Trailblazing journalist Lorena Hickok started working as a reporter in 1912, at a time when only about 1 in 5 women in the United States had jobs outside the home and their right to vote was still years away. It was that career that led Hickok to someone who would change her professional and personal life forever: Eleanor Roosevelt.
In the new biography “Hick,” the title an ode to its subject’s nickname, author Sarah Miller explores Hickok’s impoverished Midwestern upbringing, her illustrious professional career in the country’s largest cities and the relationship that would come to define her legacy.
Miller said she was inspired to write about Hickok and her association with Roosevelt after reading conflicting accounts about the nature of their decadeslong relationship. The women exchanged letters with each other, sometimes twice daily, from 1932 until Roosevelt’s death in 1962. Hickok donated thousands of these letters to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and they were made public in 1978, a decade after her death. Their 30-year correspondence provided unique insight into their relationship, but those who read the letters and went on to write about them afterward interpreted them in vastly different ways — from strictly platonic to deeply romantic.
“So you read all those things, and if you’re a person like me, you’re like, ‘OK but who’s right? What is this relationship, really?’ And the best way to do that is to go and read the letters, all of them, with your own eyes,” Miller said.
During her research for “Hick,” which comes out Tuesday, Miller read about 3,500 letters between the two women. Her conclusion falls onto the romantic side of the spectrum, but a romance rooted in friendship.
“They loved each other. They were physically affectionate with each other. It was a romance, for sure. Whether that included sexual intimacy is probably something we can’t know,” Miller said. “It’s really tough to be completely objective, but there’s no question that they were lifelong, deeply intimate friends, and I think that is the bedrock of the relationship.”
In one letter quoted in the book, dated March 5, 1933, the day after her husband’s first inauguration, Roosevelt writes: “Hick my dearest, I cannot go to bed to-night without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving to-night. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you even though I’m busy every minute.”
The following day, Roosevelt tells Hickok: “I can’t kiss you so I kiss your picture good night & good morning.” And in another letter from that week, Roosevelt mentions the sapphire-and-diamond ring Hickok gave her and writes: “Your ring is a great comfort, I look at it & think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it!”
The women also appear to conceal their level of closeness from others, including how they communicate their love in French. In one 1933 letter, Roosevelt, mentioning her teenage son, writes: “Hick darling, Oh! how good it was to hear your voice, it was so inadequate to try & tell you what it meant, Jimmy was near & I couldn’t say ‘je t’aime et je t’adore’ as I longed to do but always remember I am saying it & that I go to sleep thinking of you & repeating our little saying.”
While there appears to be consensus among historians that Hickok was only romantically interested in women, some caution against interpreting her correspondence with Roosevelt through a contemporary lens.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1994 book, “No Ordinary Time,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin concedes that their letters contain an “emotional intensity” but appears skeptical that they had more than a deeply intimate friendship, noting that at least one study has shown women of Roosevelt’s era used romantic and even sensual rhetoric to communicate with female friends.
But history does have a way of “straight-washing” same-sex relationships of the past. This practice has even spawned a popular internet joke, “And historians will say they were just good friends.”
‘Top gal reporter in the country’
“Hick” goes beyond Hickok’s relationship with Roosevelt. Miller starts at the beginning, in 1893, when Hickok was born over a Wisconsin creamery to a butter maker and his wife, and she takes the reader through Hickok’s difficult youth in South Dakota, which is marked by tragedy, poverty and abuse. Miller then recounts Hickok’s meteoric rise in the world of journalism, which started in 1912 at Michigan’s Battle Creek Evening News and ended at The Associated Press, where she worked from 1928 to 1933, covering some of the biggest stories of her day, including the Lindbergh kidnapping.
“One of my goals was to dwell more heavily on Hick’s career and her early life, because folks, and understandably so, get very caught up in the ‘did they or didn’t they’ aspect of her relationship with the first lady, but it’s interesting to note that without her success in journalism — which was a feat in and of itself, because she was a woman in an era when women had not really broken through that ceiling yet — without that success, she would not have been anywhere near the Roosevelts’ orbit,” Miller said. “She was just a little nobody kid from a podunk town in South Dakota, and yet, by the time she’s 40, she’s sleeping in the White House.”
Hick, who at the height of her career described herself as the “top gal reporter in the country,” eventually lived in the White House for four years. But her close relationship with Roosevelt, and the conflict of interest it presented, eventually led to the end of her journalism career.
“You can argue it, sort of bluntly, that Eleanor ruined Hicks’ career, because Hick recognized, a little belatedly, that she had lost her objectivity specifically where the Roosevelts, and Eleanor in particular, were concerned,” Miller said.
She quit her job at The Associated Press in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, and she would never work as a news reporter again. She did, however, go on to work for the Roosevelt administration for several years, and she wrote books in her later life, including biographies of Eleanor Roosevelt and Helen Keller.
When asked what she hopes readers take away from “Hick,” which Miller noted is intended for adults and readers as young as 14, she said it’s the importance of friendship.
“Our culture, in general, is inclined to somewhat devalue ‘just friendship,’” she said. “For many folks, and I think possibly for Hick and Eleanor, sex is not necessarily the ultimate test of intimacy. … The thing that I kind of push a bit in ‘Hick’ is friendship can be perfectly enough.”
