Word: hickok
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
Passionate but without the headline-grabbing mania of a young reporter, she travelled the United States from 1933 to 1937. Hired by the chief of several federal relief programs, she interviewed recipients of federal assistance. Charged by her boss with giving as honest an account as possible. Hickok spoke with countless needy Americans, along with businessmen, relief workers, and countless standers-by who watched with alarm as America's "golden age of individualism" withered under the exigencies of a depressed economy. Her dispatches, collected in this volume, read effortlessly. Loathe to embellish her account of what she saw or heard...
...EDITORS wisely leave out mention of Hickok's alleged affair with Eleanor Roosevelt, for Hickok's importance lies only in her reporting for the Federal Relief Administration. Apathy and despair, hope and joyfulness, take on real meaning in her smoothly-styled prose. Often she becomes emphatic--in her concerned voice for the poverty-stricken or her impatience with the laziness she perceived among the Blacks she interviewed. (The editors don't spare Hickok's prejudices. In Negroes of the deep South, she sees only laziness and irresponsibility--no doubt bred from the legacy of paternalism and slavery...
...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...
...task for philosophers, Marx said, is not to 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...