Word: hickok
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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...
...those of us in an age where electronic impressions guide opinion and sentiment more effectively than all else. Hickok's reporting during the Great Depression serves as a positive example of thoughtful reporting not shrill cant...
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...