Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  “Gosh,” she had written Eleanor, “I wish I could make you see that place as I saw it!” The tents, damp and black with coal dust, were huddled together near a river, with “those beautiful, and rather terrible hills” in the background.

  A little group of men were sitting silently on a big rock: “Ragged, discouraged, bitter.” There were women around, doing a little washing and cleaning up, and there were a few pathetic gardens. “And those terrible looking children.” Dysentery was so common it was ignored, and the children had skin diseases. She saw a small baby covered with sores, a woman wearing nothing but a ragged dress and no shoes, and a man whose trousers were so patched you couldn’t see the original cloth. There were thirty-four able-bodied men in the tent colony.

  “What they ought to do with that mine is to put a few sticks of dynamite under it and blow it up,” one of them had told Hick, “and I’d certainly like to be the guy to do it.” Hick watched as several of the men came up to the investigator and begged her, “almost with tears in their eyes,” to get them out of there before winter.

  “These tents won’t last another winter,” one of them said.

  When FDR heard about the tents from Eleanor, he told her, “Get those families out of those tents before Christmas.” With the help of Hopkins and the Quakers, it was done.

  Now, two years later, Hick revisited the scene of the tent colony that had “got the President all worked up.” The tents were gone, “every last, horrible one of them!” The families that remained were living in wooden houses they had built for themselves with the help of relief workers. There were gardens around them, and even flowers.

  Hick drew double lines under the next piece of news: “And all but 15 of those blacklisted coal miners are back at work—and in the mine that blacklisted them! Isn’t that simply swell?” The Wagner Act, passed in July 1935, prohibited the mine company from discriminating against miners affiliated with a union. The law changed everything for the tent families.

  There was good news in Indiana too: farmers, with a boost from federal programs, were beginning to prosper again. Knowing that Harry Hopkins’s father had sold harness for a living back in Grinnell, Iowa, Hick sought out a harness salesman in the little town of Bluffton, Indiana, to see how things were going. It turned out the man had gone from selling twenty-five sets of harness in a full year to selling fifty-four in ten months. And the farmers were coming in with cash, not asking for credit. “A set of harness (in case you’ve forgotten) costs about $65,” Hick wrote Hopkins. There was no way, she predicted, that FDR could lose Indiana in the coming election.

  One of Hick’s happiest moments on the job came in January 1936 on a visit to Newark airport, where some eighteen hundred men were at work enlarging the field and installing drainage. It was a hard assignment: dig down three feet and there was trouble with water, muck, and quicksand. Some of the men were working in water up to their knees.

  It was payday. Hick stood by the paymaster’s window for an hour, watching the men as they lined up to get their checks. In her letter to Eleanor, she added the exhilaration she left out of her official report. “That WAS an experience. A seemingly endless procession of eyes—gleaming, anxious, expectant. The smile of relief when the check was handed over. . . . On the whole, I feel encouraged. These men have had a couple of pay days. They look better fed and, certainly, better clothed than those out in Michigan. Things have settled down.” This kind of progress made Hick increasingly confident that FDR would win a second term. The only person in FDR’s circle who wasn’t excited about the growing possibility of a second term was Eleanor. In April 1935, she made the mistake of telling her mother-in-law that “it would not break my heart if Franklin were not re-elected.” Sara Roosevelt reacted by asking her grandson James, after Eleanor left the room, “Is that why she stays in politics, just to hurt his chances of re-election?”

  Eleanor was wounded and angry that her mother-in-law didn’t trust her to support FDR. “Now I ask you,” she wrote Hick, “after all these years?” Hick was the only one she could safely confide in about her hurt.

  What her mother-in-law couldn’t understand was how much she hated all the hoopla, all the scheming, all the infighting, and all the adulation. “And they say one day I might run for office,” she once wrote Hick. “I’d have to be chloroformed first!”

  Most of all, Eleanor hated the press scrutiny of her family. All the prurient interest in Anna’s divorce and remarriage had been especially painful, and the younger boys had gotten into minor scrapes that attracted the attention of reporters, who were always ready to think they were wild or spoiled. The incident that upset her most, however, had to do with FDR’s decision to bring the Roosevelts’ eldest son, James, on board as an adviser. Eleanor had been against it from the start, knowing that it was going to provoke accusations of nepotism. But FDR went ahead anyway, encouraging James to leave his business in New York (a decision that entailed some expense) and join him in the White House. Then, once he was criticized, FDR reversed course under false pretenses, claiming that the doctor had advised that the D.C. climate would be bad for James and he should return to his previous job.

  “I’ve been ready to chew everyone’s heads off!” Eleanor wrote Hick. “James looking upset and bewildered meets me outside and says his health has nothing to do with it but he thinks FDR is afraid if he gives up his work it will bring more stories so having spent $1000 on legally getting out of business he’s been told by Pa to go back on a 3-day a week basis. . . . He’s going back to N.Y. tomorrow. . . . He’s hurt and I’m so mad with F.D.R. I’m so on edge it is all I can do to hold myself together just now.”

  Even Hick was alarmed, fearing Eleanor might actually leave her marriage for good. Whatever her personal wishes, Hick understood that a break would destroy FDR’s political future and undermine the still-fragile national recovery. Eleanor reassured her: “Hick darling, I’m sorry I worried you so much. I know I’ve got to stick. I know I’ll never make an open break and I never tell F.D.R. how I feel. I blow off to you but never to F!”

  —

  EVEN AS HICK DID HER BEST to keep Eleanor on an even keel, the intensity Eleanor admired in Hick’s work was becoming a growing problem in their relationship. Hick resented being sandwiched in among Eleanor’s many obligations. She resented even more being sandwiched in among Eleanor’s friends.

  “It’s sometimes rather tough to be the most recent of the people who have any claim on you!” Hick wrote. “I have no seniority rating at all!” She promised that it would be easier “when the time comes when I don’t care so much—or at least not in the way I care now.”

  In the meantime, however, Hick failed miserably at sharing and wound up lonely and angry as a result. She strongly disliked some of Eleanor’s closest friends. She considered Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman snobs, and they in return thought she was coarse and common. That eliminated many possibilities for Hick to be with Eleanor, who almost never said no to one friend because she wanted to be with another. Nan had come with her often to Campobello and helped her redecorate the White House, on top of working with her as a partner in the Val-Kill furniture business. Nan had seniority, as Hick pointed out. Nan was a given.

  Hick’s behavior toward Earl Miller touched off a rare moment of anger from Eleanor. “I think you can scarcely realize how you made me feel tonight,” she wrote Hick after an encounter during one of Eleanor’s radio broadcasts. “You went right by me at the studio without speaking. You told me you would entertain yourself in Washington before I had time to tell you whether I was busy or not, you barely spoke to Earl and Jane [Earl’s companion] at the play who were my guests and certainly did nothing rude to you and when I asked you to go in so you could sit by me you deliberately changed and sat as far away as possible. . . . I’m so deeply hurt tonight that I almost wish I had no friends. . . . For Saturday and Sunday at least let’s try to be cheerful and polite and not make everyone uncom
fortable.”

  Hick’s jealousy wasn’t directed so much at any one person, however. It was about the impossibility of being the person. Hick was even jealous of people she liked. A fundamental shift was occurring in the relationship. Hick’s intense craving for intimacy was beginning to feel suffocating to Eleanor. Her reaction was to distance herself. She began making a distinction between the way she felt and the way Hick felt. “You have a feeling for me which I may not return in kind,” she wrote. She loved other people “in the same way or differently but each one has their place and one cannot compare them.”

  Even more pointed was her suggestion that Hick might want to look elsewhere for affection. “If I know someone I love is unhappy I can’t be happy and I would be happier . . . to know they were happy even if it meant giving up my own relationship to them in whole or in part.”

  Alarm bells must have gone off when Hick received that letter. She wanted to be with Eleanor and no one else. But if she couldn’t moderate her jealousy and passion, she risked losing any relationship with the one she cared most about.

  Hick seems to have decided then that the only way to hold on to Eleanor was to need her less. The next spring, in an effort to change herself—and to change Eleanor’s feelings about her—she announced that she was going to stay on the road, doing her job for Harry Hopkins, for the next four months without a break.

  “Are you taking the absent treatment because it helps?” Eleanor asked. “If so I won’t say a word.” But her hurt feelings showed beneath her pretended indifference: “Well, dear it is for you to decide, for you are the one who suffers and I just enjoy what I can have and learned long ago to accept what had to be.”

  Perhaps in response to Eleanor’s suggestion that she find someone else, Hick got back in touch with Alicent Holt, an inspiring Latin teacher who had been not much older than she when she went to Battle Creek High School. Over several visits during her trips to Michigan, Hick and Alicent renewed the connection of twenty-five years earlier, with open expressions of affection. Alicent’s letters to “Rena” began “Carissima” and “my very own dear” and talked of how happy and energetic she felt anticipating Hick’s letters and visits. “I suppose I shall love you as long as you do me, at least, and perhaps a little bit longer,” Alicent wrote Hick.

  In South Dakota, too, Hick sought a loving figure from her past: Lottie McCafferty, the childhood friend who had rescued her by finding a place for her to live when her father and woman friend kicked her out of the house in Bowdle. Lottie was “a swell person,” Hick reported to Eleanor. “Warm, generous, fine.” She’d never finished high school, and her husband was working as a machinist’s helper on the railroad, happy to have a job after being laid off for three years. Hick planned to take Lottie with her as she traveled across Dakota and into Iowa.

  “What I’ve tried to do this summer,” Hick wrote, sounding very much like she was emulating Eleanor, “has been to give a few people as much fun as I could, as I went along. Lord knows when I’ll ever be able to again—if ever. Anyway, it’s been fun. Alicent was the biggest success.”

  In June, she and Alicent spent several days together, sharing “a lovely room” at the Lake Breeze Resort Hotel on Lake Superior. “This is it,” Hick wrote Eleanor. “The perfect place—in all the world—to spend a week end.” She added the usual “wish you were here” at the end of the letter, but this time it was more polite than desperate.

  Hick was actually sounding happy much of the time as the summer wore on. “I realize what a fascinating job this has been,” she wrote Eleanor. She dreaded going back to Washington and New York. No matter what she was doing a year hence, she thought she would look on this as “one grand Summer.”

  Meanwhile, Eleanor was enduring a July 4 celebration with FDR and his political and Harvard friends. “Dearest, how I wish you were here tonight. . . . I envy you off with one person when the day’s work is done.” Most of the time, she conceded, she’d rather be in a crowd than with one person. “But I’d like a few hours with you now and then.”

  Two weeks later, Eleanor sounded even sadder: “It is a strange world, so few of us free enough to do what we want to do, all of us trying to be happy in spots and make the best of what we can have.” She had decided not to join FDR on the campaign trail in August, but to stay in New York. Ironically, it was now Eleanor who didn’t want to share Hick, in the midst of a political campaign, surrounded by so many people. “It wouldn’t be satisfactory after not seeing you for so long,” she wrote, “to see you that way.”

  Eleanor was pessimistic about the campaign. FDR was losing support, she told Hick, but there was time to turn it around. “I feel, as usual, completely objective and oh! Lord so indifferent!”

  Hick pushed back, forcefully. “I’m wondering if you or I—or any other enlightened person—really has any right to be as indifferent about the outcome of this election as you are. Oh, I know—you hate it all. The ‘position.’ And so do I when I’m with you. I can’t even be polite about it. . . . A daily dose of Missy, along with all the fuss and pomp and adulation the man receives, will distort anyone’s view. And you, personally, would like to be free. . . . And, so far as evaluating the president and his administration go—you ‘can’t see the woods for the trees.’”

  She continued, “With all the faults—and the faults of some of the people around him—I still think he is a very great man. His defeat . . . will be a terrible calamity for millions of people in this country, the kind of people you, of all people, are supposed to care about. The poor and the lowly.”

  Despite her adoration, Hick wasn’t afraid to speak her mind to Eleanor when it mattered. She could see the forest for the trees: the country’s future depended on FDR’s reelection. She was an essential counterforce.

  Eleanor’s reply was defensive: she was doing all she could. “One can be personally indifferent and yet do one’s duty.” She even argued that her unhappiness made her more effective. It was “only when one is oneself unhappy that one ever thinks about the individual right to the pursuit of happiness.”

  It wasn’t easy, though, for Eleanor to keep her unhappiness out of her public appearances. “I’m back at my worst verge of tears condition which I hoped I could eliminate this summer,” she wrote Hick in August. “I only hope no one else realizes it and I don’t think they do for I look well.”

  Whatever the reasons for Hick’s “absent treatment,” it did create a new equilibrium in the relationship. After they reunited in New York in late September, Eleanor wrote her a joyous note: “All your fight has been worth while. It was grand being with you, feeling no strain and I take my hat off to you. . . . Bless you for one grand person.”

  Yet something had shifted, away from the initial intimacy toward a deep friendship at a lower temperature. Hick was going to have to accept being “one grand person”—not the one and only.

  —

  IN THE WEEKS leading up to the election, Eleanor’s private annoyance with FDR made it easier for her to follow the advice of his campaign managers and keep a low profile. Her opposite number, Alf Landon’s wife, Theo, had vowed to stay out of politics entirely and devote herself to her family, so the advisers wanted Eleanor to do the same. In her “My Day” column, which she had begun writing in December 1935, she was a model of neutrality on the day before the election: “What happens tomorrow is entirely out of our hands, the record of the past four years, the campaign that has been waged, all are over and whatever the decision may be one accepts it and builds as useful and pleasant a life as one can under whatever circumstances one has to live. You can not get unduly excited about the inevitable!”

  Other people did get excited, though, when the returns started to come in. The electoral results were unprecedented. Roosevelt’s 523-to-8 victory over Alf Landon was the most lopsided in a hundred years and marked the beginning of a new Democratic coalition that would change American politics for decades to co
me. On election night, several thousand neighbors, bearing torches and accompanied by a band playing “Happy Days Are Here Again,” walked over to Hyde Park to cheer their hero. Back in Washington the next day, thousands gathered on the White House lawn to celebrate.

  The victory freed both Roosevelts to speak their minds. On January 6, before a joint session of Congress, FDR went after the Supreme Court for consistently ruling New Deal Programs unconstitutional. He gave the National Recovery Act (NRA) as an example. “The statute has been outlawed,” he told Congress. “The problems have not.” According to the New York Times, “riotous cheering” greeted every one of his references to the recalcitrant Supreme Court.

  The next day, Eleanor gave a feisty address to one hundred members of the New York Junior League, defending WPA workers who were being accused by New Deal critics of “leaning on their shovels.” She urged the Junior Leaguers to go out and talk to the WPA workers and “get a cross-section of their thoughts and needs.” Or, Eleanor suggested, the Junior Leaguers could just try shoveling snow for a little while to see how it feels. “I know,” she told the ladies, “because I’ve done it myself.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LOOKING FOR A HOME

  ELEANOR ROOSEVELT HAD SPENT her entire life adjusting to houses that didn’t feel like home. As a young child, she had moved with her family from place to place as her parents sought a cure for her father’s ailments. After her mother died, she had been a lonely inhabitant of her grandmother’s house, with only servants and much older aunts for company. In marriage, of course, she had lived in grand houses, in Hyde Park and Manhattan, but they were decorated entirely by her mother-in-law. Nor had she felt particularly attached to the governor’s mansion in Albany. Once, when Frances Perkins visited there and expressed admiration for Eleanor’s flexibility in sleeping in one room or another, Eleanor told her, “This isn’t my house. It belongs to the State of New York. It’s furnished by the State of New York . . . in the official taste of the State of New York. . . . I’ve never bought so much as a teacup for myself. . . . I’ve never had anything.” The White House wasn’t home any more than the governor’s mansion had been. But she worked to make it comfortable.