by Susan Quinn
The acute poverty shook Hick to the core. “I have the sense of having lost my individuality,” she wrote Eleanor. “What happens to any of us as individuals, what we think or desire or hope to do seems so trifling in the face of what I’m seeing these days.”
Soon after, Eleanor traveled to West Virginia to join Hick and see for herself. The First Lady’s visit surprised everyone but Hick, who had known about it even before she set out. It was a chance for Eleanor and Hick to be together, but it also allowed Eleanor to see the situation firsthand. But there was a practical reason for the trip as well. For a few days at least, Hick would have a way to get around.
Hick had never learned to drive. She grew up in surroundings where almost no one owned a car, and worked as a journalist in cities where she didn’t need one. But just to reach the small towns and rural areas that were her new territory, she was going to need to drive or be driven. So Eleanor, eager to offer support to her special friend, hopped into her blue roadster in Washington and set out for West Virginia alone, avoiding not only the Secret Service but also journalists and the curious public. She slipped into Morgantown and met up with Hick without fanfare. Together they drove on to the mining camps, where she was determined to be seen as just another social worker. Her disguise was a simple short-sleeved white blouse, blue linen skirt, and crush hat, along with good walking shoes.
In the beginning, it worked. She parked her roadster and traveled instead in the Quakers’ battered cars. Leading the way, along with Hick, was a dedicated Quaker activist named Clarence Pickett, soon to become an important ally. The Quakers were already working with some destitute families in the mining camps around Scotts Run. Two women working for the Quakers, Alice Davis and her partner, Nadia Danilevsky, were encouraging out-of-work mining families to do subsistence gardening—a huge challenge on the steep hillsides—as well as canning and carpentry.
But as Eleanor’s retinue proceeded up the winding dirt roads of Cheat Mountain, people began to hear the news. Sometimes there were cheers, and sometimes people just stood outside their houses and stared. At first, when she got out and greeted people, they were too shy to do more than mumble. But just as she had talked potatoes in Aroostook, she spoke with them of everyday things and slowly began to elicit their stories.
At one house, a miner showed the First Lady his paycheck, which came to less than a dollar a week after the company deducted his bill at the company store. There were six children in the house who took scraps from a single bowl on the table, “the kind you or I might give to a dog,” Eleanor wrote. “That was all they had to eat.”
Two of the children were standing at the door as she left. The little boy held a white rabbit in his arms, which was obviously a cherished pet. The little girl was very thin and had a gleam in her eye as she looked at her brother. “He thinks we are not going to eat it, but we are,” she said.
It was rare for these families to have sheets or dishes in their houses, let alone furniture. So when Eleanor entered a neatly kept house with crocheted curtains and several chairs, she complimented the Slavic woman she met, who smiled broadly as she hastily dried her hands. She told Eleanor that when they first came they had only soapboxes to sit on.
There were visits to a carpentry shop, where Eleanor took special interest in the furniture making because of her experience with Val-Kill Industries, and to the community garden. At one point, when she couldn’t make it through the woods to a camp in her battered sedan, she parked it in a field and walked along with her party for more than a mile so she could talk to the miners and their families. All of this was done with great gusto. “She made us feel she was one of us,” a worker reported. At the end of the day, an official on the tour paid the First Lady the compliment of pronouncing her “a swell guy.”
By the time she left Morgantown, the news of Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit had become a huge banner headline in the Dominion News. MRS. ROOSEVELT VISITS MINES HERE, it read. But she had the satisfaction of slipping out of the home of her hosts, superintendent of mines Glenn Work and his wife, without anyone sticking a camera in her face. Just before she left, the phone at the Works’ house rang and she answered.
“Can you tell me when Mrs. Roosevelt is leaving?” inquired the caller.
“Why, she may be going while I am talking to you at this very minute,” replied the First Lady slyly.
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THINGS HAD NOT ALWAYS been this bad in mining country. The enormous demand for coal during World War I lured many families off the farm into promising jobs in the pits. There were immigrants from nineteen different countries working in the mines of Scotts Run at its height. There were also black families there, many of whom had escaped worse conditions in the South to work in the mines. But then came the postwar bust, and a depression that took hold well before the national collapse. Mine operators’ greed, along with dwindling demand and the depletion of the rich coal vein that had created Scotts Run, left these families bereft and desperate. Work came sporadically, under worse and worse conditions, and the owners often took much of the money miners earned to pay off debts they had incurred at the company store, or even to pay for the oil for their headlamps. Under these circumstances, the work of the Quakers, as Clarence Pickett observed, was like trying to sweep back the ocean.
Eleanor Roosevelt, however, was undaunted. One of the things she learned on her visit was that the women didn’t have enough jars for canning. Within days of her return to Washington, a freight car filled with canning jars arrived in Scotts Run. The jars were a down payment of sorts on a much bigger scheme: a whole new village for at least some of these stranded mining families, where they would combine self-sustaining farming with work in industry, away from the danger and black soot of the mines. This was an idea FDR and Eleanor had talked about for some years. Within the week Hick wrote to Eleanor from the southern counties of West Virginia, “I think the President would be interested in the attitude of this whole West Virginia mining population on going back to the land.” Relief officials in Charleston begged Hick to find out in Washington if there was a way to get some of the miners out onto the land. They thought hundreds would respond, since the great majority of the miners came down out of the hills in the mining boom and were actually raised on the farm.
Arthurdale was the very first embodiment of this New Deal dream. It was built on a 1,028-acre farm in Preston County, West Virginia, just eighteen miles from Scotts Run, that had been the property of a gentleman farmer named Richard Arthur. Having fallen on hard times, Arthur sold the land to the Department of the Interior for $45,000.
With the encouragement of FDR, and the teamwork of Eleanor and Louis Howe, the town came into being quickly. By July 1934, less than a year after Eleanor’s first visit to Scotts Run with Hick, 50 homesteads were completed and 50 stranded mining families had new homes not far from their old ones, with running water, indoor plumbing, and enough land for subsistence gardening and husbandry. Before it was all over, there would be 165 families living in Arthurdale. The town would include a clinic, funded by Eleanor and the wealthy friends she persuaded to help, including Bernard Baruch, as well as an innovative school and an active carpentry shop. Mrs. Roosevelt would become a regular visitor to Arthurdale, joining in square dances at the community center and speaking at high school graduations. She stayed in touch with the villagers for the rest of her life.
Howe told Hick, “You and Eleanor ought to get a great sense of satisfaction. You really started something.”
Even though FDR had talked of the resettlement idea before, it was Hick’s fieldwork that inspired action. She was the one who escorted Eleanor around Scotts Run. She was the one who introduced her to Clarence Pickett, whom Eleanor then recruited to oversee the project. She even pointed to Prescott County as a possible location. Over the course of the Roosevelt presidency, the Arthurdale experiment would be repeated in many different guises all around the country. Some communities would follow
the Arthurdale model closely, resettling stranded communities like Scotts Run. Others would be formed around an industry, or as cooperative farms. Still others would require families to pick up and move great distances: in 1935, 203 farm families moved from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan to the fertile Matanuska Valley in Alaska. All told, the homestead project produced 10,938 new homes at a total cost of about $108 million. The projects were a frequent target of criticism, because in most cases they failed to be self-sustaining. But for the families who moved into them, they were often akin to a gift from heaven.
On a visit to Arthurdale not long after the first houses were finished, Eleanor stopped by the new four-room home of a couple with three young daughters. Their house and all their belongings had been washed away in a landslide, and they had been living in a two-room windowless building before moving to the little white house in Arthurdale. “It is Paradise for us,” the woman of the house told Eleanor. No wonder the citizens of Arthurdale referred to Eleanor Roosevelt as “our angel.”
Hick and Eleanor had different roles to play in the New Deal undertaking. Eleanor could bestow gifts and work on ambitious projects like Arthurdale. But Hopkins had instructed Hick right at the start that she was to be a reporter, not a social worker. She was to listen, not to act. Most of the time, she was happy in that role. “I seem . . . to have become a kind of wax record for the recording of other people’s ideas and complaints and hopes,” she wrote Eleanor. “And it is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me in all my life.”
Hick wrote parallel and overlapping reports: an official typed one for Harry Hopkins and another less official one for Eleanor, written in ink in her clear and flawless script. Much of the material was the same. But the letters to Eleanor had little soft touches absent in reports to the man she called “the boss.”
After Eleanor left Morgantown that first time, Hick took a bus over bumpy roads “through some of the loveliest mountain scenery I’ve ever beheld” to the southern counties of West Virginia, where conditions were even worse. Two miners died in a mine explosion while she was there, and she observed miners who had calluses on their backs from working in coal veins only thirty inches in diameter. When she described this to Eleanor she added that the miner would be “bent double—almost in the position in which he lay in his mother’s womb, before he was born.”
With Eleanor, too, she felt freer to blow off steam: “Oh, I get so burned up over the whole business!” she ranted. She hated the talk of miners as extravagant, spending their money too freely when they had it and also having too many children. “Well, what the hell is there in life for them except food and cohabitation. Ah, all that kind of talk makes me sick.” None of this went into the Hopkins reports.
But the terrible things Hick saw made her want to shed her role as reporter and do something. In Logan County, she encountered three mining families living in an abandoned schoolhouse with no windows. The men were able-bodied, but had been fired for refusing to join the company union. She saw sick little children there, including one baby with rickets and a bloated stomach. This time, she did act: she arranged to have the baby taken to a doctor in town.
Other times, she passed on a story to Eleanor, knowing that her friend could do things she couldn’t. There was the case of the wife of a disabled miner, who had harvested (and here we see Hick’s prodigious note-taking abilities) “35 bushels of pole beans, three and a half bushels of onions, enough tomatoes to can 17 gallons . . . enough beets to can nine and a half gallons; more than 15 gallons of cucumber pickles and a large and varied assortment of other vegetables, including parsnips, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, radishes, and spinach.” This woman was the mother of two “grand looking boys,” and she didn’t want them to go into the mines. She told Hick that her dream was to get a couple of acres somewhere and a cow and a couple of pigs and a few chickens. She added that “we’d be pretty well fixed right now if we could get hold of a couple of pigs.” Hick wrote Eleanor, disingenuously, “Gosh, how I’d like to give her those pigs! She’s certainly earned them. I wonder if we could any way.”
On August 25, around the time Hick left West Virginia, Eleanor sent a letter from Hyde Park that confirms she got the hint: “I talked to you,” Eleanor wrote, “and know that you acquired the pigs!” It was the kind of thing she loved to do, for strangers and friends alike.
That September, as Hick got ready for a monthlong field trip around the Northeast, Eleanor came through again, this time with a secondhand Chevrolet convertible and an unemployed young man who would travel with Hick and teach her to drive. It’s unclear how much say Hick had in this decision, but she did insist on paying Eleanor back for the purchase, in installments—as a matter of pride. Eleanor and Hick agreed to call the car “Bluette.”
“I am glad relief conditions are good in N.Y.,” Eleanor wrote soon after, “but even more glad that Bluette works so well, and that the boy is a good teacher and pleasant to be with.”
A letter to Harry Hopkins’s secretary, Kathryn Godwin, confirms that Hick did learn to drive—a challenge at age forty in the time of gearshifts. “Sorry the report is so late,” she wrote Godwin, “but learning to drive that darned automobile has left me pretty much frazzled every night. Getting the hang of it, however.” Hick came to love driving: five years later, she wrote Eleanor that she’d rather drive than do almost anything else.
As Hick traveled farther and farther from her new home, the White House, Eleanor’s daily letters became her lifeline. When they didn’t come, she protested. Writing from Rochester, New York, that September, she described herself to Eleanor as “the forgotten woman.”
“It’s the first time I’ve had to go three weeks without seeing you and the first time I’ve gone this long without a letter. There, there, Hickok! Be good. And reasonable.”
“Of course the long separation has been harder on you,” Eleanor observed at one point, “because so much of the time you’ve been with strangers.” But she too lived for Hick’s letters: “Hick dearest,” she wrote, “no letter today, but I was spoiled yesterday so I will just read over all those I had yesterday!”
In late October, Hick set out on a long trip to the Midwest, revisiting the heartaches and triumphs of her early years. In Minneapolis, she stayed at the Hotel Leamington, where she and her great love Ellie had lived together so happily during her years at the Minneapolis Tribune.
This time, she used her connections from her days on the Tribune to get “the dope,” as she called it, on Minnesota—dope that included a lengthy interview with its left-leaning governor, Farmer–Labor Party firebrand Floyd Olson. “Floyd Olson really is a remarkable man,” she wrote Hopkins. “And sometimes when I am under the spell of his personality, I feel like a dog for ever doubting him.” But she warned Hopkins that Olson was terribly ambitious for himself above all else, and wasn’t beyond slowing down a New Deal program if he couldn’t take credit for it: “Floyd is for Floyd and that’s that.”
As valuable as the political reporting was, Hick’s best writing focused on the bare-bones existence of the ordinary people she encountered in Iowa, the Dakotas, and Nebraska as fall turned into winter. From Bottineau, North Dakota, she wrote to Eleanor of the familiar beauty of the open prairie: “a deep blue cloudless sky and sunlight that brings out all the gold and blues and reds and orchid shades in the prairie landscape. These plains are beautiful. But, oh, the terrible crushing drabness of life here. And the suffering, for both people and animals.”
Over and over, in her letters to Eleanor and to Hopkins, Hick emphasized the desperate need for supplies in a place where temperatures could go down to forty below and where “we have between 4000 and 5000 human beings—men, women and children—without clothing or bedding, getting just enough food to keep them from starving.” She wrote of two small boys, one about the same age as Eleanor’s oldest grandson, Buzzie, running about without a stitch of clothing except some ragged overalls. Th
ey had no shoes or stockings, and their feet were purple with cold.
Little had changed in the twenty-five years since Hick left the little towns of her childhood: Aberdeen, Milbank, Summit, Bowdle. Outside the towns stretched miles and miles of “flat brown country. Snowdrifts here and there. Russian thistles rolling across the roads. Unpainted buildings, all going to seed. . . . What a country—to keep out of!”
The stories poured out of Hick: of a proud old couple who had lived for two years on $126; of cattle ranches devastated by plagues of grasshoppers; of “mares, dull-eyed, every rib showing, their scrawny backs sagging, great hollows behind their shoulders, followed by scrawny colts”; of farmers who wanted to work on the roads, but whose teams were too weak to last through the day.
“What a picture you can paint!” Eleanor wrote Hick after reading her letter from Huron, South Dakota. “I nearly wept. If ever under any circumstances you give up writing, I’ll flay you, whether I’m here in the flesh or flaying you from some other world!”
As their time apart continued, Eleanor wrote of missing Hick more and more. “Dear heart, I would like to be with you when this letter reaches you,” Eleanor wrote as Thanksgiving approached. “If I were free I would meet you in Minneapolis Wed. only my sense of duty keeps me from doing it!” Instead, Eleanor spent Thanksgiving at Warm Springs with FDR and friends, as usual. She wrote Hick that she dreamed Franklin would insist on Hick’s coming to make an in-person report at Warm Springs. “I knew it wouldn’t be true but it was nice to think about!”
Hick and Eleanor’s anticipation of a reunion at Christmas intensified their expressions of passion. “Darling,” Eleanor wrote, “the only real news is ‘I love you’ and two weeks and three days from now you will be here and it makes me all excited inside to think about!”
