Eleanor and Hick

by Susan Quinn

  Some doubters suggested that the Declaration meant little, since it was not legally binding on any country. But it has influenced the writing of laws and treaties all over the world since its passage, and is built into the founding documents of many nations. It also buttresses world opinion against those who violate its principles. It was an immensely meaningful accomplishment, and one that Eleanor had achieved using her own skills as a tireless and gifted negotiator. Hick’s prediction, that she would find an “active and important” place after FDR died, was coming true.

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  BOOKS WERE POURING OUT by then about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, and Eleanor’s editor at the Ladies’ Home Journal was eager for her to “get down to the business of writing your book as quickly and as definitively as you can.” Bruce Gould, like others before him, suggested that Eleanor might need to “give up” some other activities to get it done. “Tell him I’m doing the best I can,” Eleanor instructed Tommy.

  It wasn’t just a problem of time. It had been easier for Eleanor to write her first book, about her early years, than her second memoir, about her time as the wife of a governor and president; there was much she couldn’t tell. For a while, she hired Hick to help her by going through some of the files at Hyde Park, pulling out stories and anecdotes and posing questions. But when she finally sent This I Remember off to Gould, he wasn’t happy with it. “You have written this too hastily—as though you had written it on a bicycle while pedaling your way to a fire.” He told her he wanted her to work on it for three more months, with a collaborator, and didn’t promise to publish it even then. Eleanor balked. Gould told her to “sell her book elsewhere if she wouldn’t improve it, and her column, too.”

  It was a parting of the ways he would live to regret. Otis Wiese, the publisher of McCall’s, was willing to pay $150,000 for the book, sight unseen, along with the monthly question-and-answer column for $3,000 a month, $500 more than Eleanor had been getting from Ladies’ Home Journal.

  When This I Remember came out, in November 1949, it was praised for sounding like the Eleanor Roosevelt everyone knew. “It is almost shockingly delightful to read a book which could have been written by absolutely no one else in the world than the great and important figure whose name is signed to it,” wrote Elizabeth Janeway in the New York Times Book Review. Eleanor Roosevelt was no stylist, Vincent Sheean noted, but what mattered was “the character of the author, and therefore it is from the character of the author that the pervading sense of great beauty arises.”

  If ever Hick had occasion to resent her dearest friend, this might have been it. Eleanor was being praised—not for writing well, but for writing in her own rather bland but highly recognizable style. Hick, who wrote far more vividly, couldn’t manage to sell a thing.

  Hick had shown some very justified resentment when she read what Eleanor had written about her in an early draft. On her first day at the White House, Eleanor wrote, she was interviewed by Lorena Hickok. “Later, I came to realize that in the White House one must not play favorites.”

  This was an example of Eleanor at her most insensitive. The reference to the interview was one of the few mentions she made of Hick in the draft. What’s more, it touched a nerve she should have been well aware of. Hick, the proud newspaperwoman, hated to be seen as only getting ahead because of Eleanor. Eleanor’s mention of her reinforced that idea.

  Perhaps because it was difficult for her to confront Eleanor, Hick protested in a three-page letter to Tommy. She didn’t get the interview because she was “a nice, tame pet reporter.” Rather, she got the story because “in those days (pardon an old lady her conceit) I was somebody in my own right. I was just about the top gal reporter in the country.” She noted that “being a newspaper reporter was the only thing I ever was really good at.

  “God knows,” she added, “I’ve had the conceit taken out of me plenty in the years since.”

  Above all, Hick was a writer: she believed this about herself, and others believed it too. But she couldn’t seem to sell her work. Part of the problem was her loyalty to the Roosevelts: all her pieces about them lacked critical distance. Even in other pieces, the habit of working for a partisan organization sometimes deprived her of her old edge.

  A particularly cruel blow came in 1949, when she attempted several chapters of an autobiography. A publisher who read it concluded that it lacked “the breath of life.” In fact the autobiography was full of life. But it was the life of an awkward girl who had crushes on other girls and who grew up to be a mannish woman, matching her male colleagues drink for drink. It was a world away from the sedate autobiographical writing of Eleanor, with whom she was linked in everyone’s minds. At the very least, the book would have told a different story from Eleanor’s. Hick’s chapters retain their power even now. But she couldn’t get them published in 1949.

  Eleanor, responding to Hick’s protest about her autobiography, revised her early draft to read, “Both my husband and Louis Howe agreed to this interview because [Lorena Hickok] was the outstanding Associated Press woman reporter and they both had known her and recognized her ability.” She added that “we had become warm friends and I felt that she would always be fair and truthful.” Then she ended the passage with a detail Hick had provided: the two of them were interrupted so often that they finally retreated to the bathroom.

  The positive response to This I Remember was part of a general softening of the public attitude toward Eleanor Roosevelt. The New Yorker had already begun the process with a two-part profile entitled “The Years Alone,” which emphasized her lifelong mantra: “Engagements must be kept.” New Yorker writer E. J. Kahn told of a time the previous winter when she was supposed to travel to Poughkeepsie from Val-Kill for a radio broadcast and was snowed in. The radio producer offered to send a sleigh, but Eleanor insisted she didn’t want to put him to so much trouble. She would find a way. She set out on foot through deep snow to reach the main road, two miles away, then hitched a ride from there to Poughkeepsie. After the broadcast, she was driven back to her jumping-off place. The return walk was easier, she explained, because she could follow the tracks she had made on the way out. She was sixty-three years old.

  Increasingly, Eleanor showed her more relaxed and even playful side to the public. She engaged in conversations on ABC radio with Anna and hosted a Sunday afternoon television program, produced by Elliott, on which famous people came to tea. The programs were meant to help Anna get out of the debt she had built up in her failed attempt to start a newspaper, and to help Elliott develop his career. Unfortunately, neither of the programs succeeded in finding a permanent sponsor. Nor did a subsequent radio program, in which Elliott touted certain products, like soap and hairbrushes, as the ones “Mother uses.” That show proved, according to Billboard, that “a boy’s best friend is his mother.” Eleanor made light of such criticism. She insisted she had enjoyed it.

  Over the years, Eleanor would agree to go on both serious and frivolous TV shows—everything from What’s My Line? to Meet the Press to Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person. She charmed a Tanglewood Music Festival audience with her reading of Peter and the Wolf. The critic Howard Taubman praised her “unaffected approach” and her “personal relish.” “She sounded like a grandmother,” he wrote, “reading a pleasant little story to her grandchildren.”

  Among those who were decidedly not charmed by Eleanor was Francis Joseph Cardinal Spellman. The cardinal was outraged by a “My Day” column Eleanor wrote in June 1949, responding to a request from the church for federal aid to Catholic schools. “The separation of church and state is extremely important to any of us who hold to the original traditions of our nation,” she wrote. Catholic schools should not receive “tax funds of any kind.”

  Spellman’s response astonished even good Catholics. “Your record of anti-Catholicism stands for all to see,” he wrote in an open letter, “a record which you yourself wrote in the pages of history .
. . documents of discrimination unworthy of an American mother!”

  Eleanor suspected that there was a subtext. Her earlier alliance with the Communist-influenced youth movement, her sympathy for the Loyalists in Spain, her active opposition in the UN to the Franco regime—all no doubt contributed to the cardinal’s outburst.

  Her response to the cardinal was calm and masterful. She denied any anti-Catholic feeling, but insisted that spiritual and secular leadership should not intrude upon each other. “I assure you that I had no sense of being ‘an unworthy American mother.’ The final judgment, my dear Cardinal Spellman, of the worthiness of all human beings is in the hands of God.”

  Thousands of letters of support poured in to Val-Kill. Archibald MacLeish contributed a poem that began, “Have you forgotten, Prince of Rome / Delighted with your Roman title / Have you forgotten that at home / We have no princes?”

  In the end, Cardinal Spellman was prevailed upon by others, probably including the Vatican, to backtrack. He called Eleanor and exchanged cordial words with her. Then a monsignor paid Eleanor a visit at Val-Kill to work out two conciliatory statements—one by the cardinal and one by Eleanor. The cardinal’s, while not mentioning Mrs. Roosevelt, referred to “the great confusion and regrettable misunderstandings.”

  It might have been the end of the story. But there was to be one last, rather astonishing chapter—described matter-of-factly in “My Day.”

  “The other afternoon,” Eleanor wrote, “as I was signing my mail, with side glances out of my window . . . Miss Thompson came to my desk, looking somewhat breathless and said: ‘Mrs. Roosevelt, Cardinal Spellman is on the porch and he wants to see you!’”

  It turned out that the cardinal was in the neighborhood, dedicating a chapel in Peekskill, and stopped by for what turned out to be a “pleasant chat.”

  “I hope the country proved as much of a tonic for him as it always is for me,” Eleanor wrote politely. Then she went on to discuss a letter she had received from a twelve-year-old.

  At the height of the Spellman controversy, Eleanor told President Truman that she would willingly resign her UN post if he thought her reappointment would be divisive. Truman replied immediately that she was needed in the UN more than ever. With Truman’s encouragement, Eleanor came to be what he called the “First Lady of the World.” During the four years after he was elected, she traveled not only all over Europe but also, following the sixth UN General Assembly in Paris at the end of 1951, to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Pakistan, and India. When she could, she brought David Gurewitsch along with her.

  For David and Eleanor, the high point of their journeys may well have been the moment of their meeting in Israel. Eleanor visited the Arab countries on her itinerary without David: she was advised that as a Jew he would have been unwelcome. But he was waiting at the Mandelbaum Gate when she crossed over into Israel from Jordan. “It was an emotional moment for Mrs. Roosevelt,” David wrote in his journal. “She had fought for Partition and was intensely and passionately pro-Israel.” It had been seventeen years since David had lived in what was then Palestine. “It certainly was an emotional moment for me.”

  After Israel, Eleanor and Gurewitsch traveled on to Pakistan and then India, where Eleanor used her experience with rebellious American youth to quell an angry crowd. She was in Allahabad, where she was to pay a visit to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and receive an honorary degree from Allahabad University. But then she discovered that the students had written an open letter of protest: Eleanor Roosevelt, an American imperialist, was not welcome! Timid officials wanted to cancel her appearance to prevent a scene. Eleanor would have none of it. She insisted on meeting with the protesters.

  Madame Pandit, Nehru’s sister and India’s ambassador to the UN, had accompanied Eleanor to Allahabad. She was outraged. But Eleanor insisted that it didn’t bother her. She had been through it all before with the Youth Congress back in the States, where she was sometimes “booed for five minutes.” At her insistence, some of the students were allowed into the Nehru compound for a conversation. But many more were still shouting their protests from the other side of a tall fence surrounding the residence.

  Madame Pandit, a courageous woman in her own right, went out and climbed first onto a table, and then onto a chair on top of the table, to speak to the angry crowd over the fence. To no avail. Finally, Eleanor came out herself and climbed up on the top of the table and chair. The students demanded she come back to meet with them at the student hall. She agreed, but would not let guards or even David accompany her. No one else should be endangered.

  Back at the students’ hall, Eleanor spoke briefly, then answered questions about America’s treatment of Negroes, policy toward Red China, and attitude toward India’s nonalignment. The meeting ended peacefully.

  Eleanor’s triumph in India was to be one of her last in an official role, representing the United States government. By 1952, Truman’s popularity had plummeted—partly because of the bloody and unending war in Korea and partly because of congressional investigations that implicated some members of his administration. He decided not to run again. In his place, the Democrats nominated a very different kind of candidate: Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson was a Princeton-educated lawyer from a privileged Illinois family with deep Democratic roots—a family not unlike Franklin Roosevelt’s. He had been a delegate to the UN in 1946 and 1947, before he became governor of Illinois. Eleanor was an enthusiastic supporter. She believed he was a far better candidate than his Republican opponent, the popular World War II general Dwight David Eisenhower.

  “I think on Election Day,” she wrote in “My Day,” “the votes will be cast for the man who really clarifies the issues and discusses them—Governor Stevenson—and not for the man who makes wild promises.”

  Republicans attacked the Truman administration’s failures to address “Korea, Communism, and Corruption,” including evidence that a large number of IRS employees had accepted bribes. But for the most part, the Eisenhower campaign relied on Eisenhower’s popularity more than the issues. “I Like Ike” became the prevailing slogan.

  Eisenhower won a landslide victory over Stevenson in 1952. Some hoped the new president might send Eleanor back to her position at the UN. But Eisenhower was not an admirer of Eleanor Roosevelt. There were perhaps too many substantive differences between them; it was also said that Eisenhower believed Eleanor had gossiped about his private life, though this would have been uncharacteristic. Whatever the reason, Eisenhower did not reappoint Eleanor to her post at the UN. At age sixty-eight, she was going to have to look for a new way to be “useful.”

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  WHEN CONGRESSWOMAN MARY NORTON retired in 1950, at age seventy-five, she asked Hick to collaborate with her on her life story. Norton had served in Congress for twenty-six years—longer than any other woman to date. Nannine Joseph, who was Hick’s literary agent as well as Eleanor’s, predicted that her book would be a “big seller.”

  “Thanks for helping me write ‘my baby,’” Norton wrote Hick after nearly a year of work on the book. “I know there were times when you felt like I did and wanted to throw it into the Potomac, but maybe when the baby grows up we will be proud of it.”

  When the “baby” went out into the world, however, there were no takers. Editors thought it was too heavy on issues and too light on personal anecdotes. Mary was disappointed but philosophical: she still had her health and sense of humor, she wrote Hick. “A big part of my disappointment has been on your account. I’m coming to believe that an author’s life is a tough one. It’s like a lottery.”

  Norton had been one of Hick’s warmest supporters through all her personal and professional ups and downs. She told Hick she was one of the “grandest women” she had ever known. Hick, for her part, told friends she felt closer to Mary than she had to her own mother. When Hick was struggling, Mary prayed for her. As Hick’s health deteriorated, she even asked th
e Benedictine Fathers to pray for her.

  Hick had a part-time job working for the New York State Democratic Committee until 1950. After that, her occasional article sales were barely enough to keep food on the table, buy coal for heat, and pay her rent at the Little House. Eleanor’s $100 checks, which arrived at Christmas, on her birthday, and even sometimes at Easter, were one of her few reliable sources of income.

  In the summer of 1952, Eleanor threw out a lifeline. Harper Publishing wanted Eleanor to write a book about women in politics, but she didn’t have the time. If Hick would do it, she would help, and “both our names can go on as co-authors.” Eleanor would write some parts and go over all of it. “They’ll give you an advance.”

  Hick jumped at the chance. It was a natural fit for her: she’d be writing about women she already knew and admired: Molly Dewson, Helen Gahagan Douglas, Mary Norton, Gladys Tillett, and, of course, Eleanor herself.

  The advance on what would be called Ladies of Courage gave Hick a chance to stay a while longer at the Little House. She sent chapters to Eleanor as she wrote them, and Eleanor wrote back full of praise: they were “simply swell” and “much more interesting than I thought it could possibly be made.”

  But the book wasn’t getting finished. Hick’s health problems were slowing her down: she had dizzy spells and eye hemorrhages that temporarily impaired her vision. In July 1954, she had to ask Eleanor to send her $50 a month for the next three months. She had a second book project by then, thanks to another Eleanor connection: an immigrant Italian named Joseph Cucolo, whose company built the Tappan Zee Bridge, hired Hick to write the story of his life. “He seems happy . . . so don’t tell him about your troubles,” Eleanor advised. “Bless you and I’m sorry dear.”

  In May 1955, when Ladies of Courage was still not done, Eleanor asked delicately, “How nearly are you making the end of the book?” Eleanor was beginning to realize that Hick wasn’t going to be able to earn a living from one or even two books, at the pace she was going. She suggested that Hick might want to “turn out lurid short stories for money to live on.” She could “do them fast and write the books slowly.”