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Amanda Vaill
NYT Syndicate
When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in November 1932, his wife, Eleanor, made an extraordinary admission to the Associated Press reporter on the Roosevelt beat."Being a Democrat, I believe this change is for the better," she said, but she"never wanted to be a president's wife ... Now I shall have to work out my own salvation." A devotee of progressive causes and a veteran political helpmate (Franklin had been assistant secretary of the Navy and then governor of New York), Eleanor didn't shrink from public service; but she was dismayed at the loss of privacy being a first lady would entail, and she worried that her position would keep her from the activism that gave meaning to her life.
Paradoxically, it was the AP journalist, Lorena Hickok, who helped her find her equilibrium. Hickok was a tough-minded beat reporter with a nose for a story, and Eleanor ” a good wife who had looked the other way at her husband's infidelities ” could have been the scoop of a lifetime. But Hick, as she was called, fell in love with her subject, and at least for a time Eleanor reciprocated. Realising she couldn't cover someone she had feelings for, Hick resigned from the AP and all but moved into the White House. Formally she worked for Harry Hopkins, the head of the New Deal relief programmes ” a job Eleanor arranged ” and reported, brilliantly, from the field about the lives of those affected by the ravages of the Depression. But she also functioned as Eleanor's increasingly necessary confidante and cheerleader.
In Eleanor and Hick, Susan Quinn, the author of several books including a biography of Marie Curie, is both circumspect and suggestive about the nature of their relationship.
Eleanor seized the bull by its ambiguous horns:"No one is just what you are to me," she wrote Hick. It was true. Hick was not only a personal safety-valve ("I blow off to you but never to F!" ), she advised the spotlight-averse Eleanor to hold weekly news conferences ” for women only ” and pushed her to repurpose the chatty, personal accounts of her life she included in their correspondence and turn them into the hugely popular newspaper column 'My Day'. And she brought Eleanor to Appalachia, where the two of them founded a public-private resettlement community called Arthurdale, for unemployed and impoverished miners and their families.
By 1938, however, Eleanor needed Hick less and less. Her involvements with the NAACP's anti-lynching campaign, her partisanship for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and the internationalists of the World Youth Congress, her wartime inspection tours of Britain and the Pacific, and in particular her transformative postwar work as chairwoman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights ” activities that manifested a kind of philosophical vision that went beyond Hick's pragmatic but parochial focus ” were undertaken on her own. Eleanor had other confidantes, and intimates, now. Hick did as well; but in choosing Eleanor, she had stepped off the ladder of her career, and she never regained her professional footing. Eleanor's death in 1962 brought eulogies for"the first lady of the world." When Hick died, six years later, her ashes were consigned to the"unclaimed remains area" of her town's cemetery.
This is a brisk, readable account of the intersection between these two women, but its subtitle is a misnomer. Eleanor was already shaped, as a writer and activist, when they met, and the period of Hick's influence lasted only from 1932 to 1938. The book's real value is as a parallel portrait of two unconventional women caught up in the maelstrom of 20th-century politics and world affairs ” one transcending the confines of her traditional role, the other ultimately pushed to the sidelines. Eleanor and Hick may not have the heft and depth of Blanche Wiesen Cook's monumental Eleanor Roosevelt biography (whose third and final volume will be published next month). But it provides helpful context in this electoral season, when a former first lady has become the first female presidential nominee of a major party, and the (male) nominee of the other party has belittled a female reporter for (in his words) having"blood coming out of her wherever." It's too bad Lorena Hickok isn't still around: She'd have slugged him.
