Lorena Alice "Hick" Hickok (March 7, 1893 – May 1, 1968) was an American journalist. She was also a long-term friend and possibly romantic partner of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
After an unhappy and unsettled childhood, Hickok found success as a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune and the Associated Press (AP), becoming America's best-known female reporter by 1932. After covering Franklin D. Roosevelt's first presidential campaign, Hickok struck up a close relationship with the soon-to-be First Lady, and travelled with her extensively. The nature of their relationship has been widely debated, especially after 3000 of their mutual letters were discovered, confirming some level of physical intimacy. Hickok was known to be a lesbian. The closeness of their relationship compromised Hickok's objectivity, leading her to resign from the AP and work as chief investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). She later promoted the 1939 New York World's Fair, and then served as executive secretary of the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee, living mostly at the White House, where Hickok had a conjoining room with the First Lady. Hickok was the author of several books.
Early life and career Lorena Alice Hickok was born on March 7, 1893, in East Troy, Wisconsin, to Addison J. Hickok, a dairy farmer who specialized in making butter, and Anna Hickok (; died 1906). She had two sisters, Ruby Adelsa (later Ruby Claff, 1896–1971) and Myrtle.All Wisconsin, Birth Index, 1820–1907, Ancestry.com Her father was an alcoholic and was not consistently employed. When Lorena was 10 years old, the family moved to Bowdle, South Dakota, where, in 1906, when Lorena was 13 years old, her mother, Anna, died of a stroke. In 1908, two years after his wife's passing, Addison married Emma Flashman, a divorcee who had worked as a housekeeper for the family after Anna's passing.South Dakota Department of Health; Pierre, South Dakota; South Dakota Marriage Records, 1905–2016 Lorena's relationship with Addison was poor. He was abusive and neglectful towards her, and did not come to her defense when Emma forced her out of the family home.
Having lost support from her father, 14-year-old Lorena worked variously as a housekeeper for an Irish family, in a boarding house infested with mice, in a rooming house for railroad workers on the edge of town, and in a farm kitchen. During her time at the rooming house, Hickok was forced to barricade her door with a chair so that male visitors to the house would not be able to enter her room while she slept. She saw her father one more time in her life, when she was 15 years old, while on a train. Addison had no polite words for his eldest daughter, but the experience was a liberating one for the girl, who left the train with the realization that she was now an adult and her father could no longer strike her.
Hickok made her way to Gettysburg, South Dakota, where she met and worked for a reportedly kind, elderly lady named Mrs. Dodd, who helped her to learn how to be an adult, teaching the teenager basic skills such as how to wash her hair. Under Dodd's influence, Hickok decided to return to Bowdle to go to school. In exchange for room and board, she started working for a wealthy family, the Bicketts. The living situation was not a good one for Hickok, as the wife demanded she devote all her free time to keeping house, which came at the expense of schoolwork. She left the Bicketts to live with the O'Malleys, who owned a saloon and were viewed with disdain.
Unlike the Bickett family, Hickok found friendship with the couple, particularly the wife, who was somewhat of an outcast in Bowdle, not only for her family's source of income, but also for wearing makeup and wigs and drinking alcohol. Hickok was ultimately able to find some stability within her family in 1909, when she left South Dakota to meet Ella Ellis, a cousin whom she called Aunt Ella, in Chicago, Illinois. Prior to her departure, Mrs. O'Malley paid for her train fare and dressed her for the occasion. From there on, Hickock went on to graduate from high school in Battle Creek, Michigan, and in 1912 she enrolled at Lawrence College in Appleton, Wisconsin, but dropped out.
Unable to fit in at college, Hickok found work covering train arrivals and departures and wrote personal interest stories at The Battle Creek Evening News for $7 a week. In an attempt to follow in the footsteps of her role model, novelist and former reporter Edna Ferber, she joined the Milwaukee Sentinel as its society editor and then moved on to the city beat, where she developed a talent as an interviewer. She interviewed celebrities, including actress Lillian Russell, pianist Ignacy Paderewski, and opera singers Nellie Melba and Geraldine Farrar, gaining a wide audience. She also became close friends with diva Ernestine Schumann-Heink.
Hickok moved to Minneapolis to work for the Minneapolis Tribune. She enrolled at the University of Minnesota, but left when she was forced to live in a women's dormitory. She stayed with the Tribune, where she was given opportunities unusual for a female reporter. She had a byline and was the paper's chief reporter, covering politics and sports and preparing editorials. During her tenure with the paper, she also covered the football team, becoming one of the first female reporters to be assigned a sports beat. In 1923, she won an award from the Associated Press for writing the best feature story of the month, a piece on President Warren G. Harding's funeral train.
During her years in Minneapolis, Hickok lived with a society reporter named Ella Morse, with whom she had an eight-year relationship. In 1926, Hickok was diagnosed with diabetes, and Morse persuaded her take a year's leave from the newspaper so the pair could travel to San Francisco and Hickok could write a novel. At the beginning of the leave, however, Morse unexpectedly eloped with an ex-boyfriend, leaving Hickok devastated. Unable to face a return to Minneapolis, Hickok moved to New York, landing a job with the New York Daily Mirror.
After working for The Mirror for about a year, Hickok obtained a job with the Associated Press in 1928, where she became one of the wire service's top correspondents. Unusually for the time, she was assigned hard-news stories, which female journalists rarely were allowed to cover. Instead, they were assigned soft-news stories, which were thought to be more feminine. Her November 1928 story on the sinking of the SS Vestris was published in The New York Times under her own byline, the first woman's byline to appear in the paper. She also reported on the Lindbergh kidnapping and other national events. By 1932, she had become the nation's best-known female reporter. Hickok called herself by this time "the top gal reporter in the country".
Early relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt
Hickok first met Roosevelt in 1928 when assigned to interview her by the AP. In 1932, Hickok convinced her editors to allow her to cover Eleanor Roosevelt during her husband's presidential campaign and for the four-month period between his election and inauguration. When the mother of Franklin's secretary, Missy LeHand, died, Eleanor invited Hickok to accompany her to Potsdam, New York, for the funeral. The women spent the long train ride talking, beginning a long friendship.
During the 1932 election, Hickok always submitted her stories about Eleanor Roosevelt to the subject first for her approval or to Louis Howe, the campaign adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, becoming by the end of the election an unofficial press attaché for Eleanor. By Franklin's inauguration on March 4, 1933, Hickok had become Eleanor's closest friend. The two made trips together to Albany and Washington, D.C., and spent nearly every day in each other's company. Hickok joined the Roosevelts every Sunday night for dinner, while on other nights Eleanor joined Hickok at the theater or opera, or at dinners alone at Hickok's apartment. For the inauguration, Eleanor wore a sapphire ring Hickok had given her.
That same day, Hickok interviewed Roosevelt in a White House bathroom, her first official interview as First Lady. By this time, Hickok was deeply in love with Roosevelt and finding it increasingly difficult to provide objective reporting. In addition, Hickok's job kept her largely in New York, while Eleanor was in Washington. Both women were troubled by the separation, professing their love by telephone and letter; Roosevelt put a picture of Hickok up in her study, which she told Hickok she kissed every night and every morning. During this period, Roosevelt wrote daily ten- to fifteen-page letters to "Hick", who was planning to write a biography of the First Lady.
The nature of Hickok and Roosevelt's relationship has been a subject of dispute among historians. Roosevelt was close friends with several lesbian couples, such as Nancy Cook and Marion Dickerman, and Esther Lape and Elizabeth Fisher Read, suggesting that she understood lesbianism; Marie Souvestre, Roosevelt's childhood teacher and a great influence on her later thinking, was also a lesbian. Hickok biographer Doris Faber published some of Roosevelt and Hickok's correspondence in 1980, but concluded that the lovestruck phrasing was simply an "unusually belated schoolgirl crush" and warned historians not to be misled. Researcher Leila J. Rupp criticized Faber's argument, calling her book "a case study in homophobia" and arguing that Faber unwittingly presented "page after page of evidence that delineates the growth and development of a love affair between the two women". In 1992, Roosevelt biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook argued that the relationship was in fact romantic, generating national attention.
Biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin summarized the letters between Hickok and Roosevelt thus:
Goodwin concluded, however, that "whether Hick and Eleanor went beyond kisses and hugs" cannot be known for certain, and that the important issue is the impact the close relationship had on both women's lives. A 2011 essay by Russell Baker reviewing two new Roosevelt biographies in the New York Times Review of Books stated, "That the Hickok relationship was indeed erotic now seems beyond dispute considering what is known about the letters they exchanged."
In the Roosevelt administration
Early in the Roosevelt administration, Hickok is credited with pushing Eleanor to write her own newspaper column, "My Day", and to hold weekly press conferences specifically for female journalists. Hickok found it difficult to objectively cover the Roosevelts herself, however, and once suppressed a story at Eleanor's request. The declining quality of her reporting soon caused her to receive a pay cut. Despite her worries about leaving the career on which she had built her identity, Hickok resigned from the Associated Press at Eleanor's urging in June 1933. They spent the next month on vacation in New England and in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.
With support from Eleanor, Hickok obtained the position as a Chief Investigator for Harry Hopkins' Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), where she conducted fact-finding missions. Hopkins told Hickok: "What I want to you is to go around the country and look this thing over. I don't want statistics from you. I don't want the social worker angle. I just want your own reaction, as an ordinary citizen". She traveled in a car that Eleanor had brought her which she named Bluette.