Eleanor and Hick
Page 1
ALSO BY SUSAN QUINN
Furious Improvisation
Human Trials
Marie Curie
A Mind of Her Own
On Stage
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2016 by Susan Quinn
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Photograph credits
Unless credited below, photographs are courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library
Insert here and here: Hennepin County Library Special Collections
Here and here: Bettmann / Corbis
Here: Marion Post Wolcott / Library of Congress
Here: Photo by the author
ISBN 9781594205408 (hardcover)
ISBN 9781101607022 (e-book)
Version_1
CONTENTS
Also by Susan Quinn
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
PART I:
UNEXPECTED LOVE
CHAPTER 1 Beginning to Trust
CHAPTER 2 Eleanor According to Hick
CHAPTER 3 Je T’aime et Je T’adore
CHAPTER 4 Lorena
CHAPTER 5 Eleanor
CHAPTER 6 Getaway
PART II:
BECOMING A TEAM
CHAPTER 7 Partnership
CHAPTER 8 La Presidenta and the Newshawk
CHAPTER 9 Getting Away with It
CHAPTER 10 Now or Never
CHAPTER 11 Blowing Off
CHAPTER 12 Looking for a Home
PART III:
TOGETHER AND APART
CHAPTER 13 Trading Jobs
CHAPTER 14 This Place!
CHAPTER 15 Time Tears On
PART IV:
THE WORLD AT WAR
CHAPTER 16 Afraid No More
CHAPTER 17 A Better Politician Than Her Husband
CHAPTER 18 In Residence
CHAPTER 19 In It, Up to the Neck
CHAPTER 20 Risking Everything
CHAPTER 21 A Fight for Love and Glory
CHAPTER 22 Winning with the Women
CHAPTER 23 There Is Only One President
CHAPTER 24 The Greatest Catastrophe for the World
PART V:
STARTING OVER
CHAPTER 25 Sliding on Marble Floors
CHAPTER 26 The Opinion of Mankind
CHAPTER 27 A New Way to Be Useful
CHAPTER 28 Living On
Postscript
Photographs
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION
BY THE TIME FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT was elected president in 1932, his wife, Eleanor, had succeeded in forging an independent life for herself—a life of teaching, writing, and political activism. Now she was about to become First Lady, with all the duties that would entail. In the midst of the victory celebrations, Eleanor was filled with dread about her future.
Lorena Hickok, a top reporter assigned to cover the new First Lady for the Associated Press, was one of the few who noticed Eleanor’s unhappiness and took it seriously. Hickok—“Hick” to everyone who knew her—worked patiently to gain Eleanor’s trust. By the time she wrote her stories for the AP, Eleanor and Hick had fallen in love. Hick knew both the publishable and the unpublishable reasons for Eleanor’s unhappiness. She wrote a profile that was frank about Eleanor’s reluctance to become First Lady, but without revealing all the reasons why.
America was in the depths the Great Depression. Banks were running out of money, unemployment was spiraling upward, and there was a very real possibility that the country would erupt in violence. Americans were in desperate need of the leadership Franklin Roosevelt was promising to provide. Eleanor would become FDR’s most important partner in the great challenges he faced. She would often act as his conscience, reminding him of the human cost of his political decisions, and urging him to speak out courageously about racism and inequity. But more and more, as FDR waited to assume the presidency, Eleanor found excuses to spend her days and nights with Hick.
It would be hard to imagine a less likely pair than Eleanor and Hick. Eleanor had grown up in a mansion on the Hudson, with nannies and maids, while Hick had worked as a maid in other people’s houses, starting at age fourteen, in the bleak railroad towns of South Dakota. Yet despite vastly different circumstances, both women had lonely and loveless childhoods, and both needed the kind of deep caring they gave to each other.
Hick would have loved to settle down with Eleanor for life. It will never be clear if Eleanor could or would have agreed to such an arrangement. Still, she loved Hick in a new and thrilling way. In other times and circumstances, she and Hick might have been able to make a life together, like the other women partners in their circle.
But Hick and Eleanor’s intimacy would have to fit in around not only Eleanor’s marriage, but also momentous national and world events. After FDR was elected, Hick quietly moved into the White House, where she stayed off and on for the entire thirteen years of the Roosevelt presidency. During those years, Eleanor and Hick managed to form a partnership that transformed their lives and contributed in a major way to important initiatives of the New Deal.
When they weren’t together, Eleanor and Hick wrote tenderly of their longing for one another. “Oh! How I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit,” Eleanor wrote Hick during the first year of their relationship. “I went and kissed your photograph instead and tears were in my eyes.”
“There have been times,” Hick wrote from San Francisco after they vacationed together out west in the summer of 1934, “when I’ve missed you so much that it has been like a physical pain, and at those times I’ve hated San Francisco because you were not there.”
Eleanor loved Hick for many reasons, but it didn’t hurt that such a relationship was considered a subversive act within her wellborn family. Hick was a woman, for one thing. She was also a reporter, a species that FDR’s aunt Kassie proudly asserted she had never spoken to in her life. Aunt Kassie, like others in her circle, believed a lady’s name should only appear in print at the time of her coming out, her marriage, and her death. Hick had a peaches-and-cream complexion and beautiful shapely legs, but weighed two hundred pounds and dressed without frills, in a tailored style. She reveled in food and drink, played a good game of poker, smoked a lot, including an occasional cigar, and was capable of swearing a blue streak.
Unlike Eleanor, who kept strong emotions under control, Hick let it all out. When she was typing out a “sob story,” tears would run down her cheeks; when she wrote a humorous piece, her laughter shook her entire body.
Hick was fun to be with, but she was also tempestuous—her letters to Eleanor were often written in a fury about one injustice or another, especially after she went on the road for New Deal relief boss Harry Hopkins to report on the desperate poverty of the Depression years. “This valley is the damnedest place I ever saw,” she wrote Eleanor from El Centro, California. “If you don’t agree with them, you are a Communist, of course.” And another
time, when the Red Cross was withholding warm clothes for an emergency: “Good God, I wonder what constitutes an emergency in the eyes of the old ladies who run the Red Cross!”
Eleanor’s upbringing would never allow her to express herself so emphatically. But Hick’s embrace gave her the courage to open up, more than she ever had before, about her true feelings. “I’m back at my worst verge of tears condition which I hoped I could eliminate this summer,” she wrote Hick in August 1935. “I only hope no one else realizes it and I don’t think they do for I look well.”
Eleanor and Hick’s epistolary relationship was a rare and remarkable thing. They poured out their longing in thousands of letters. But they also used the letters to tell the stories of their time. Hick’s journalistic training served her well as she reported on the terrible human cost of the Depression: she was good at gathering facts, good at getting people to talk, and good at vivid storytelling. Officially, she was reporting to Harry Hopkins. But she told Eleanor all the same stories—and some extra ones—in her long and detailed letters. The letters and reports added urgency to Eleanor’s advocacy for people in need, and sometimes even made it to the president’s desk. At other times, Hick described situations so harrowing that they sent Eleanor into action. One of Hick’s reports about coal-mining families in West Virginia impelled Eleanor to hop in her roadster and drive down and see for herself. Not long after, she and others drew up plans for Arthurdale, a homestead community to house the mining families. Arthurdale was the first of the many resettlement projects for destitute families built by the Roosevelt administration. It started with a report from Hick.
Eleanor’s letters to Hick are a kind of reportage themselves, chronicling her life in the fishbowl of the White House—more honest by far than her published accounts. They came so frequently that Hick, out in the field reporting on the lives of poor people, asked Eleanor to use special plain stationery. The embossed gold letterhead of the White House was an embarrassment when it arrived at a post office in Bemidji, Minnesota, or Jesup, Georgia. Eventually, Eleanor’s long and detailed descriptions of her days in the White House led Hick to suggest she take her story to the world. “My Day,” the daily column that brought Eleanor Roosevelt into the homes of America, grew directly out of the private diary reports that she first sent to Hick.
Eleanor became a word-producing marvel: she wrote her column six times a week from the 1930s until almost the end of her life. She also wrote memoirs that purported to be the story of her life. These, it must be said, are more fiction than fact when it comes to Eleanor’s feelings about her marriage, her mother-in-law, her troubled children, and her life in general. The “My Day” column and the memoirs are useful as a record of events, but they paint an unreal picture of the emotional life of Eleanor Roosevelt. The letters between Eleanor and Hick tell a truer and more compelling story—not just of Eleanor but also of the lesser-known but brilliant journalist and chronicler of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok.
Eleanor and Hick exchanged well over thirty-three hundred letters, starting when they fell in love, in 1932, and ending not long before Eleanor’s death thirty years later. Hick died in 1968, five and a half years after Eleanor. Entrusted by Eleanor with both sides of the correspondence, Hick debated with herself and others about their final disposition. Some of Eleanor’s loyal friends thought all the letters should be burned, to protect the First Lady’s reputation. Hick did destroy some of the most explicit ones. She tried retyping others, leaving out the passionate parts. Fortunately for posterity, she soon gave up that effort, which was draining the correspondence of all life. In the end, she chose to donate the letters to the Roosevelt Presidential Library in Hyde Park, New York, with the stipulation that they could not be opened until ten years after her death.
On schedule, in 1978, a journalist named Doris Faber, a prolific writer of young adult books about prominent Americans, happened upon the letters. She was shocked and dismayed by what she found. “How could any reasonably perceptive adult deny that these were love letters?” she asked rhetorically. “And that a love affair, with at least some physical expression, had existed between this woman reporter and Eleanor Roosevelt. Unthinkable!” In “something like a classic state of shock,” Faber asked the Hyde Park librarian why the collection couldn’t be “locked up again, at least for another several decades.”
Faber faulted Lorena Hickok for donating the letters and allowing the world to see them. She suggested that Hick had been seduced, in lonely old age, by the library’s archivist. She claimed that Hick had acted out of “an uncontrollable craving for posthumous fame.” Finally, Faber was persuaded that the story was going to come out, in more sensational form, if she didn’t tell it.
The resulting book, The Life of Lorena Hickok: E.R.’s Friend, was published in 1980. Doris Faber was a thorough researcher, and brought together valuable information from friends who have since died. But the “very mixed emotions” with which she undertook the project muffled a story that deserves to be fully told—and celebrated. Instead, she sought to reassure readers that “the Eleanor Roosevelt who emerges in the Hickok Papers does not, to any significant extent, differ from the First Lady of the World we already know.” By 1980, when the book came out, there were already some outspoken lesbian women who yearned for more. Kathy Riley lamented in the journal Big Mama Rag that Doris Faber was the one who got to the letters first. It was “a crime,” she wrote, “akin to turning over Sappho’s poems to medieval Christian theologians.”
Yet there were others who criticized Faber for even suggesting that Eleanor Roosevelt might have had an intimate relationship with another woman. One of them was Helen Gahagan Douglas, the very progressive Democrat who spoke out against McCarthyism, and was accused by Richard Nixon of being “pink right down to her underwear.” She refused to cooperate with Faber once she learned that there might be even a hint of intimacy between Hick and Eleanor. In 1980, homosexuality aroused fear and hostility, even in a woman who had championed migrant workers and African American soldiers.
By the time I began reading the letters at Hyde Park six years ago, a great deal had changed. Blanche Wiesen Cook had presented the intimate relationship between Eleanor and Hick in a new and entirely sympathetic light in 1999, in the second volume of her groundbreaking biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. In our own time, love between two women seems neither shocking nor shameful to me or to many others.
Yet I still encounter people who are reluctant to believe that Eleanor Roosevelt was passionately involved with another woman. “Eleanor Roosevelt?” they will say. “Really? A lesbian relationship? A physical lesbian relationship?”
I suspect that people react this way because they have a fixed idea of Eleanor Roosevelt, with her flowered hat and her purse and her sensible shoes, slightly bent forward as she marches off to make the world a better place. That Eleanor Roosevelt dwells in a world that transcends all the longings, hurts, and excitements of passion. But that public persona masked the real Eleanor—as her letters to Hick make abundantly clear.
The letters between Eleanor and Hick are less remarkable now for their shock value than for the moving and poignant story they tell of two women who loved each other intensely and deeply. Women who loved women surrounded both of them, and showed the way to a freer life. For Eleanor Roosevelt especially, who was required to marry within narrow boundaries of class and wealth, the possibility of such love was liberating. When she found it, with Hick, it changed her life, and Hick’s, forever.
PART I
UNEXPECTED LOVE
CHAPTER ONE
BEGINNING TO TRUST
BY THE TIME FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT was nominated for president, in August 1932, some doubted whether a survivor of polio, paralyzed from the waist down, had the strength to conduct a vigorous campaign, let alone lead the country out of the worst economic depression in its history. Even his advisers were worried. FDR came up with a defiant answer to all of them: a nine-t
housand-mile, twenty-one-day trip through seventeen midwestern and western states aboard the Roosevelt Special.
It was a trip perfectly suited to both FDR’s temperament and his physical limitations. As soon as the train came to a stop, FDR stepped out on the rear platform, gripping the arm of his son Jimmy. The railing cut off sight of his lower body, so the public saw only his broad shoulders and chest as he delivered his one-minute address. “It’s nice to be back in Dubuque,” he would begin, flashing his wide smile, adding, “I’m just here to look, learn, and listen.” His speech was patrician, but his message was friendly, and his physical courage buoyed his worried listeners.
Between stops, FDR had only to look out the train window to see just how bad things had become. In Chicago, there were blocks of lifeless factories, overgrown parks, and rows of vacant stores with blackened windows. Shantytowns, clustered along the railroad tracks, sent up smoke from cooking fires. In the rich farm country of Iowa and Ohio, the farmhouses were unpainted, the fences were crumbling, and food was rotting in the fields. By the time the Roosevelt Special reached Seattle, Roosevelt had reason to speak “in the name of a stricken America and a stricken world.”
Even in such terrible times, however, Franklin Roosevelt managed to enjoy himself. He loved everything about campaigning, from the enthusiasm of the local crowds to the sparring with the newspaper “boys.” FDR’s sitting room was open to all comers: local politicians got on and off, and close advisers and future cabinet members huddled late into the night, plotting a future course for a country in crisis. FDR enhanced his listening and learning with healthy doses of jokes, storytelling, poker, and booze.
Eleanor Roosevelt waited until the return journey from the West Coast to join the Roosevelt Special. She didn’t share her husband’s enthusiasm for the cheering admirers on the campaign trail. “It seems undignified and meaningless but perhaps we need it!” she once confided. She wasn’t comfortable with the jocular atmosphere around FDR, either. Try as she might, Eleanor didn’t always get the jokes and was uncomfortable with the teasing. On her honeymoon, she had refused to join a bridge game that involved money, because she had been raised to think it was improper. Drinking, especially, made her uneasy. She had her own reasons for disliking even the smell of alcohol: her father had drunk himself to death, and it now looked as though her brother was going down the same path.