No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Read online

  For nine months, a labor force of 28,500 had worked 24-hour days to triple the size of the camp. They had built a road that stretched 74 miles, a reception center capable of handling 1,000 men at a time, 20 63-men barracks, and a new hospital with 99 interconnected buildings and beds for 1,680 soldiers. When a critical shortage of furnaces threatened to halt construction of the hospital, four railroad locomotives had been brought into the camp on temporary sidings to pump steam into the building. And still the ringing of hammers could be heard everywhere the Roosevelts went.

  Eleanor found the 25-mile drive through Fort Bragg “extraordinarily interesting.” She heard a general say that “they put up a building of some kind every 32 minutes.” She was pleased with the range of activities available to the soldiers—the athletic programs, the recreation centers, the football fields, and the theaters—though she worried about the strain on the small city of Fayetteville, and took note, as always, of the lack of housing for workmen, who were sleeping in trailers, in the back seats of cars, in makeshift tents on the hillsides.

  The hurried pace at Fort Bragg could have been seen at any number of spots across the country. In order to train and equip the army of 1.4 million that conscription had decreed, 46 new army camps had to be built. The camps were concentrated along the Eastern Seaboard, in the states of the Old Confederacy, and along the California coast. Ideally, the construction would have been finished before the draftees were inducted, but because funds were not available until the passage of the Selective Service Act in September, the army was struggling to complete the camps even as the troops arrived. The job was monumental: land had to be cleared, hills leveled, valleys filled, trees uprooted, roads surfaced, and drainage systems installed before the construction of barracks, laundries, officers’ quarters, and rifle ranges could begin. The building of the new camps required 400,000 men, 908,000 gallons of paint, 3,500 carloads of nails, and 10 million square feet of wallboard.

  The frantic schedule had resulted in scores of mistakes. Lacking proper engineering surveys, camps had been built on rocky terrains and swampy soil. “We’re building this camp in a sponge,” workmen at Camp Blanding in Florida complained. One camp had been located 16 miles from “the worst malaria area in the southeastern United States.” Another lacked adequate water supplies and had to be moved. In some cases, confused orders had gone out to put up barracks before roads had been built. In other cases, men were brought in before even the most rudimentary facilities—latrines and kitchens—were available. “If our plans for military campaigns are no more extensive and no better than these constructions,” Senator Harry Truman’s special committee to investigate the national defense program later concluded, “we are indeed in a deplorable situation.”

  Each camp was a little city, with a population ranging in size from 40,000 to 80,000, with its own police force, fire department, water sewerage, and transportation system. “But to the new soldier,” Lee Kennett has written in his study of the American soldier in World War II, “the camp that would be his home for the next few months was like no city he had known in civilian life.” The buildings were all so similar, made with the same “bare, angular, institutional look of the Quartermasters’ 700 Series plans,” that it was almost impossible to tell them apart. All the intersections looked the same as well; the relentless rectangular layout made it easy to get lost. In the early days of the planning, Eleanor had suggested that “curved streets might make the camps more pleasant places,” but the rectangular orthodoxy prevailed. The original intention was to leave the buildings unpainted, but here Eleanor achieved partial success—the structures were painted but the same drab color was used throughout. Whether in Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, or New Jersey, the camp presented an unwelcoming aspect to the new arrival.

  But all these problems paled beside the magnificent achievement of the Quartermaster Corps under General Brehon Somervell. By the spring of 1941, despite the waste and the bungling, despite the obstacles of weather and terrain, all 46 camps were open and functioning, ready to receive the new American army. And when they were finished, Geoffrey Perrett has written in his study of the American army during the war, “they were the best run, most comfortable, most efficient posts [the army] had ever possessed.”

  Roosevelt was delighted with his inspection tour. Reporters noted his high spirits and suggested that he seemed to be “sitting on the top of the world.” Returning to his train, he passed a group of children from a Negro school in Fayetteville. His appearance made a lasting impression. Twelve months later, the school’s principal, Edwin Martin, wrote him that the children still recalled “that wave of the hand and that broad smile.”

  As the train pulled away from the station, the army fired the president’s 21-gun salute. “Fala stood with his paws on the window,” Eleanor noted in her column, “and as each gun went off, he sniffed the air,” a bewildered expression on his face.

  • • •

  On the night of their return to the White House, the president dined with Missy while Eleanor attended a dinner party at the Women’s National Press Club. Special guests included Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, which had inspired the biggest movie of the year, and Marjorie Rawlings, author of The Yearling. In Eleanor’s honor, the women journalists had devised a humorous skit depicting the curious assortment of houseguests Eleanor was constantly inviting to the White House, with members of the club impersonating the president and the first lady. At one point in the make-believe party, which sported a wildly clashing group of guests, an annoyed Franklin approached Eleanor. “You do have the damndest people at the White House, Eleanor,” he told her. “Now, Franklin,” she replied, “you know I had all the royalties you like, and besides . . .” Eleanor enjoyed every moment, leading the applause.

  But even as the members of the press club teased Eleanor about her eclectic guest list, they had no idea that the newest addition to the Roosevelts’ unorthodox “family” was one of their own—former AP reporter Lorena Hickok. Miss Hickok, known to everyone as Hick, had moved from New York to Washington in January to become executive secretary to the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee. Leaving behind a rented apartment in Manhattan and a country house on Long Island, she could not afford to rent an apartment in Washington. Eleanor, understanding Hick’s predicament, invited her to stay at the White House until she could sublet her New York apartment.

  Hick ended up living in the White House for four years. The little room she occupied was part of the northwest corner suite on the second floor. Two hundred feet from the president’s bedroom, this was the room where Louis Howe had once lived. It was originally designed as the dressing room for the larger bedroom next door, but it contained a bed, a dressing table, a desk that jiggled, an old-fashioned commode that served as a night table, and a fireplace. “I never knew any greater comfort or luxury,” Hick later said, “than lying in bed and looking into that fire. It was wonderful not to have to carry in logs for it. Twice a day a man came in with logs, poked up the fire, and swept up the ashes.”

  Eleanor’s generosity allowed Hick to keep her beloved country house in Mastic, Long Island. “But that was not the only reason why I stayed at the White House,” Hick later admitted. “Although I never told Mrs. Roosevelt I couldn’t bear the idea of being in Washington and hardly ever seeing her.” When Hick and Eleanor first became friends in the fall of 1932, the thirty-nine-year-old Hick was at the top of her profession as a journalist. Having worked at the Associated Press in New York for a dozen years, she was the most widely known female reporter in the country, respected for her political savvy, her passionate convictions, and her superb writing style. At poker games with her colleagues, she looked and acted like one of the boys, with her flannel shirt and trousers loosely covering her two-hundred-pound frame, and a cigar hanging from her mouth.

  Eleanor that fall was at one of the lowest moments in her life, filled with terror at the thought of moving to Washington and becoming first lady
, fearing that everything she had built in the previous decade with the help of her female colleagues would be destroyed.

  Now, eight years later, the tables were turned. As Hick was moving into the White House, it was Eleanor who had transformed the position of first lady into one perfectly suited to her remarkable skills, while Hick was depressed and emotionally unstable.

  To understand this reversal, one must understand their relationship in the days after Eleanor and Hick first became acquainted. During the last weeks of the 1932 campaign, Hick was assigned to cover Eleanor on a regular basis. “You’d better watch out for that Hickok woman,” Franklin had warned his wife. “She’s smart.” But, the more time they spent together—sharing a drawing room on the presidential train, riding together in an automobile from one event to the next—the more Eleanor began to grasp the vulnerability and need that lay beneath Hick’s hard-boiled exterior—a vulnerability that found an answering chord in Eleanor’s own sense of weariness and pain.

  In the time they spent in each other’s company, Hick told Eleanor the story of her childhood days on a poor dairy farm in Wisconsin. Her father was an abusive man who beat her regularly, killed her dog, and crushed her mother’s kitten against the house. “There must have been times when he was not angry,” Hick later wrote, “times when he was gay, affectionate, perhaps even indulgent with his children, but I do not remember them.” After leaving home as soon as she could, Hick put herself through high school by working as a servant in a number of rooming houses. She won every school prize that was offered, then spent two years at Lawrence University before quitting to become a cub reporter.

  Her rise through the world of journalism was exceptional. She went from cub reporter at the Battle Creek Journal to society editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel within the space of a year. From there she moved on to the Minneapolis Tribune, where she became the first woman sports reporter and a star feature writer.

  In her personal life, Hick had achieved less success. When she was twenty-five, she had fallen in love with a wealthy young woman named Ellie Morse, who was taking English courses at the university and trying to write poetry. For six years, Hick and Ellie lived together in what seemed to be a serene and happy relationship. Then, one day, without warning, Ellie eloped with an old boyfriend, leaving Hick in a ravaged state, certain she would never fall in love again.

  Hick’s story touched Eleanor profoundly, prompting her to share with the reporter the story of her own wretched childhood. “I am not unhappy,” Eleanor assured Hick. “Life may be somewhat negative with me, but that is nothing new. I think it was when I was a child & is now a habit . . . .” Eleanor further confided in Hick the catastrophe of her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer and the slow, painful process of reconstructing herself through her work with the League of Women Voters and a dozen other organizations in her home state. But with her husband’s move to the White House, she would be forced to leave all her friends behind, forced to invent herself all over again. It was a daunting prospect.

  Hick empathized with Eleanor’s fears of becoming first lady in a way that other friends did not. And she had the professional experience and political sophistication to help Eleanor figure out how to make the job she feared into one she wanted. It was Hick who suggested that Eleanor consider holding her own press conferences, restricted to female reporters so as to encourage the papers to employ more women. It was Hick who suggested that Eleanor publish a running account of her daily experiences in the form of a column, a suggestion that led directly to Eleanor’s enormously popular syndicated column, “My Day.” It was Hick who encouraged Eleanor to write frequent magazine pieces and spent hours editing her early drafts. But, far more important, it was Hick who fell madly in love with Eleanor, pursuing her in a way she had never been pursued before.

  “Every woman wants to be first to someone in her life,” Eleanor later explained to Joe Lash, “and that desire is the explanation for many strange things women do.” When Franklin was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, Eleanor was wearing a sapphire ring which Hick had given her just before she left New York. “Hick, darling,” Eleanor wrote Hick after the inauguration. “I want to put my arms around you . . . to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and I think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it!”

  Every night of that first week in the White House, as Franklin summoned the Congress into special session and prepared his first fireside chat on the banking crisis, Eleanor had sat in her room writing to Hick, whose work had taken her back to New York immediately after the festivities. “I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. 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 . . . . My love enfolds thee all the night through.”

  Hick called Eleanor at the White House the following day. “Oh! how good it was to hear your voice,” Eleanor wrote later; “it was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant. Jimmy was near and I couldn’t say Je t’aime and je t’adore . . . . I go to sleep thinking of you and repeating our little saying.

  “The nicest time of day is when I write to you,” Eleanor assured Hick, pledging that she would kiss Hick’s picture since she couldn’t kiss her. “Remember one thing always, no one is just what you are to me. I’d rather be with you this minute than anyone else . . . . I’ve never enjoyed being with anyone the way I enjoy being with you.”

  For her part, Hick counted the days until she and Eleanor could be together again. Having found the love she had been seeking all her life, she was miserable without Eleanor. “Funny,” Hick wrote, “how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips.”

  What are we to make of these intimate letters? “While they seem at first glance to be the letters of one lover to another,” historian and former Roosevelt Library Director William Emerson observes, “the passionate words were more likely a substitute for the expressions of love Eleanor needed so desperately.” Eleanor’s friend Trude Lash agrees. “Eleanor had so many emotions stored up inside, that when Hick came along, it was almost like a volcanic explosion. But does that mean that Eleanor acted on her words, that she had a lesbian relationship with Hick? I do not think so.”

  Hick’s biographer, Doris Faber, concedes the amorous phrases but reminds us that personal letters can be terribly misleading unless they are placed in the context of their time. In a ground-breaking study of correspondence between women in Victorian America, the world into which Eleanor was born, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that women routinely used romantic, even sensual rhetoric to communicate with their female friends. At a time when relationships between men and women frequently lacked ease and spontaneity, women opened their hearts more freely to other women, exchanging secrets, sharing desires, admitting fears.

  To be sure, the letters possess an emotional intensity and a sensual explicitness that is hard to disregard. Hick longed to kiss the soft spot at the corner of Eleanor’s mouth; Eleanor yearned to hold Hick close; Hick despaired at being away from Eleanor; Eleanor wished she could lie down beside Hick and take her in her arms. Day after day, month after month, the tone in the letters on both sides remains fervent and loving.

  Yet the essential question for the biographer is not whether Hick and Eleanor went beyond kisses and hugs, a question there is absolutely no way we can answer with certainty. The far more absorbing question, and the one that can be answered, is what role the precious friendship played in each of their lives at that particular juncture.

  There is every evidence that Hick’s love for Eleanor came at a critical moment in Eleanor’s life, providing a mix of tenderness, loyalty, confidence, and courage that sustained her in her struggle to redefine her sense of self and her position in the world. For Eleanor, Hick’s love was a positive force, allowing her to grow and take wing, write the story of her life the way s
he wanted it to be, even in the White House. Secure in the knowledge that she was loved by the most important woman in her life, Eleanor was able to create a public persona that was to earn the love of millions. “You taught me more than you know & it brought me happiness . . . ,” Eleanor later told Hick. “You’ve made of me so much more of a person just to be worthy of you.”

  For Hick, the love that had made her so euphoric at the start soon left her wretched and sulking. When she was separated from Eleanor, she felt restless and miserable, able only with the greatest difficulty to concentrate on the work that had once given her such pleasure and prestige. What is more, in drawing so close to Eleanor, Hick had compromised her position as a journalist. “A reporter,” Louis Howe once warned Hick, “should never get too close to a news source.” Through her friendship with Eleanor, Hick found herself smack in the middle of some of the biggest stories of the First Hundred Days, but it never once occurred to her to share what she was hearing with her office. Her days as a reporter had come to an end before she recognized it.

  Willing to submit to anything as long as she could spend time with Eleanor without feeling guilty, Hick resigned her position at AP in the summer of 1933. It was a major miscalculation. Though Eleanor found her a good job with Harry Hopkins that made use of her writing skills in evaluating WPA projects, Hick reproached herself bitterly for giving up her career, her colleagues, her daily by-lines, her life. “Unwittingly,” Eleanor’s granddaughter Eleanor Seagraves said, “Hick let herself slip into a role where she lost her old identity and became dependent on my grandmother.” No longer a nationally recognized reporter, she found it degrading and hateful to be identified in pictures as Eleanor’s secretary or bodyguard. Yet, even if she had wanted to get rid of the love that obsessed her, she could not.