Lorena Hickok

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Lorena Alice Hickok (March 7, 1893 – May 1, 1968) was an American journalist and confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt. Her relationship with Roosevelt has been the subject of research and it is not universally accepted by historians that the two were romantically connected.[1][2]

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[edit] Biography

Lorena Hickok was born in East Troy, Wisconsin in Walworth County. She helped Harry Hopkins with some fact finding missions during the New Deal. This, however, scarcely defines the relationship between Mrs. Roosevelt and "Hick" as she was popularly known. Lorena Hickok died in 1968 and willed her personal papers to the FDR Library, in Hyde Park, New York, part of the US National Archives, contained in 18 filing boxes to be sealed (to the outside world) until 10 years after her death.

In early May, 1978, Doris Faber, as part of research for a projected short biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, was perhaps the first person outside the National Archives to open these boxes, and was astounded to discover that they contained 2336 letters from Mrs. Roosevelt to Lorena, most of them dated in the 1930s, and continuing right up to Mrs. Roosevelt's death in 1962.

A key passage from just one early twelve-page handwritten missive to Lorena from Eleanor is indicative:

Goodnight, dear one. I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now — I shall![3]

From early January, 1941 until shortly after FDR's fourth inauguration in 1945, Lorena lived at the White House. During that time she formed an intense friendship with the Honorable Marion Janet Harron, a United States Tax Court judge ten years her junior. After the judge's death in 1972 of cancer, her papers were found to contain what can only be described as intense love letters to Lorena, beginning in March 1942. No documentation is available to indicate whether the love was reciprocated or not.

In earlier life, Lorena was one of Associated Press's most valued correspondents of either sex, participating in a prominent way in such events as the Lindbergh kidnapping [4].

At first, being a "special friend" of Mrs. Roosevelt was a journalistic asset, but in the end she had to choose between her friendship with Mrs. Roosevelt and her position with Associated Press. The choice was made in letter to Harry Hopkins, Federal Relief Coordinator on June 7, 1933, informing him that she would begin work for Hopkins about June 19, and that she had resigned from Associated Press days before.

During her time at the White House, Lorena's nominal address during the war was at the Mayflower Hotel in DC, not the White House, and that is where she met most people other than the Roosevelts. An exception to this was Judge Harron, who visited Lorena frequently at the White House, almost the only person to do so.[5]

After World War II, assorted circumstances conspired to keep her away from Eleanor, although she lived in a cottage on the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park, where she died in 1968..

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  1. ^ Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, Penguin Books Ltd, 1991, page 99
  2. ^ "However, the case for Roosevelt's lesbianism is one of inference and is not a view universally shared. Among experts who take an opposing view are historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Lorena Hickok's biographer, Doris Faber; and Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II." Eleanor Roosevelt biography.
  3. ^ Faber, Doris (1980). The Life of Lorena Hickok, E.R.'s Friend. William Morrow & Company. ISBN 0-688-03631-7.  p. 132
  4. ^ See Faber p 82 ff
  5. ^ See Faber, Chapter 18