by Susan Quinn
Hick didn’t write that way about all African Americans. While at the Minneapolis Tribune, she had written an admiring portrait of Roland Hayes, the black lyric tenor, who had a childhood not unlike hers, working for his board and a dollar a week in Louisville while attending sixth grade. Hayes, who had performed before the king and queen, was on a quest to find and perform the “purely Negro music of Africa,” music not distorted by “our association with white people.” Clearly, Hick made a distinction between successful and polished blacks like Roland Hayes and those she encountered in Savannah.
Hick had prefaced her report to Hopkins with the caveat that “the ‘Old South’ is all brand new to me—it’s the first time I’ve been south of Charlottesville, Virginia and I’ve been feeling my way about a bit.” She no doubt brought her own midwestern prejudices along with her. But in the South, her remarkable ability to mirror the attitudes of others reflected the more extreme distorting effects of racism.
Eleanor had her own blind spots—particularly an upper-class strain of anti-Semitism that shocks the modern ear. In 1925, while on a houseboat with Franklin near Key West, she wrote her friend Esther Lape that “we’ve had a little Jew business friend of F’s on board for 4 days and he’s such a good kind little man I couldn’t imagine why he annoyed me so much but I decided yesterday it was because he typifies the people who think everything can be done with money! He left us last night and it is a strange relief.”
Another time, Eleanor told a visiting writer from South Africa that “the country is still full of immigrant Jews, very unlike ourselves. I don’t blame them for being as they are. I know what they’ve been through in other lands, and I’m glad they have freedom at last, and I hope they’ll have a chance, among us, to develop all there is in them. . . . Well, one day, I hope, we’ll all be Americans together.”
Eleanor showed some of the usual attitudes toward blacks as well: her “My Day” column included a recommendation of a book called Chocolate Drops from the South, a compendium of “Negro Humor” in dialect. “Many of us do not appreciate what we owe the Negro race for its good humor and frequently unconscious fun producing ways of saying and doing things,” she wrote, and proceeded to quote one of the jokes in dialect. When she used the word “darky” in her first memoir, she was surprised when it caused an uproar.
But right at the time Hick was writing about Negroes as animals, Eleanor was taking on racism in a major way in Washington. Eleanor’s greatest virtue was her ability to learn from experience. And the experience of establishing Arthurdale had brought home the prevalence of racism in the United States like nothing before it. In Scotts Run, miners of color and whites had lived alongside each other. But when it came time to found the new colony, whites voiced fierce opposition to including blacks, opposition Eleanor and other planners were unable to overcome.
It was that experience which led Eleanor to invite leaders of the nation’s most prestigious black institutions, including the presidents of Howard and Fisk universities, and of the Tuskegee Institute, to a White House conference that January for what turned out to be an “unrestrained” airing of grievances. At the same time, she was working hard, along with Walter White of the NAACP, to gain FDR’s support for an antilynching bill, which was introduced to Congress that January. Lynching was still widespread in the South. Between 1901 and 1929, twelve hundred blacks were lynched in the South. There had been twenty-eight lynchings in 1933 alone.
Given her growing concern about racial injustice, Eleanor must have been deeply troubled when she read Hick’s report from Savannah. She wrote, mildly, that Hick “should be reading John Brown.” Eleanor had read the whole of the Benét poem John Brown’s Body aloud to Hick on their trip into Canada. Now she was telling Hick she should read it again—surely because she thought Hick needed to be more reflective about the poisonous legacy of slavery in the South.
Two weeks later, Eleanor joined Hick in Warm Springs for three uninterrupted days together. This time, instead of the usual crowd, it was just Eleanor and Hick. Eleanor had reserved one of the private cottages in the woods for “three quiet evenings and breakfasts and I don’t know if you realize how nice that sounds to me!” Local papers made note of the presence of the First Lady at Warm Springs, but this raised no suspicions, since it was natural for her to pay a visit to FDR’s retreat. No one noticed her companion. It was one of Hick and Eleanor’s better reunions—enhanced by the satisfaction of taking over a place where Eleanor had never felt entirely at home.
As usual, the two of them spent their time in earnest talk and reading, probably about the issues of race that were hovering around them in Talmadge country. One of the things that bothered Eleanor most about Warm Springs was that all the patients there were white. FDR, when challenged on the issue, cited local prejudices and helped to fund a polio treatment center at Tuskegee instead of trying to integrate Warm Springs. Eleanor also lobbied for a school for black children in the area to match the all-white school FDR had funded. A bare-bones brick school for blacks was finally built, partly with WPA funds. FDR wrote a $1,000 check in the end to cover a shortfall. When it opened in 1937, he spoke at the dedication. It was called the Eleanor Roosevelt School, a tribute to the woman whom some longtime white residents of the county considered an intrusive busybody and troublemaker.
A side trip to the homestead of Eleanor’s paternal grandmother, Martha Bulloch, in Roswell, Georgia, was no doubt part of Eleanor’s educational project. Martha and her family were southerners who sympathized with the Confederate cause—more history to deepen Hick’s understanding.
“Hick dearest,” Eleanor wrote afterward, “it seems years since we sat and read and read and were alone together. I loved every minute and I am going to live on it during these next few weeks.”
Hick wrote Eleanor, “I had a little ache when I unpacked my briefcase and realized that I was in the cottage at Warm Springs, with you, when I packed it early this morning.”
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AFTER HER REFLECTIVE TIME with Eleanor in Warm Springs, Hick became more alert to lurking racial violence. Visiting turpentine farms “hidden away in the pines, cut off from all the world by trees and swamp,” she heard an owner complain about the federal government stirring up the Negroes. Most of his employees were “good Niggers,” he said, but occasionally he had some trouble. He showed Hick his bruised fist, painted with mercurochrome. Afterward, her guide told her that the man had “killed a couple” of Negroes in his camps.
Another day, as she drove out of Odum, Georgia, Hick saw a man with a blacksnake whip in his hands going into a dooryard. “I’ve been wondering ever since what he was going to do with it.”
In North Carolina, Hick met with prominent black leaders of an interracial commission—businessmen and teachers she described as “very fine Colored people—intelligent, well-educated, cultured. Little by little, they are probably getting somewhere but it’s awfully slow.” They talked about a subject close to her heart: the exploitation of household servants. The black leaders were proposing a training program to get wages up: many maids now worked for nothing but board. One leader quoted a white woman who announced, “At last I’ve found a woman who will come in and clean up my house for her dinner!”
This was familiar territory for Hick, who once protested to Eleanor that she had “been a slavey” and didn’t wish it on anyone else. She suggested to the black leaders that there should be a training course for the housewives—instead of the maids.
Hick’s travels through Georgia, Florida, and North and South Carolina led her to conclude that the rural South had never progressed beyond slave labor. “When their slaves were taken away, they proceeded to establish a system of peonage that was as close to slavery as it possibly could be and included Whites as well as Blacks. That’s all the tenant farmer is . . . a slave.”
The complaint of Governor Talmadge, that federal funds were luring workers away from the fields and causing a
labor shortage, was false, Hick concluded. There was still plenty of surplus labor almost everywhere. What really riled the establishment, as Hick wrote in southern parlance, was that the federal government should “take all that trouble for ‘jest pore white trash an’ Niggers.’”
Hick herself had become increasingly unhappy with the federal relief program because of the way it played out in the racist South. For blacks who earned fifty cents a day or less as farm laborers, federal relief was welcome. But white growers liked it too, because it provided meager sustenance to their workers in the off-season, perpetuating an invidious system. Deeply ingrained racism meant that working- and middle-class whites were ashamed to “stand in line with niggers” and ask for relief. Furthermore, even if they got desperate and joined the relief rolls, these workers were unable to sustain their higher living costs with what relief provided. The result was that the relief rolls all over the South were disproportionately black.
This became Hick’s mantra wherever she went in the South and the Southwest: there were “two classes of people”—people of color and working and middle-class whites. This was a fact on the ground that the federal government wasn’t going to change. The relief program merely perpetuated the entrenched class and racial divides. But even though Hick tempered her language about race after the Warm Springs reunion, her bias continued to show in a more subtle way as she traveled to Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. “We are carrying on relief,” she wrote, “thousands of Mexican and Negro families, to whom relief, however low, is more attractive than the jobs they can get,” while whites over forty-five, who would “never get their jobs back,” aren’t taking advantage of it. “They’re our babies. And what are we going to do with them?” Whites were more “ours” in Hick’s mind than people of color. Despite her bias, she proved correct in her conclusion that the federal government should get out of “this business of relief.” Real work—not relief—was the answer. But things didn’t look promising in the spring and summer of 1934. Under pressure from his conservative budget director, Lewis Douglas, and worrying himself about overspending, FDR had decided to dismantle the one jobs program that was under way: the hastily put together CWA (Civil Works Administration), which put hundreds of thousands to work during the early days of the administration. The PWA (Public Works Administration), under Harold Ickes, was moving at a snail’s pace on larger infrastructure projects. Outside of a few bright spots, most notably the massive Tennessee Valley dam project, PWA was having little or no impact. No wonder Hick’s reports got bleaker and bleaker.
In Alabama, she met with three hundred displaced tenant farmers who begged her for tents. In Texas, she wrote of towns where you could immediately find the relief office because of the long line outside. In New Mexico, she saw small Mexican children working long hours in the sugar-beet fields under a blazing sun. She stood watching in the yard of one beet worker’s shack as he and his family came home for lunch: there were a father and five children, two girls and three boys. “As he came trailing along across the field,” Hick wrote, “the youngest child didn’t look over 6 years old. But he told me he was 9. And on this sort of thing,” she fumed, “is built up one of the most powerful industries in the country.” The beet industry in 1933 had $78 million in assets.
One of Hick’s lowest moments came at the scene of an execution in Cañon City, Colorado. Two boys had been convicted of killing a rancher in “a holdup which netted them only two cheap pistols.” One of the boys put up $200 for an appeal, so he was still alive and able to stand trial. The other boy couldn’t raise the $200. “And last night they killed him.
“The thing has nearly driven me crazy,” Hick wrote Eleanor. “My first impulse was to hand over the $200 that night—I still had most of my paycheck. . . . And I still think I should have. I think the impulse was right and that I should have done it.” The field representative she was with talked her out of putting up the money, arguing that her connection to the administration might make it into a story and embarrass the president. “I loathe myself for not having more courage and trying to stop it,” she wrote Eleanor, “no matter what the consequences were. You would have done it. . . . I’ve become afraid of my impulses.”
Eleanor made an unconvincing attempt to comfort Hick: “I would have felt as you did about the boy,” she wrote, “but they were probably right or the Governor would have given him a stay so your giving the $200 would have been useless.” But Hick was correct: Eleanor surely would have put up the $200.
Hick’s life on the road was wildly different from Eleanor’s back in Washington. Between January and July, she drove thousands of miles, crossing the country twice, enduring terrible food, spider bites, and long lonely nights pounding out her reports on her typewriter.
Eleanor, meanwhile, was attending symphony concerts, hosting balls, and receiving myriad visitors, including forty-nine thousand for the Easter egg roll on the White House lawn. For FDR’s fifty-second birthday, Eleanor and Louis Howe dreamed up an elaborate skit in which FDR was cast as the great Caesar, a role he had already been assigned by his critics. The president, attired in royal purple and wearing a crown of laurels, was surrounded by his “vestal virgins”: Missy, Tommy, daughter Anna, Nancy Cook, and Marion Dickerman. The diminutive Louis Howe headed up the Praetorian Guard, wearing a plumed helmet. Eleanor, also keeping to her reputation, played the Delphic Oracle, dispensing wisdom from on high. “I evidently answered to their satisfaction,” Eleanor reported to Hick afterward.
At the same time, Eleanor was doing serious work on the projects she shared with Hick. She met with Harry Hopkins to talk about the white-collar workers Hick worried about, with Clarence Pickett about Arthurdale, and with Walter White to draft the antilynching bill. She followed up on the recommendations she and Hick had made after their trip to Puerto Rico, which resulted in some important changes. Administration of the island was transferred from the War Department to the Interior Department, as Hick and Eleanor had suggested. Also a Puerto Rican Reconstruction Administration was created to expand and stabilize the economy. Their visit also led to the establishment of a minimum wage scale for women garment workers and to the building of new brick and stone schools and prisons, replacing rickety bamboo structures.
On April 21, Eleanor gave a daring and mischievous speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution. She talked to the ladies about the “mountain people” in Kentucky and Virginia who had “ancestry as good as any that we have in this country” but who lived in “deplorable” conditions. The ladies of the DAR were not pleased with the comparison between their lineage and that of the Hatfields and McCoys. Eleanor thought it was “rather fun.” A few days later, an anonymous member sent a “stern reproof.”
Everything went into Eleanor and Hick’s daily letters: the weather, their schedules, their sleep, their dreams. “And now I’m going to bed—to try to dream about you,” Hick wrote from Texas. “I never do, but I always have hopes.”
“I thought about you in church,” Eleanor wrote, “as I couldn’t hear the sermon and . . . I imagined . . . you motoring along and wished I were with you.”
At this stage of the relationship, Eleanor was the more effusive of the two. “What wouldn’t I give to talk to you and hear you now, oh, dear one, it is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about and long for.”
She dreaded Hick’s trip to the West Coast—partly because she would be so far away and partly because Hick planned to meet up with Ellie, her great love from Minneapolis days, in California. “I know I’ve got to fit in gradually to your past and with your friends so there won’t be closed doors between us later on,” Eleanor wrote. “Love is a queer thing, it hurts but it gives so much more in return!”
The worst happened even before Hick got to California, as she drove the hundreds of desert miles from Lordsburg, New Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona. On a rough gravel road near Bisbee, Arizona, wher
e wrecks were common, her car rolled over and hurtled into a ditch. Eleanor’s first reaction was to send a wire: “THANKFUL YOU ARE NOT BADLY HURT ANYTHING ELSE CAN BE QUICKLY REMEDIED.” After a phone call, Eleanor worried more. “The ‘what might have happened aspect’ I can’t face even now. Darling, I ought to drive you!”
Bluette was totaled, but Hick escaped with minor injuries and made light of the incident in her report to Hopkins. Apparently she had carried most of the weight of the car on the back of her neck for a split second during the rollover, so the doctor seemed to think it wise for her to spend a day in bed. “Incidentally, sir, you have to have a darned good neck to get away with anything like that. I think mine had no doubt got toughened up these last five or six weeks from carrying the weight of the world on it.”
Hick found California infuriating. “This valley,” she wrote Eleanor from El Centro, in Southern California, “is the damnedest place I ever saw . . . suspicion and bitterness all through the place.” There was “an unreasoning blind fear of ‘Communist agitators.’” Anyone who disagreed was labeled a Communist. “Oh, my dear,” she wrote Eleanor, “I’m so sick of the whole miserable business!”
Only the prospect of her July holiday with Eleanor, planned to take place at the same time as FDR’s voyage to the Caribbean, the Panama Canal, and Hawaii, made Hick’s life endurable. But even though they were soon to reunite, she felt remote: “You, Washington, the apartment in New York, Prinz—they all seem very far away this morning. I wonder if it will be like this when I die.”
Eleanor, sensing that Hick was fearing disappointment, reassured her: “I can’t understand why you are so worried dear, why can’t you just be natural? Of course we are going to have a good time together and neither of us is going to be upset.”
