized: That night, the night before FDR’s inauguration, “Lorena Hickok ceased to be a newspaper reporter.”
The next day, her long-anticipated interview with ER seemed to Hick something of a disaster. Constrained by the fact of their friendship, her words were confined and she failed to write her customarily fresh and dynamic story. ER described the scene: “Soon after the inauguration ceremonies Lorena Hickok, to whom I had promised an interview, came up to my sitting room.” ER was sure that Hick would write “a friendly and discreet story,” since “we had become warm friends and I felt that she would always be fair and truthful.” ER did not remember what she told Hick, “but I do remember that we were interrupted so often that we finally retired to the bathroom to finish the interview.”
Years later, Lillian Rogers Parks, a White House maid, wrote that just how close Lorena Hickok and Mrs. Roosevelt “already were became obvious to some servants on the very day of the inaugural ceremonies. Eleanor and Hicky, as we were soon calling her, spent a lengthy time together in Eleanor’s bathroom and came out claiming that was the only place they could find privacy for a press interview.” The staff considered it “hardly the kind of thing one would do with an ordinary reporter. Or even with an adult friend.”
Such momentary lapses aside, through twelve years in the White House ER and Hick were discreet and self-protective. But that interview and her lapse as a reporter tormented Hick with the specter of her career at an end. Journalism had given Hick pride, prestige, self-respect. Without it, she would be lost. For several months, she continued to work at the AP, assigned to important front-page stories. But increasingly she was torn. She had privileged information she would not use, sources of information she no longer pursued.
ER encouraged her to leave the AP and join her in Washington. She suggested that Hick could do a series of magazine articles, or a book. Or ER would find her work, good and meaningful work. They would be together. Hick did not want to leave the AP, or her colleagues and friends in New York, but she regularly refused assignments that concerned the First Lady. Her position as a journalist became increasingly untenable, and her heart was in Washington with ER.
They wrote daily, and spoke on the telephone. They made plans to see each other regularly. Nothing was simple. ER’s long daily letters to Hick began the first evening after the inauguration, on 5 March 1933, when Hick returned to New York, and ER felt quite alone in a completely guest-filled White House:
Hick my dearest—
I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you, even though I’m busy every minute.
These are strange days & very odd to me but I’ll …try to plan pleasant things & count the days between our times together.
To begin my diary, after you left I went to supper taking F Jr and John Mama & Betsy & we were followed by FDR & James just before the boys left. I went to the station with them & left the Secret Service man at home. (1st assertion of independence!) Saw the boys on train. [Massachusetts’s Governor Joseph B. Ely, a Smith supporter] took the trouble to come up to me & tell me he thought F’s speech was great. Quite a change! Returned, had a short talk with FDR James & Betsy, read Proclamation. Tommy came & we arranged tomorrow’s work. At ten Meggie & I took her to the gate & I thought of you & Prinz. [Tommy] seemed very happy & said everyone had had a good time, also that you looked “stunning” dressed up! I then went back and devoted 3/4 of an hour talking to Mama, then listened to FDR broadcast, sorted mail & am now preparing for bed. So endeth my first Sunday.
I’ll call you tomorrow night….
Oh! darling. I hope on the whole you will be happier for my friendship. I felt I had brought you so much discomfort and hardship today & almost more heartache than you could bear & I don’t want to make you unhappy—All my love I shall be saying to you over thought waves in a few minutes
Good night my dear one
Angels guard thee
God protect thee
My love enfold thee
All the night through
Always yours
ER
Discomfort. Hardship. Heartache. ER and Hick struggled to work out the boundaries and limits of their friendship in the uncongenial environment of the White House. After all, theirs was not an equal situation. ER had, in addition to position and authority, all the privileges of marriage and family. She was a mother and a grandmother. They lived on different levels of emotional security, and Hick’s affections were more vulnerable. Although both ER and Hick denied it for many months, the reality of the White House changed everything. It was a very public place, and ER had personal, public, and social obligations to perform.
ER PREPARED FOR HER NEW LIFE IN WASHINGTON WITH A determination that masked her sense of dread. It had been for her a town filled with bitter memories. Now she was expected to preside over its most formal events, adhere to its rigid customs, celebrate its ongoing traditions. At the height of the Depression, she was expected to please the cliff-dwellers, those rare birds who lived permanently in the big houses with their fossilized views and commitment to a society she had long since abandoned. She was expected to give up her teaching, her editorial position—indeed, all her public works—and become the nation’s First Wife. It seemed unbearable. In fact, it was impossible.
ER felt a need to fortify herself. Between the election and the inauguration, she began work on two books, which enabled her to face her new position with a new freedom. The first was a tribute to her father: Hunting Big Game in the ‘Eighties: The Letters of Elliott Roosevelt, Sportsman. The second was an assessment of her understanding of the role of women in public life, and a rallying call to political activism: It’s Up to the Women! In that book, ER reached out to the women of America to join her in a crusade for change and decency.
Within months, ER involved most of America in that crusade. She wrote articles, gave interviews and radio talks, and dashed about the country “here, there, and everywhere, literally from the depths of the earth to the heights of the clouds,” on behalf of that crusade. At first her detractors were many, and veteran journalists like Rita S. Halle considered ER’s omnipresence “evidence of a ruthless craving for personal publicity.” Halle, like other critics, gradually experienced a “complete change of heart.”
ER’s performance during a September 1933 conference “to plan ways and means of helping the needy …through the coming winter” changed Halle’s mind. The First Lady presided over the dinner meeting and “made the most heart-tearing speech” Halle had ever heard. It seemed unrehearsed, and unprepared:
Perhaps it was really as it seemed, the spontaneous outpouring of her heart, for she used no notes…. Her audience was exhausted by a long, hot, busy day. Several others had spoken before her. Then Mrs. Roosevelt rose. Despite a lithe, graceful figure, she is not beautiful. She does not charm by her personal appearance. Yet, as she spoke, the wearied audience uncurved its collective spine until, all over the large room, men and women were sitting forward on their chairs in intent response to the magnetism of her simple sincerity.
ER “spoke of the needs of the common people, needs that could not be delayed for the unwinding of red tape, needs that she had seen with her own eyes, touched with the antennae of her own heart.” Somebody had told ER that “she was too sentimental about human want …poor people did not suffer as she would …because they were used to less.” And she declared:
When I heard that, I could not but think of the mother I had seen …whose child had just died. He had died because he had slept on a cold, wet bed. He had slept on that kind of bed because there were no panes in the windows and the rain came in. They lived in that sort of a place because a few days before they had been evicted from the home they could no longer keep, with the father out of work. When the Sheriff had come to evict them, she had pleaded with him to let them stay until her baby was better. But he had replied: “I ain’t here to nurse your goddam kids! …I’m here to put you out.” And he did. And the baby died. Yet people say that the poor do not suffer. People who say that just don’t think and don’t know….
Halle reported that alter that speech, “even at the hard-boiled press table there was an emotional and spiritual response such as I have never before witnessed at a public gathering.” And Halle herself left the meeting “profoundly stirred.” She heard the comments of others as well, and understood the full dimensions of Eleanor Roosevelt’s commitment: Despite all criticism, she “had the courage to be herself and to do the things which seems right to her.” As one Gloucester fisherman was heard to say: “She ain’t dressed up, and she ain’t scared to talk!”
The White House had never been used as a platform from which the First Wife expressed bold, dissenting political ideas. But Eleanor Roosevelt was to transform the position of First Lady as her sense of responsibility and political urgency continually grew. Throughout the White House years, ER juggled her public responsibilities, her ever-increasing political activities, and her complicated private life.