Pioneering journalist Lorena Hickok began working as a reporter in 1912. It was her career that led Hickok to Eleanor Roosevelt, the one who changed her professional and personal life forever.
In the title, the new biography, Hiccup, author Sarah Miller explores Hiccupuk’s upbringing of poor Midwest, her illustrious professional career in the country’s largest city, and the relationships that come to define her legacy.
Miller said she was inspired to write about Hickok’s relationship with Roosevelt after reading conflicting accounts about the nature of their decades of relationship. The women exchanged letters sometimes twice a day, sometimes twice a day, from 1932 to Roosevelt’s death in 1962. Hickoc donated these letters to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, to thousands of people, and was published in 1978 10 years after her death. Their 30 years of communication provided unique insight into their relationship, but those who continued reading the letters then interpreted them in a very different way – from strictly platonic to deep romantic.
“So you’ve read all of them, and if you’re like me, you’re ‘OK, but who’s right? What is this relationship?” And the best way to do it is to read all the letters, with your own eyes,” Miller said.
In her study of “Hic” that appears on Tuesday, Miller read about 3,500 letters between the two women. Her conclusion is in the romantic aspects of the spectrum, but a romance rooted in friendship.
“They loved each other. They were physically affectionate about each other. It was certainly a romance. “It’s really hard to be completely objective, but there’s no doubt that they’re a lifelong, deeply intimate friend. I think that’s the bedrock of the relationship.”
In one letter cited in a book dated March 5, 1933, Roosevelt wrote the day after her husband’s first inauguration:
The next day, Roosevelt told Hickok: And in another letter from that week, Roosevelt says that Hickok, a ring of sapphire and diamond, gave her.
Women also seem to hide the level of intimacy from others, including how they communicate love in French. In one letter in 1933, Roosevelt mentioned his teenage son, saying, “Hick Darling, oh! It was so insufficient to try and talk about how good it was to hear you, what that meant, that Jimmy couldn’t say, “je t’aime et je t’adore.”
While there appears to be a consensus among historians that Hickoc is merely a romantic interest in women, careful interpreting her communication with Roosevelt through the contemporary lens.
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book No Ordinary Time, historian Doris Kerns Goodwin admits that while their letters contain “emotional strength,” he notes that at least one study shows that women in the Roosevelt era used romantics to communicate with female friends.
However, history has a way of “washing straight” same-sex relationships from the past. This practice has produced popular internet jokes. “And the historians will say they are just good friends.”
