Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  “Good night, dear one!” Hick wrote six days later. “I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now—I shall!”

  “Dear one,” Eleanor wrote four days after that, “it’s getting nearer and nearer and I am half afraid to be too happy. It’s the way I felt as a child when I dreaded disappointment!”

  In their letters, which combined their deep affection with their passionate need to make a difference, Hick and Eleanor were often at their best. They were happy when they were part of a shared enterprise, as they were when Hick was out in the field and Eleanor was working her magic back in Washington. But when Hick was at her leisure at the White House and Eleanor was attending to her unending mountain of appointments and family obligations, things often didn’t go so well. The reunion that Christmas didn’t live up to expectations. Knowing how busy Eleanor would be with family and public events, the two of them planned to spend one evening together, December 22. But when the evening arrived, Eleanor was drawn into a long conversation with her daughter, Anna, who was upset about the public airing of her divorce. Hick, waiting for time alone with Eleanor, grew more and more impatient. Finally, she stormed off, furious, announcing that she was taking the train to New York and would spend the next two weeks with her friends there.

  “I went to sleep saying a little prayer,” Eleanor wrote Hick on December 23. “God give me depth enough not to hurt Hick again,” adding, “Darling, I know I’m not up to you in many ways but I love you dearly and I do learn sometimes.” After they talked, on Christmas Day, Eleanor wrote Hick again. “Dearest one bless you and forgive me and believe me you’ve brought me more and meant more to me than you know and I will be thankful Christmas eve and Christmas day and every day for your mere being in the world. I’d like to hug you.”

  Unfortunately, because Hick became custodian of the correspondence, and threw out many of her own letters while keeping Eleanor’s, we don’t know what she wrote in response to these entreaties. But it’s fair to guess that she quickly calmed down, as she did on later occasions, and then castigated herself for being so volatile.

  Eleanor wrote to thank Hick for her wonderful presents (underclothes, automobile first aid kit, lemon fork, and a poetry collection). Before long, the two were starting to plot another field trip—this one to Puerto Rico in March, at the time of Hick’s birthday. “Franklin said I could ask Harry Hopkins about Puerto Rico,” Eleanor wrote her. “I only wonder if I’ll be a nuisance for you for of course we can’t keep it quiet and there will be reporters and fuss. Would you rather I didn’t try to go with you? Be honest, I won’t be hurt!”

  Hick was all for it, of course.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LA PRESIDENTA AND THE NEWSHAWK

  AS ELEANOR WALKED WITH HICK through the worst slums of San Juan, Puerto Rico, naked children surrounded her, shouting, “La Presidenta.” She and her press retinue marched side by side past dilapidated houses built on stilts above polluted waters, and shacks clinging to old fortress walls. In the swamp slums created by the 1932 hurricane, two years before, she peered into a rickety hut built with debris, and instructed the photographer, the one male among the women journalists, to take a photograph. “I want you to get this,” she instructed him, “to really show what it is like.”

  But no photograph could do justice to the desperation of those Puerto Rican slums. “Photographs don’t give you the odors,” Hick wrote Hopkins. “Imagine a swamp, with stagnant, scum-covered, muddy water everywhere, in open ditches, pools, back up around and under the houses. . . . Pack into this area, over those pools and ditches as many shacks as you can, so close together that there is barely room to pass between them. Ramshackle, makeshift affairs, made of bits of board and rusty tin, picked up here and there. Into each room put a family, ranging from three or four persons to eighteen or twenty. Put in some malaria and hookworm, and in about every other house someone with tuberculosis, coughing and spitting around, probably occupying the family’s only bed. And remember, not a latrine in the place. No room for them. . . . And pour down into that mess good, hot sun.”

  Eleanor’s prediction that there would be “reporters and fuss” on the trip to Puerto Rico came true. What was supposed to be Hick’s investigation of conditions turned instead into a media feast for the women reporters who came along. They focused more on the First Lady than on Puerto Rico’s problems. But the trip did draw attention to the extreme poverty on the island, where, as Eleanor pointed out, people had lived through three generations of depression as well as a recent devastating hurricane. It also set the precedent for Eleanor Roosevelt’s lifetime of trips abroad, in which she would fight to get the real story in the face of ever-growing celebrity.

  Eleanor had brought along her riding clothes with the wildly optimistic idea that she could ride up into the remote mountain areas. When that proved impossible, she agreed to be driven. But, in her usual fashion, she insisted on minimizing pomp: she rode in a small car, marked with the initials of the Civil Works Administration. Nonetheless, one town along the way saluted her with “sirens and aerial bombs” and another with a detachment of soldiers who wanted to lead a procession. “I cannot crawl along at this pace,” she protested, and sent them on their way.

  Eleanor and the press corps visited a small factory where women were earning $2 for sewing a dozen nightgowns, which would sell on the mainland for $1.95 each. She knocked on the doors of palm-thatched cottages in the banana and coffee forest. At one home, she and her retinue found “only a crying baby with a rooster on her crib.”

  Despite the grim conditions in much of the country, and despite Eleanor’s insistence on visiting people in distress—in a women’s prison, a juvenile jail, an insane asylum—there were spontaneous moments reminiscent of her happy days traveling with Hick the previous summer. Eleanor insisted on driving over mountain roads with hairpin turns on the edge of precipices, rather than the safer routes. Spying a cable messenger on a bike along the way, she stopped him in the middle of the road and wrote out birthday greetings to her youngest son, John, back in the United States.

  Eleanor and the retinue of journalists celebrated Hick’s forty-first birthday on a mountaintop, with a picnic lunch for everyone to share. They arrived back in San Juan at the end of their three-hundred-mile journey just in time for a reception at the Governor’s Palace, the magnificent sixteenth-century edifice La Fortaleza. Eleanor’s costume for the occasion was duly noted in the exhaustive newspaper coverage: “a flowered chiffon with a spray of pale lavender and native orchids.”

  The flurry of excitement surrounding the visit of “La Presidenta” drowned out the objections of the Puerto Rican independence movement leaders, who complained that Mrs. Roosevelt was the wife of “Puerto Rico’s greatest oppressor.” Instead, she was praised for the thoroughness of her investigations. “You can’t fool Mrs. Roosevelt,” island governor Blanton Winship declared.

  If ever there was one event that cemented Eleanor’s reputation as bold and unconventional, it was this visit to Puerto Rico, the first ever by a president’s wife. In a time when “fear itself” was the enemy, Eleanor’s fearlessness, and tirelessness, made great copy for the “news gals” who now covered the First Lady.

  The news gals, and all the publicity they created about the First Lady, were Hick’s doing. It was she who encouraged Eleanor, so wary of the press in the past, to hold weekly press conferences for women only. It meant that news outlets would have to hire or retain women to cover the briefings. The idea appealed to Eleanor, who liked supporting other women, and to Hick, who had long resented her treatment in the oppressively male newsroom. “I can never be anything better than a second-stringer on a story, leg-man for the guy who does the job,” she had complained to her fellow AP reporter Bess Furman in 1930. “And, if there are men available, I can’t even be a second-stringer, but third- or fourth-, or fifth-stringer. And it burns me up awfully. God
Damn it, I don’t want any of their desk jobs or fancy executive positions . . . but if only they’d let me be a reporter, dammit, instead [of] sending me out to do blah-blah features and patting me on the back and telling me I’m a nice girl. . . . Sometimes it hurts like hell. Sometimes I just get—savage.”

  The atmosphere at the women-only news conferences was so friendly that some male reporters, no doubt resentful, came to call the thirty-five women who attended them “incense-burners.” Eleanor passed out candied fruit, took an interest in the reporters’ family lives, and even paid visits to their new babies.

  Bess Furman couldn’t get over the fact that she found herself riding in the White House car, having lunch at the White House table, and receiving Easter lilies from the White House greenhouses. In her purse were cards of the president and Mrs. Roosevelt. “These things happened naturally,” she noted, “one friendly gesture leading to another, on a basis of day-by-day camaraderie.”

  The women reporters, in exchange for this camaraderie, were careful not to write anything that might be embarrassing or awkward. As Eleanor herself noted to Hick, “I rather think some of the girls are getting [to be] pretty good champions!” Even the New York Herald Tribune, editorially anti-Roosevelt, wound up running the lengthy Puerto Rican dispatches of Emma Bugbee, one of these admiring journalists, on the front page.

  The plane ride to San Juan was a story in itself: Eleanor’s flight coincided with the attempt to initiate airmail service, and there had been ten small-plane fatalities right around the time of her trip. Eleanor, however, was a friend and admirer of Amelia Earhart and an enthusiastic and fearless flyer. “Fog Interrupts Flight,” read one headline, “but She Knits On, Unafraid.” Eleanor used some of her time in the air to conduct what may have been the first in-flight news conference.

  Bugbee mentioned that Lorena Hickok would be “accompanying” Mrs. Roosevelt. But, perhaps to allay suspicions of an intimate relationship between the two, she placed emphasis on Eleanor as devoted wife, wearing “a diamond monogrammed watch, the President’s wedding gift to her, which she always wears pinned to her blouse.”

  A storm forced Eleanor’s plane down in Haiti on her return, so she traveled the last leg of her journey by boat and train, arriving back in Washington on her twenty-ninth wedding anniversary. “Mrs. Roosevelt,” Bugbee wrote, “talked about her wedding as the train sped north. She still wears daily her engagement ring, a large square diamond.” Bugbee didn’t mention of course that she also wore a ring Hick had given her. Nor that FDR and Eleanor very rarely traveled or spent leisure time together.

  FDR was waiting to greet Eleanor at Union Station when she returned. A small crowd had gathered and cheered the couple as they sped off in the White House limousine. The next day, the headline in the Herald Tribune read, “President Welcomes Wife Home on Their Wedding Anniversary.” A day late, the Roosevelts celebrated their anniversary and their son John’s birthday with friends. Hick was in attendance, of course.

  Hick was used to the “happy marriage” myth—in fact, she had helped to perpetuate it. What bothered her about the Puerto Rican trip was something else: the role she was assigned in the advance publicity. “It was announced,” according to a February piece in Time magazine, “that Mrs. Roosevelt planned to visit Puerto Rico in March” and that “Miss Hickok would also go along to look into Mr. Hopkins’ relief work there.” This infuriated Hick, since it was she who was to investigate, and Eleanor’s coming along was an afterthought.

  “I’m so fed up with publicity,” she wrote Mrs. Godwin, Harry Hopkins’s secretary, “I want to kick every reporter I see. Which is a bad state for me to get into, since I’ll probably be back in the business myself after I get through with this.”

  Her resentment carried over into the trip itself and made her disagreeable. Even though she stayed with Eleanor at the Governor’s Palace and had some private moments with her on the beach in the early morning, the relaxed, intimate time together she had imagined was impossible. Sometimes, she told Godwin, she wished Eleanor Roosevelt were “Mrs. Joe Doaks of Oelwein, Illinois.”

  What was surely bothering Hick even more about the Time article was the subtext. She was described in exaggerated terms as “a rotund lady with a husky voice, a peremptory manner, baggy clothes . . . one of the country’s best newshawks.” The article went on to say she had become “fast friends with Mrs. Roosevelt” and “gone around a lot with the First Lady.” The combination of the physical description of a heavy woman in unflattering clothes with a deep voice, who was commanding, who was not a news hen but a newshawk, and who was also Eleanor’s close friend, suggested to readers, even in a time when it was taboo to say so in polite company, that there might be something unconventional and scandalous going on between Eleanor and Hick. To add to suspicions, the Spanish-language press picked up the Time story and wrote their own about the “amistad íntima” (intimate friendship) between the two women.

  Hick had hoped that Eleanor “would get all the publicity and that I could go fairly quietly about my business.” But that was not to be. It was impossible, with all eyes on Eleanor, to do the kind of investigation that made her reports worthwhile: long conversations with politicians, journalists, relief workers, and ordinary people in many walks of life. Hick, who held herself to very high standards, considered her report from Puerto Rico one of her worst.

  After the Puerto Rican trip, Eleanor wrote Hick that it got harder and harder to let her go each time, “because you grow closer. It seems as though you belonged near me, but even if we lived together we would have to separate sometimes and just now what you do is of such value to the country that we ought not to complain, only that doesn’t make me miss you less or feel less lonely!”

  The belief that they were a team, doing important work, helped both women deal with the long separations. “We do do things together don’t we?” Hick wrote Eleanor. “And it’s fun, even though the fact that we both have work to do keeps us apart.”

  The weekly press conferences were one of the ways in which Hick helped Eleanor take possession of her role as First Lady. Less obvious, but equally important, was her influence on Eleanor as a writer. There can be no doubt that Hick made Eleanor, through all their talking and corresponding, a better writer over the years. One need only read the preachy first book she published as First Lady, It’s Up to the Women, and compare it to the second, This Is My Story, to discern Hick’s influence.

  In a sort of Lady Bountiful voice, It’s Up to the Women lectures to women, both rich and poor, about the challenges of the Depression. “It will do us no harm to look at ourselves somewhat critically,” she wrote in her introduction, “in relation to some of the problems that confront us to-day.”

  Hick encouraged Eleanor to stop preaching and find substance from her own experience instead of from some general ideas about other women—most of whom lived lives vastly different from her own. In This Is My Story, Eleanor replaces her grand lady voice with a more genuine, storytelling one. She writes of being sent to a convent in France as a young child: “One of the girls swallowed a penny. Every attention was given her, she was the center of everybody’s interest. I longed to be in her place. One day I went to one of the sisters and told her that I had swallowed a penny. I think it must have been evident that my story was not true, so they sent for my mother. . . . She took me away in disgrace.” We can imagine Eleanor telling this story, and so many others in This Is My Story, to Hick. It has the intimacy of their letters to each other and is a world away from the sanctimonious tone of It’s Up to the Women.

  Eleanor often wrote in a last-minute rush and Hick’s editorial comments came too late. But that didn’t mean Eleanor wasn’t taking them in. She herself had spoken more than once of her ability to listen in on others and acquire new ideas as they “passed through my rather quick mind.” In her typical self-deprecating fashion, she described it as a “bad habit.” But in this case, it was a habit that
greatly improved the quality of the numerous articles and memoirs that Eleanor published throughout her life. Though she didn’t often admit it, Eleanor also had a strong competitive streak: she wanted to become as good a writer as Hick.

  Eleanor helped Hick in her work too—especially in overcoming one large and potentially damaging blind spot that began to emerge in her reports from the South early in 1934. Hick had no trouble reading and explaining the mood of the country as long as she stayed in familiar territory—the Midwest, New York, and even New England. But that January, Hopkins asked her to travel to Georgia, where Governor Eugene Talmadge was making news by calling the New Deal “a combination of wet-nursin’, frenzied finance, downright communism and plain damn foolishness.” Talmadge took particular aim at the relief programs, quoting a farm laborer who wrote, “I wouldn’t plow nobody’s mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents a day when I could get $1.30 for pretending to work on a DITCH.” FDR replied, “I take it . . . that you approve of paying farm labor 40 to 50 cents per day. Somehow I cannot get it into my head that wages on such a scale make possible a reasonable American standard of living.”

  Talmadge was an extreme racist. He once told a columnist, “No niggah’s as good as a white man, because the niggah’s only a few shawt year-ahs from cannibalism.” Talmadge’s attitude was widespread in the South. But Hick, a midwesterner, didn’t sound so very different in her early reports from Savannah.

  “Savannah must be a little afraid of the Negroes,” she wrote. “More than half the population of the city is Negro—and SUCH Negroes! Even their lips are black, and the whites of their eyes! They’re almost as inarticulate as animals. They ARE animals. Many of them look and talk and act like creatures barely removed from the Ape.”