Roosevelt
Thirteen years George VI’s senior, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was born on 30th January 1882 in Hyde Park, also came from a privileged background, although one that was very different from the King’s. The Roosevelts were one of the oldest families in New York, of mixed English and Dutch descent, and had lived in the Hudson Valley since the nineteenth century, when FDR’s great-grandfather built a house near Poughkeepsie. They had made their money from a variety of sources, including the West Indian sugar trade, shipping, real estate, coal and railway.
FDR’s father, James, had inherited considerable wealth. Although involved in business ventures with varying degrees of success, he primarily lived the life of a country squire, bestriding his horse in formal English riding wear, sailing in his yacht on the Hudson in summer and in iceboats in the winter. In 1866, while married to his first wife, Rebecca Howland – a cousin, in the usual Roosevelt fashion – he bought a Colonial-style clapboard house set in 1,300 acres of woodland, with glorious views of the valley. He and his wife gradually added to the property, until it eventually grew to have thirty-five rooms and nine baths. Other wealthy families were also attracted to the area: in 1895, Frederick William Vanderbilt – whose grandfather, Cornelius Vanderbilt, had been the richest man in America in his day – built a mansion down the road.
Although the house was formally called Springwood, most people knew it simply as Hyde Park. It was there that the couple’s first and only son, James Roosevelt Roosevelt, was born. This “double Roosevelt” was a way for his father to boast of his proud family name and also to avoid the “junior” form, which he disliked. The boy soon became known to friends and family as “Rosey”.
Rebecca died in 1876, and after an abortive attempt to marry another cousin, James walked down the aisle again in 1880 with Sara Delano, a member of a family of French Huguenots who had come to America in the seventeenth century and had a pedigree that was even more illustrious than his.
James was already fifty-three when Franklin was born, and Sara, twenty-six years his junior, soon established herself as the dominant influence in their son’s life. While most families as wealthy as the Roosevelts put their newborn babies in the care of nurses or old family retainers, Sara insisted on doing everything herself and took care of her son for almost a year, even though a wet nurse was available. She was also determined that he should grow up a Delano as much as a Roosevelt: his first name came from her favourite uncle. “My son is a Delano, not a Roosevelt at all,” she once declared.
The birth was a difficult one, and Sara was advised to avoid a second and potentially fatal pregnancy. This left her free to devote her life to Franklin: he was schooled at home, initially by Sara herself, and then by a series of governesses and tutors who followed a rigorous study plan that she had drawn up. Playmates were carefully selected from the ranks of the other suitable families that lived along the Hudson. While other children were learning their ABCs in English, Franklin was doing so in French and German too, and soon became fluent in both languages. His father taught him to ride and hunt and also to sail at Campobello, a Canadian island off the coast of Maine, where the family had a summer retreat.
Franklin’s life changed in 1890, when he was eight: his father suffered a mild heart attack and gradually became an invalid. The riding and sailing ended, and Sara became largely responsible for the rest of their son’s upbringing. As an only child raised on a rural estate, the boy spent much of his time in the company of adults; frequent family vacations in Europe broadened his horizons and helped him develop his linguistic skills. At the age of twelve he should have gone off to prep school with his contemporaries, but Sara could not bear to part with him; it was only when he reached fourteen that he finally escaped her influence, attending Groton, a prestigious boarding school that aimed at producing young gentlemen fit to rule the nation. Even then, he still could not escape his mother: when he was quarantined in the school infirmary with scarlet fever, he was astonished to hear a tapping on his window and saw her perched on the top of a workman’s ladder. She returned every day to read to him until he had recovered.1
Just five foot three inches and weighing barely seven stone, Franklin was a sickly child, and already suffered from the frequent colds, throat infections and bouts of sinusitis that would plague him all his life. At Harvard, he was only a C-student, but was a member of the prestigious Alpha Delta Phi fraternity and became editor-in-chief of the Harvard Crimson newspaper. It was while he was studying there that his fifth cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, became vice president and then, in September 1901, after the assassination of President William McKinley, moved into the White House. Although a Republican, Theodore attempted to move his party in a progressive direction and was elected president in his own right in 1904.
FDR went on to Columbia Law School and began his career as a corporate lawyer, but was keen to follow his cousin into politics – although for the Democrats. He scored his first success in 1910, running for the New York State Senate for the district of Poughkeepsie, which included Hyde Park. The area was solidly Republican, but the cachet of the family name, coupled with FDR’s energy and reforming zeal, brought him victory, even though he was still only twenty-eight. Typically, when a friend had proposed that he stand for political office, Franklin’s response had been: “Sounds like a good idea, I’ll have to discuss it with Mother.”
Roosevelt became an instant celebrity in Albany, the capital of New York State, with his progressive views and willingness to take on Tammany Hall, the powerful and often corrupt political machine that controlled New York Democratic politics. He also backed Woodrow Wilson’s successful candidacy for the party in the 1912 presidential election; Wilson repaid Roosevelt for his support after he took office in March 1913 by naming him assistant secretary of the Navy – a post that Theodore had held for a year in the late 1890s during his own rise to the top.
Like his distant cousin before him, FDR had his sights set on higher things. In 1914, he tried to win the Democrats’ backing to run for the US Senate seat for New York; although he did not succeed, he remained undaunted. He fared better in 1920, when he resigned from his Navy job and won his party’s nomination for the vice presidency, on a ticket headed by Governor James M. Cox of Ohio. At thirty-eight, he was four years younger than his cousin Teddy had been when he was nominated for the same post by the Republicans.
Yet, while Teddy had been successful, Franklin’s attempt ended in failure: Cox was soundly beaten by Warren G. Harding, who promised Americans a “return to normalcy” after the turmoil of the Wilson years and won sixty-one per cent of the vote – the greatest percentage achieved by a party since 1820. Roosevelt went back to New York to practise law. Observers thought his political ambitions over. They were wrong: he was playing the long game.
As he told Cox, Roosevelt realized the Democrats would not get back into power until the Republicans were driven out by an economic collapse, and he set out to reposition himself in order to benefit from that moment when it came. In the meantime, he was determined to earn some more money in order to reduce his dependence on his mother. Making full use of his political contacts, he joined the Fidelity & Deposit Company of Maryland, as vice president for New York, New Jersey and New England, earning $25,000 a year – five times more than he had made in the Navy – and having to work only half-days.
Then, in August the following year, came another event that was to change his life for ever. While vacationing at Campobello, Roosevelt contracted an illness that led to permanent paralysis from the waist down. It was diagnosed as polio, even though this has since been doubted: his age – thirty-nine – at the onset of the disease, coupled with his symptoms, has led to suggestions that it was actually Guillain–Barré syndrome, a rare disorder affecting the peripheral nervous system that leads to paralysis, starting in the feet and moving up to the trunk. Whatever the cause, Roosevelt refused to accept that he would be permanently paralysed for the rest of his life. He tried various treatments, and in 1926 bought a resort at Warm Springs, a spa in Georgia, where he founded a hydrotherapy centre for the treatment of polio patients.
Despite his defeat in 1920, Roosevelt was determined to continue his political career. He strongly believed that in order to do so he would have to convince people he was getting better. And so began what was to be an extraordinary exercise in deception. Although he used a wheelchair in private, he was careful not to be seen in it in public. In March 1922, after seven months in which he only lay or sat, he was fitted by doctors with a pair of leg irons weighing a stone: stretching from his heels to above his waist, and secured with a leather pelvic band, they allowed him to stand up, if precariously, as if on stilts. He then developed a method of walking a short distance by swivelling his torso while supporting himself with crutches or a cane. “It was inelegant, hazardous and exhausting, but it was progress and a great refreshment to Roosevelt’s morale,” wrote one biographer.2
Even after he became president, Roosevelt was to make great efforts to ensure he was not shown in the press in a way that would reveal his disability. In public, he would usually appear standing upright, leaning on one side or on an aide or one of his sons. Only two photographs are known to have been taken of him in his wheelchair; only a few seconds of footage exist of the special walk he perfected.
By the late 1920s, Roosevelt was ready to revive his political ambitions. In 1928, when his mentor, Alfred E. Smith, stepped down from the governorship of New York to make an unsuccessful bid for the presidency, Roosevelt secured the Democratic nomination and was elected by a narrow one-per-cent margin. As a reformist governor, he instituted a number of social programmes; when he was re-elected two years later, the margin had grown to fourteen per cent.
As governor of the country’s most populous state, Roosevelt was the Democratic Party’s obvious candidate for the 1932 presidential election, even though this meant pushing past Smith. In his speech accepting the nomination, he promised a “new deal for the American people”, adding: “This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.”
The poll was held in the midst of the Great Depression; the promises of Herbert Hoover, the Republican incumbent, to bring about a new era of prosperity had ended in plunging industrial production and incomes and huge rises in the number of homeless and the unemployment rate, which was to peak at twenty-five per cent. Hoover stood little chance. With the Democratic Party united behind him and a leading southern conservative, John Nance Garner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, as his running mate, Roosevelt achieved a landslide victory, winning 57.4 per cent of the popular vote and taking forty-two states to just six for Hoover. The election marked a turning point in American political history: Roosevelt managed to assemble a new majority coalition for the Democrats made up of organized labour, African Americans, Jews and Italian and Polish Americans that was to dominate most presidential elections for the three decades that followed.
Roosevelt’s inauguration on 4th March 1933 coincided with another twist in the country’s economic woes: a bank crisis, prompting him to utter his famous phrase: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” The next day, Congress passed an Emergency Banking Act, which defused the crisis. It was one among a record number of bills and executive orders during the first hundred days of Roosevelt’s presidency. These formed the first stage of what became known, after his 1932 convention speech, as the “New Deal”, the focus of which was on providing “relief, recovery and reform”. Such measures began to bring benefits, but the economy was still in a parlous state when Roosevelt stood for a second term in 1936. Standing against Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, who fought a lacklustre campaign, his victory was even greater: he increased his share of the popular vote to 60.8 per cent, carrying all but two states.
FDR’s private life was more complex – and understandable only in terms of the dominant role played by his mother Sara, which was to continue until her death in 1941, two weeks before her eighty-seventh birthday. This made it all the more surprising that when he came to marry, he chose a woman of whom his mother disapproved.
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was the daughter of Elliott Roosevelt, the younger brother of Theodore, the future president, and Anna Hall Roosevelt. Two years younger than Franklin and a distant cousin, she was born at 56 West 37th Street in New York City, into a world of immense wealth and privilege. Nicknamed “Granny” by her family, she had an old-fashioned manner. At a time when a great premium was put on physical beauty, she was not a pretty child – a fact that, cruelly, was often pointed out to her. “Eleanor, I hardly know what’s to happen to you. You’re so plain that you really have nothing to do except be good,” her mother once said to her as she was playing with a cousin.3 Other comments followed, both to her face and behind her back, leaving an enduring mark. “I often felt that I’d like to have the floor open so that I could sink into it,” she once said.4
Eleanor’s life took a tragic turn: when she was eight, her mother died of diphtheria; a year later, the same disease claimed her four-year-old brother, Elliott Jr. To add to her woes, her father was an alcoholic. After a series of failed cures and stays in sanatoriums, he collapsed and died at the age of thirty-four. Already before his death, Eleanor and her surviving younger brother, Hall, had been sent to live with their maternal grandmother, Mary Ludlow Hall, who had a home in New York City and an estate at Tivoli on the Hudson. It was a depressing life, and Eleanor felt lonely, unloved and insecure. Although growing tall and with wavy, honey-coloured hair and a flawless complexion, she seemed reconciled to not being a great beauty. “It may seem strange but no matter how plain a woman may be, if truth and loyalty are stamped upon her face all will be attracted to her and she will do good to all who come near her and those who know her well will always love her,” she wrote optimistically when aged fifteen.5
Escape came later that year when the family sent her to Allenswood Academy, a small finishing school for the daughters of wealthy Americans and Europeans near Wimbledon on the south-west outskirts of London. The headmistress, Marie Souvestre, was a French feminist who, at a time when little attention was paid to the education of women, taught her girls to think critically. Eleanor grew much more confident and self-assured during her stay, despite the school’s curious rules, one of which was a requirement that, after lunch, the girls lie on the floor for an hour and a half and fix their minds on a single thought that would then be discussed at teatime.
Eleanor would have liked to stay on when her three years were up, but in the summer of 1902, at the age of seventeen, she was ordered back to America by her grandmother to be formally presented to New York society. It was shortly after her return that, while travelling on a train from New York to Poughkeepsie, she happened across Franklin. As distant cousins, they already knew each other vaguely from previous encounters and soon fell into conversation; Franklin even took her to the Pullman car in which his mother was sitting. They met again by chance a few weeks later, when they found themselves in the same private box at the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden; then, that New Year’s Eve, along with other members of the Roosevelt clan, they were both at a reception in the White House following Theodore’s election as president in his own right.
It was during the course of 1903 that their relationship appears to have begun in earnest. It was a curious match: still somewhat old-maidish in appearance, Eleanor had little in common with the glamorous society girls usually frequented by Franklin, who had become a tall, handsome and physically vital young man. Yet she offered him the kind of intellectual companionship that he had hitherto found only among his fellow male students at Harvard. She also encouraged him to take an interest in social issues, bringing him along on tours of the East Side slums of New York, where she taught the underprivileged. To the ambitious Franklin, there was the lure of social advancement too: the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt family, to which Eleanor belonged, was much more prestigious than Franklin’s Hyde Park one – not least because it counted Theodore among its members.
It was only that November, when the Delano family was gathered at the family seat in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, for their annual Thanksgiving get-together, that Franklin broke the news to his mother: a few days earlier he had proposed to Eleanor. It was like a bombshell. Although Sara had met Eleanor several times since their first encounter on the train and had even welcomed her to the family retreat on Campobello Island, it had never occurred to her that there was any romantic attachment between her and Franklin. It was not just the shock felt by a possessive mother of losing her only son to another woman. Sara was convinced her son could do better for himself than Eleanor. And so, although unable to prevent the match – her son was twenty-one, after all – she did the next best thing: she begged him not to say anything and give it a year. “Franklin gave me quite a startling announcement,” she wrote that evening in her diary.6
Sara continued to hope that her son would change his mind. That winter she took him off on a six-week Caribbean cruise with a Harvard room-mate; maybe distance would take his mind off his still secret fiancée. Her efforts were to no avail. Franklin and Eleanor’s engagement was announced on 1st December 1904; they married on 17th March the following year, St Patrick’s Day. The day was chosen so that Theodore Roosevelt, in New York for the parade, could give her away – squeezing in the duty between the parade itself and two speeches. “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family,” Theodore told him after they had exchanged their vows.
Although she had little alternative but to accept Eleanor, Sara retained her grip on her son. Before the marriage, she had embarked on a mission of shaping her future daughter-in-law. This continued after the couple returned from their honeymoon, a three-month trip through Britain, France and Italy. Sara had leased for them a four-storey brownstone at 125 East 36th Street in New York, a mere three blocks from her own home in the city. She had furnished it herself and hired the servants.
Eleanor, still only twenty when she married and without a mother of her own, was in many ways grateful for her mother-in-law’s advice. She was also stifled by it, and the two women began to clash over the rearing of the children, the first of whom, Anna, was born in May 1906, followed by James a year and a half later. Sara was soon to step up her influence even further: at Christmas 1907 she announced she was giving the couple as a present a new five-storey brownstone. The house, at 47 East 65th Street, completed the following year, just happened to adjoin a similar property she was building for herself. The house’s conception, design and interior decoration were completely in the hands of Franklin and his mother. Eleanor was not even allowed onto the premises until the house was finished.
Living next door meant Sara was now able to intervene in every aspect of her son and daughter-in-law’s lives. The two houses were linked by doors at every level, allowing her to check up on dinner-party arrangements and make sure her growing brood of grandchildren was being looked after properly. The Roosevelts’ fourth child, Elliott, born in September 1910, recalled how, when his mother was entertaining guests to tea, his grandmother would often arrive and, unbidden, take over the role of hostess. “This was a constant, nagging problem for mother in her own development of her own household abilities from the earliest years,” he said.7 It was little better in summer when the whole family would decamp to Campobello Island, where they vacationed in adjoining homes.
Eleanor was to gain a measure of independence from her mother-in-law when Franklin was elected to the New York State Senate that November and they moved to Albany. She gained even more with the move to Washington that came with her husband’s appointment as assistant secretary to the Navy. This time they lived in a house found not by Sara but by Eleanor’s aunt Anna, known in the family as Bye.
While Sara’s sway over Franklin and Eleanor was waning, another woman, whose influence was to be even more disruptive, was looming on the horizon. Overwhelmed by the demands of Washington society and pregnant for a fifth time, Eleanor decided she needed help. Aunt Bye had a solution in the form of Lucy Mercer, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a suitably well-connected family that had fallen on hard times. After a brief interview, Eleanor took her on to work three mornings at a salary of $30 a week.
Personable and efficient, Lucy dealt with all the invitations, bills and other paperwork, and got on well with the Roosevelt children. She was also very attractive: at five foot nine, she was slightly shorter than Eleanor, and had blue eyes, a milky complexion, light-brown hair and a regal posture. In character, the two women were very different: Eleanor was earnest and oblivious to fashion, and had, according to Elliott, “something of a schoolmarm’s air about her”. Lucy, by contrast, was poised, glamorous and self-assured. As one of her cousins put it: “Every man who ever knew her fell in love with her.”
Roosevelt was soon among them. It is not certain when his relationship with Lucy began, though it is thought to have been some time in 1916. It is very clear when it came to light, however. In September 1918, he returned from a two-month inspection trip to the Front in Europe so badly ill with influenza that when the Leviathan, the warship on which he was travelling, docked in New York, he was met by a doctor and an ambulance. Since his own home was by then let out, he was taken, much to Sara’s satisfaction, to her house. While he was in bed, Eleanor, distraught, started to unpack his bags. Concern for her husband’s health was soon to turn into an overwhelming sense of betrayal: tucked away amid the clothes and toiletries, she came across a bundle of lightly scented letters that revealed he was having an affair with Lucy.
The extent of their relationship and whether it extended to sex is not clear; it would certainly have been difficult for them to have conducted a full-blown clandestine affair. Franklin’s house was full of servants, and Lucy still lived with her mother. A tryst in a Washington hotel, where FDR was already well known, would have been tricky. Plus, Lucy was a devout Catholic who regarded sex with a married man as a cardinal sin. The incriminating letters, presumably destroyed, have never been seen by historians. Whatever the truth, Eleanor was devastated: the man whom she had loved and supported and by whom she had had six children had betrayed her with another woman who was younger, livelier and more attractive than her – and worse, was her own social secretary. Twenty-five years later she wrote: “The bottom dropped out of my own particular world and I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.”8
Although concerned about the prospect of her children growing up without a father, Eleanor did not want to remain trapped in a loveless marriage, and offered her husband a divorce. Franklin, completely besotted with Lucy, appears seriously to have considered the possibility, even though it would have certainly provoked a family crisis. At this point Sara, who was still paying Franklin’s household expenses despite his $5,000-a-year naval job and Eleanor’s own income from her family, intervened. She told her son that if he left his wife she would “not give him another dollar”. Nor would she allow him to inherit his beloved Springwood. Roosevelt was also warned by Louis Howe, a former newspaperman turned trusted political adviser, that a divorce would mean the end of his chances of winning elective office.
Faced with the loss of family, money, his ancestral home and his political career, Roosevelt agreed to remain married. But Eleanor would allow him to do so only under two conditions: he had to break off with Mercer immediately and could never again share his wife’s bed – something that appears to have caused little concern to Eleanor herself, who once told her daughter she considered sex an ordeal that women must bear. Roosevelt agreed to the conditions. As their son, James, wrote later, “After that father and mother had an armed truce that endured to the day he died, despite several occasions I was to observe in which he, in one way or another, held out his arms to mother and she flatly refused to enter his embrace.”9 Lucy fled to her relatives, and in February 1920 married Winthrop Rutherfurd, a wealthy widower twenty-nine years her senior. As Joseph E. Persico, who has charted the affair in his book, Franklin and Lucy, put it: “In the end, the three parties in the triangle behaved according to character, Eleanor self-sacrificing, Franklin self-preserving, Lucy lovelorn but resilient.”10
Roosevelt’s illness was to bring him and Eleanor closer again, if only temporarily: she nursed him during the first agonizing weeks, but soon found it a challenge to care for him, and Roosevelt began to tire of her exhortations to do exercises. In the spring of 1922, he left the bustle of their New York apartment and retreated to Springwood, which was largely empty.
Their marriage had already changed from a conventional union into something more akin to a political partnership – and one in which Eleanor found herself in a more powerful position. Indeed, the events of 1918 ultimately proved to have been something of a liberation for her. She had spent the first dozen years of marriage entirely in her husband’s shadow, whether helping him fulfil his ambitions or bearing him six children – all the while overseen by Sara. Now she felt free to go her own way, entering a community of politically aware women who shared her passion for social reform. While her husband was pursuing his political career, she began to make a name for herself in her own right, organizing conferences, serving on committees and helping raise funds for the Democratic Party.
Eleanor was also developing a network of independent-minded women friends – among them prominent lesbian couples such as Elizabeth Read and Esther Lape, and Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman. Such friendships inevitably led to gossip, fuelled by her acerbic cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth. Never too fond of Eleanor, she was heard remarking loudly in a fashionable Washington restaurant, “I don’t care what they say, I simply cannot believe that Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian.”11
During the 1920s Eleanor regularly visited the home in Greenwich Village that Read, an attorney and scholar of international affairs, shared with Lape, a college professor, having dinner, reading poetry and discussing progressive ideas. Her involvement with Cook and Dickerman became even closer: in 1924, they built a fieldstone cottage named Val-Kill, with a swimming pool next to it, on a piece of land donated by Roosevelt in the grounds of the Hyde Park estate. Dubbed by FDR “the love nest” and “Honeymoon Cottage”, it rapidly turned into the three women’s private domain. Other joint projects followed: in 1925, they founded a newsletter, Women’s Democratic News, and the following year they bought the Todhunter School for Girls in New York City, where Dickerman became principal and Eleanor a teacher. Then, in 1927, they opened a factory at Val-Kill in which they made handcrafted reproductions of early American furniture: Cook became manager and Eleanor its sales agent.
Such friendships, as Rodger Streitmatter, an expert on the First Lady, put it, “show that love between women was definitely not an alien concept for Eleanor. She was a professed believer in sexual freedom – including people acting on homosexual desires. In 1925, she wrote in her personal journal: ‘No form of love is to be despised.’”12
The real love of Eleanor’s life, however, was a pioneering woman journalist named Lorena Hickok – or “Hick”, as everyone called her. Weighing in at fourteen stone and often with a whiskey glass in her hand and cigar in her mouth, Hick was an extraordinary character who rose from humble origins to become one of America’s leading reporters and the first woman to have her byline on the front page of the New York Times. She was also a lesbian, living for eight years from 1918 with Ellie Morse, whom she encountered when they were both working at the Minneapolis Tribune.
Hick met Eleanor in 1928 while covering politics for the Associated Press, America’s biggest news network, out of its New York office. In that year’s presidential election, she focused on the campaigns of the New York governor, Alfred E. Smith – who was to be soundly beaten by Herbert Hoover – and of Roosevelt.
It was far from love at first sight: Eleanor, Hick wrote later, “was very plain”. Yet the future First Lady was also an intelligent and forceful woman whose many activities in the social sphere made her newsworthy. Reluctant to be pigeonholed as someone who wrote about “women’s issues”, Hick avoided covering Eleanor. That changed in 1932, when Roosevelt stood for the presidency and Hick was sent to cover his campaign. This meant talking to the candidate’s wife, who had become one of his most trusted advisers. Hick returned from her first interview with Eleanor smitten. The feeling was mutual: time and time again, Eleanor would pluck Hick out from among the gaggle of reporters whenever they met on the campaign trail. They became even closer in October that year, when another female reporter who had been covering Eleanor moved to San Francisco and Hick, as the only woman left in the bureau, was given the job.
Infatuated, Hick painted an increasingly flattering picture of the would-be First Lady in her articles, some of which, in a clear breach of usual journalistic rules, she handed over to be vetted by the Roosevelt campaign before sending them to her editors. Objectivity went out of the window: it became her aim to ensure that the Roosevelts made it into the White House.
Shortly after FDR’s victory, Hick bowed to the inevitable: in June 1933 she left journalism and, with Eleanor’s help, secured a job as chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, crossing America to report on the effectiveness of the various programmes that had been introduced. She also gave public-relations advice to the First Lady, encouraging her to carve out a profile independent of her husband’s. At Hick’s suggestion, Eleanor began to hold weekly press conferences and, starting in 1935, wrote a syndicated column entitled ‘My Day’ – which, over the years that followed, was to provide an extraordinary fly-on-the-wall insight into the life of the first couple.
The true nature of the relationship between the two women was long a matter of debate – were they merely friends or actually lovers? Any such ambiguity seemed to be dispelled in 1978, when the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library opened eighteen cardboard boxes containing 3,500 letters that the women wrote to each other during their thirty-year friendship. They included passages that were gushingly affectionate and sometimes even openly erotic. “I wish I could lie down beside you and take you in my arms,” Eleanor wrote to her friend, whom she addressed as “Hick Dearest”. Hick, away on work in Minnesota, wrote on 5th December 1933: “I’ve been trying today to bring back your face – to remember just how you look [...]. 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.”13
Yet some experts on Eleanor have been appalled at the suggestion she was a lesbian. They noted that she often wrote in a florid style, even to her mother-in-law, with whom her relations were cool. Arthur Schlesinger Jr said it was important “not to read twentieth-century preoccupations into nineteenth-century forms of personal relationships”. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr, the literary executor of his mother’s estate, also warned against attaching too much significance to Eleanor’s prose style. “Remember, my mother was brought up in an era when children read the Brontës and Jane Austen, and they adopted that effusive form of writing,” he said.14