Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  One of Hick’s favorites among the staff was Elizabeth MacDuffie, known to everyone as “Mrs. Mac.” Mrs. Mac’s mother had been born into slavery in Georgia. She herself, however, was a graduate of Morris Brown College in Atlanta, had taught school, and knew a vast trove of poems by heart. One she recited for Hick, with great passion, was “Hagar’s Farewell” by Augusta Moore, a retelling of the biblical story of the slave Hagar, ordered by the childless Sarah to become a second wife to Abraham:

  I never asked his love; I wished it not;

  I feared ye both, for was I not your slave?

  I was an orphan, friendless and forlorn,

  A stranger among strangers and a slave.

  “My God,” Hick wrote Eleanor, “what feeling she puts into those lines!”

  Once, when Hick was in bed with the flu, Mrs. Mac said, “Didn’t anybody ever iron you?” She directed Hick to lie on her stomach, spread a towel over her back, and passed a warm iron back and forth over her back and shoulders, “quietly talking to me of her girlhood days in the old South, until I felt completely relaxed and drowsy.”

  Several of Eleanor’s guests who stayed in the room adjoining Hick’s became Hick’s lifelong friends. One was Belle Roosevelt, wife of Teddy Roosevelt’s son Kermit, who defied her Republican relatives to become an eloquent speaker for Democratic women. Another was Helen Gahagan Douglas, the actress who served as California’s first Democratic congresswoman. Hick remembered one night when she and Douglas discovered that they had been standing facing each other for nearly two hours, leaning on the mantel and staring at themselves in a huge, gilt-framed mirror that hung above it, completely absorbed in their conversation. “You two haven’t any more sense than a couple of school girls,” Eleanor told them.

  Some of Hick’s most memorable times at the White House, however, came when the Roosevelts were out of town and there were no guests to be found. Not long after FDR’s victory in the 1936 elections, the Roosevelts took off in different directions. Eleanor was the first to leave, setting out by train on a speaking tour. Not long after, FDR boarded the USS Indianapolis for a cruise to Buenos Aires, where he was to attend the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace.

  For several weeks, the only guest at the White House was Lorena Hickok. Hick was there because Eleanor insisted she should write a book based on her reports to Harry Hopkins from the field. Hick needed to dig into the files at the White House, then read through and edit the reports, as well as some of the letters she had written to Eleanor.

  Despite her fear that she would be viewed by others in the administration as one of Eleanor’s charity cases, Hick had won the respect of a discerning audience. Harry Hopkins predicted that her reports would be published one day as one of the best histories of the Depression. FDR, too, read the reports and made use of them in clever ways: not only did he pass them on to the foot-dragging Harold Ickes, head of the PWA, as an argument for quicker action, but he also used them to impress people in conversation. According to Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rex Tugwell, “her reports on conditions throughout the country . . . were responsible in large part for the fund of information with which the President often astounded visitors.”

  Publishing a book would give Hick a chance—perhaps her only chance—to hold on to her identity as a writer. She would have gladly returned to her old job at the AP in New York, but she knew it wasn’t possible, despite Eleanor’s arguments to the contrary. “Now if you could just stop talking about your friendship for me and ignore it I think you would find it is practically forgotten,” Eleanor wrote her at one point. “If you get a job in N. Y. I don’t think you need fear their demands for I think they don’t need you now to get any story they want.”

  Hick was “amused at your idea that I could get a newspaper job, telling them I never saw you and didn’t know what was going on. They’d NEVER believe it, dear—unless I actually did quit seeing you. And that would be expecting a good deal of me. Gosh I’m not prepared to give you up entirely! (And I don’t believe you would want that, either).”

  But Hick was tempted, as the Spanish Civil War heated up, by the possibility of following her friend Marty Gellhorn to Europe. In several ways, Gellhorn represented the path not taken. Her reporting style would never have gone over at the AP: while far away in England, she had managed to write a piece about lynching in the South, purporting to be an eyewitness account but drawn entirely from her imagination, that prompted a congressional committee to call her in to testify. But her fictionalized portraits of life during the Depression, published that year under the title The Trouble I’ve Seen, received well-deserved praise. Now she was off on the Île de France with $250, most of which she’d earned from an unsigned article for Harper’s Bazaar called “Beauty Hints for Middle-Aged Women.”

  “I don’t worry about Marty,” Hick wrote Eleanor after a luncheon send-off. “If she has to, she can always cable her mother for help. And if she gets into a jam—which she probably won’t, being very courageous, clever and good looking—she’ll probably land on her feet. As a matter of fact, if she should get shot, she’d probably die happy. She’s that kind.” Hick added that “the adventure of the thing” would appeal to her too, if she “had a mother I could cable for funds.”

  Hick might have been a great war reporter. After it was all over, a friend of hers inscribed his book on World War II, “To Hick, who could have covered this story better than any of us.” But Eleanor gave only halfhearted support to Hick’s idea of reporting from Europe. “I’d hate you to go to Europe and see a war,” she wrote Hick in September 1936, “but if you really want it I’ll speak to Roy Howard [of Scripps-Howard newspapers] if you think it would help.”

  But then she sent Hick a clipping about a correspondent covering the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, lying in his bed and gasping for breath in the extreme heat. The headline on the story was “War Correspondent Finds Many Troubles.” The truth was, Eleanor didn’t even like having Hick on the West Coast, let alone across the ocean. And Hick didn’t want to be so far away either. If she was to have a future as a writer, she was going to have to publish a book. And that was why she found herself all alone at the White House.

  “The White House, when the family are all away,” she noted, “is about as cozy as Grant’s tomb after midnight. Even the dogs get low in their minds.” It was during this period that she formed a bond with Anna’s Irish setter, Jack. She found him waiting for her when she arrived home in the evening and was so flattered by his enthusiasm that she took him for a run on the South Lawn. After that, Jack slept on her bed and followed her into the bathroom to lie beside the tub while she took a bath.

  With Jack at her side, Hick made her way through the reports and letters, reliving the highs and lows of the last four years. Sometimes she was encouraged by what she found. “Really some of it reads rather well,” she wrote Eleanor. “I’m surprised!”

  On one day Hick came across a lot of early letters written to Eleanor while she was still at the AP. “Dear, whatever may have happened since—whatever may happen in the future—I was certainly happy those days, much happier, I believe, than many people ever are in all their lives. You gave me that, and I’m deeply grateful.”

  The next day she was in despair about her wordiness. The letters, she wrote, “depress me horribly, and I wonder if sometimes in the last four years you haven’t been as tired of looking at my handwriting as I am now!”

  Hick’s turbulent emotions about her writing were interrupted by tragic news: the young son of Mabel Webster, Eleanor’s personal maid, had died after an illness. Marshall Webster had been an athlete, president of his class in high school, and was planning to be a minister. He had turned twenty just two days before he died.

  Hick decided to attend the funeral. It was a cold day in December, so she borrowed Eleanor’s fur-lined coat. “I hope you don’t mind,” she wrote Eleanor, who was in New York, “and do
n’t think you will because you have let me wear it before.” Accompanied by Mrs. Mac, she drove down to Catlett, Virginia, a “typical little Southern town, probably hot and dusty in Summertime—pretty cold and bleak today in the pale winter light.”

  The service was held in “a chilly, shabby little church down near the railroad station,” with hard benches and “pieces of cardboard replacing the glass” in some doors, “a wheezy old organ,” and fans with “colored pictures of Jesus preaching beside the Sea of Galilee.” The place was filled. The eleven people who came from the White House were seated prominently up front. Except for several ladies in the balcony, Hick was the only white person in attendance.

  There were many flowers, Hick reported, including a very large set piece, a floral wheel with a spoke and part of a rim missing. Across it on white ribbon, in letters of gold, were the words “My Darling.”

  Mabel, Hick reported, “simply sat, perfectly quiet, looking down. At times her lips would move. She looked as though she had wept until she could weep no more.

  “Poor, poor Mabel,” Hick wrote. “But she was splendid today. You know, in a way she reminded me of that statue in Rock Creek cemetery. There wasn’t the beautiful face, of course, or form. It was just fat, pudgy, black Mabel—who has trouble with her arches and keeps saying she must cut down on starches. But, oh, my dear, the dignity of her! She was quiet, spent, relaxed, like that woman in the statue. And in it, somehow, she was beautiful!”

  PART III

  TOGETHER AND APART

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TRADING JOBS

  IN THE END, Hick didn’t succeed in finding a publisher for her book about the Great Depression. Only one editor nibbled, and his letter to her wasn’t encouraging. Eleanor cheered Hick on to “tell him with a little fire such as you are capable of what you did . . . and he will be interested. Go after him!”

  But even though Hick could generate plenty of fire when she was going after a scoop, she was terrible at selling herself. When she first met George Bye, the agent she shared with Eleanor, he said, “Good Lord, are you always so humble and so unsure of yourself in anything you do?” To which Hick replied, “No, I was a darn good reporter and knew I was.”

  The underlying problem, once again, was that Hick was now linked in everyone’s minds to Eleanor, for better and for worse. People were much more interested in Eleanor Roosevelt than they were in stories of the Great Depression, which they were living through at that very moment. And those Roosevelt stories were the ones Hick wouldn’t tell.

  But the same connection that undermined her writing career became an asset in hunting for work. It was probably Eleanor’s idea, and it was certainly her political influence, that helped Hick get a new job working for the dapper and politically connected Grover Whalen, who was in charge of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Hick was hired to work in promotion at $5,400 for the first year. It would mean living most of the time at her New York apartment, which she had kept during her years on the road with Hopkins. She would have to take a pay cut (she had been paid $6,000 a year by the government). Also, doing PR was a step down for a self-respecting newspaper person. But Hick told Eleanor she was “pleased to have it settled.” Nor did Hick seem to mind that the Ladies’ Home Journal had offered Eleanor $50,000, on the basis of one installment, for her memoir about her early life. Hick read and critiqued all the installments. When they came out in book form, with the title This Is My Story, Hick exulted in the reviews: “I read the notice in the Times today,” she wrote, “and it is marvelous. I’m so pleased and proud. . . . I think the review is very sincere—an honest tribute to a real job.”

  The sheer volume of Eleanor Roosevelt’s writing over a lifetime is astonishing. In addition to three lengthy memoirs, she wrote a half dozen other books and scores of magazine articles. But her most astounding accomplishment by far was her newspaper column, “My Day,” which she began writing late in 1935. From then until the month before she died, in November 1962, Eleanor filed her column. Most of that time she filed it six days a week. At its height, “My Day” reached over four million readers and placed her in the redoubtable company of Heywood Broun and Dorothy Thompson.

  Eleanor was proud of the writing identity she had developed, with Hick’s encouragement. She joined the Newspaper Guild and referred on several occasions in “My Day” to her “fellow columnists.” For the most part, as she acknowledged, she was “a painter of pictures and a chronicler of unimportant events,” rather than a deep thinker. Especially during the early years, “My Day” was really the same diary of daily life that she had been sending to Hick in letter form since 1932—supposedly with the idea that Hick would one day write her biography. Now it was dictated to Tommy in the same casual fashion, but without the private emotions. The voice was friendly and smiling, and the style was conversational. Phrases like “you would like,” “I wonder how many of you,” and “I must tell you” were common. Small things, like a tickle in the throat at a concert, or feeding her horse Dot sugar cubes after a ride, were the usual fare.

  To her credit, she listened to and even published the words of her critics, including a letter from a woman “very much in earnest” who complained about her filling up her column “with inane chatter about your family affairs—words, words, words, which are . . . only once in a blue moon of any value whatsoever. Why do you consider those things interesting to intelligent people just because you happen to be the President’s wife? Why waste your valuable time and the space in the paper . . . when you could so easily write something which might have marvelous results for the betterment of the world?”

  The day after she published this critique, Eleanor returned to tried-and-true cataloging of the day’s events: tea with a bishop who was an old family friend, a press conference, a meeting about the national folk festival, followed by the largest dinner of the year—for the Diplomatic Corps. It turned out, as Eleanor also learned from her mail, that a lot of people enjoyed entering vicariously into the First Lady’s daily routine. It was also true that, as the wife of the president, she couldn’t ever say what she really felt.

  In the early years, some of Eleanor’s more outspoken “My Day” columns concerned the role of women in the world. When the critic John Golden claimed that women could never become great playwrights because they “do not know as much as men,” she responded that “as a rule women know not only what men know but much that men will never know. For how many men really know the heart and soul of a woman?”

  As if to prove her point, many male readers wrote to Eleanor complaining about women who were taking paid jobs and did not need them. Some women, she argued, get jobs because they are not entirely satisfied with work in the home. “This does not mean that they are not good mothers and good housekeepers, but they need some other stimulus in life.” Regular readers of “My Day” would have understood that Eleanor was one of those women who longed for more.

  The enormous victory in the 1936 presidential election gave Eleanor more freedom to participate in public life. In January, she delighted her friend and ally, the civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune, by speaking at a national gathering on the future of the Negro. She spoke in support of a low-income housing bill, sponsored by Senator Robert Wagner of New York, even before FDR endorsed it.

  She also spoke out on the single most controversial issue of FDR’s second term, and perhaps of his entire presidency: the attempt to remake the Supreme Court. On February 5, 1937, just a few weeks after his inauguration, FDR sent a special message to Congress proposing the transformation of the Court. Under his plan, the president would have the power to appoint an additional member to the Court whenever a justice reached age seventy. Since six of the nine members were already over seventy, FDR’s proposal would have increased the number on the Court by six, all of them allies of the president.

  FDR had good reason to be frustrated with the Supreme Court: the justices had overruled every major New
Deal measure that came before them—the National Recovery Act (NRA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), and even a minimum wage law. But the president handled his effort at court reform badly: he consulted no one ahead of time, telling congressional leaders about his plan at the very last minute. He made disparaging remarks about “horse-and-buggy” justice handed out by “elderly judges living in cloistered seclusion and thinking in terms of a by-gone day.”

  FDR’s proposal was viewed by friend and foe alike as an unwise power grab and a sign of dangerous dictatorial tendencies. His allies in Congress deserted in droves. Even Governor Herbert Lehman, the Roosevelts’ old friend, became a critic.

  Eleanor had qualms too. But she always cared more about helping people in need than about strict adherence to the rules. She rose to FDR’s defense in “My Day.” Opposition to the plan came from “the same group which opposed much of the social legislation of the present administration.” The will of the people, expressed in the November election, should “determine our government,” not “a minority group” of critics.

  “Lord, I love it when you get your back up,” Hick wrote Eleanor after reading the column. But Hick wasn’t entirely convinced herself, even after FDR delivered one of his most persuasive fireside chats, assuring his audience that “you who know me can have no fear that I would tolerate the destruction by any branch of government or any part of our heritage of freedom.”

  Eleanor, however, praised Franklin’s “calm, dispassionate delivery” and dismissed fears of dictatorship. “That isn’t my worry,” she told Hick. “I wonder if in the long run it will accomplish the desired results!”