Word: lorena
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...most important reassessment of E.R. began in 1979, 17 years after her death. The Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, N.Y., unsealed a mass of 3,500 letters exchanged between the President's wife and Lorena Hickok, a stocky onetime A.P. reporter nine years her junior. An entirely typical letter written by Eleanor on March 7,1933, begins, "Hick darling, All day I've thought of you . . . Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think she does love...
...love is to be despised," Eleanor once copied into a diary, and the truth seems to be that she successfully conducted her sentimental friendships as if sex did not exist. Earl Miller, F.D.R.'s handsome bodyguard when he was Governor of New York, was another such friend; Lorena Hickok seems merely to have been the most important of Eleanor's attachments. By the time their friendship was cooling, in the early war years, the First Lady had two other favorites: Joe Lash and his wife-to-be, Trude Pratt...
Editors Richard Lowitt and Maureen Beasley, too, begin their book on Lorena Hickok with such an epigram of economic dismay. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...Lorena Hickok observer occasionally becomes Lorena Hickok prophet. In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt from North Dakota, she describes the squalor and degradation of a family of farm laborors: no shoes or stockings, feet purple with cold. Only one bed, with dirty pillows, a ragged mattress, and a blanket in tatters. "This," she concludes "is the stuff that farm strikes and agrarian revolutions are made of Communist agitators are in here now, working among these people, I was told. What to do about it--I don't know." And again, from Houston, the strains of the emerging impatience: She tells...
...interpret the world, but to change it. As Hickok never pretends to philosophy, there can be no faulting her unwillingness to call for change. What a reader finds in her reporting, instead, might prove more enduring. With her sensitivity, her thirst for detail, and above all, her sincerity, Lorena Hickok succeeded in finding what radical social theorists have merely postulated to exist--that among us which is human. In taking to the home' of America, and then, reporting what she felt, Lorena Hickok avoided the flaw that undermined other 1930's writers, from John Steinbeck to Malcolm Cowley. No golden...