Eleanor Roosevelt

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1932
With Amelia Earhart
Writing "My Day"

Lorena Hickok

Lorena Hickok, or "Hick" was born on March 7, 1893 in East Troy, Wisconsin. In 1913 she began her career in journalism as a reporter for the Associated Press. Hickok has been described as looking like one of the boys, wearing men's shirt, smoking cigars, and playing poker with the other AP reporters. In 1932 she did a series of interviews with Eleanor Roosevelt. Through these meetings the two grew to be friends. It is said that Hickok helped Eleanor Roosevelt become even more assertive than she already was. Hickok helped the First Lady "get her wings." It was Hickok who suggested to Eleanor the idea that would become the column My Day. Hickok's close relationship with the First Lady compromised her position as a Washington news reporter, and she resigned from the AP in 1933. From 1933 to 1936 she wrote field reports for Harry Hopkins and the Federal Emergency Relief Agency. In 1936 she moved to Long Island to work for a public relations firm. In 1940 Hickok returned to Washington and the First Lady; she took up residence in the White House and began working for the Democratic National Committee as executive secretary to the Woman's Division. In 1945, poor health forced her to resign from political life. She moved into a cottage in Hyde Park and wrote many books on the lives of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. Hickok died in 1968. ________________________________________Sources: Goodwin, Doris Kearns. No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor The Home Front in World WarII. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994.

Letters Between Eleanor Roosevelt & Lorena Hickok

Eleanor Roosevelt (ER) and Lorena Hickok began their decades-long relationship in 1933, before FDR's inauguration. Lorena, or Hick (as ER called her) was a highly successful reporter, and ER was about to become First Lady. They shared an emotional and romantic relationship that peaked in passion and later developed into a friendship that endured until death. When their relationship began, ER was not a naive, inexperienced woman. Biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook states that after 1920, many of her closest friends were lesbians, and that she both honored their relationships and preserved their privacy. ER's letters (and she wrote ten to fifteen page letters daily to Hick for a time) indicate a romantic attachment that was physical. She knew what kind of attachment this was, and the secrecy its nature demanded. As a result, finding evidence is difficult--but not at impossible. The relationship these two women shared has been--not surprisingly--heavily censored over the years. While they lived, photographs of family dinners were cropped to remove Hick's image. If she was included in a photograph, she was not identified. And she was certainly not talked about, even to biographers. After ER's death, Hick herself edited and retyped much of their correspondence. She burned some of ER's letters and many of her own. After Hick's death, her sister Ruby read the original versions of their first year of correspondence and then threw them in the fireplace, saying, "This is nobody's business." Even Doris Faber, author of The Life of Lorena Hickok: ER's Friend was horrified by the correspondence. She tried to get the letters sealed from the public until after the year 2000, and when she couldn't do that, she decided to ignore content that reflected on the relationship. About one particularly romantic passage, she declares that there can be little doubt that "it could not mean what it appears to mean." The collection Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, published in 1998, recently gave the public a new glimpse into the life of one of America's most beloved First Ladies.

Sample Letters

March 5, 1933 [ER to Hick, written on the first evening after FDR's inauguration.] Hick my dearest-- I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you, even though I'm busy every minute. [details of day deleted] Oh! darling. I hope on the whole you will be happier for my friendship. I felt I had brought you so much discomfort and hardship today & almost more heartache than you could bear & I don't want to make you unhappy--All my love I shall be saying to you over thought waves in a few minutes. Good night my dear one Angels guard thee God protect thee My love enfold thee All the night throughAlways yours,ER
March 7, 1933ER to Hick... Hick darling, All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonite you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it. ER to Hick [Date not provided]I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms. [Hick writing to ER [Date not provided]Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .

Earl Miller

SIGNIFICANCE: Navy Officer, New York State Trooper, and Bodyguard and Confidant of Eleanor RooseveltPLACE OF BIRTH: Schenectady, NYDATE OF BIRTH: May 9, 1897PLACE OF DEATH: Hollywood, FLDATE OF DEATH: May 2, 1973PLACE OF BURIAL: CrematedCEMETERY NAME: Ashes Scattered at Sea Earl Miller was escort, companion, and confidant of Eleanor Roosevelt from 1928 until her death in 1962. A New York state trooper, Miller was assigned to the Executive Mansion in Albany in 1928 and accompanied Eleanor Roosevelt on her tours of state prisons and other institutions. He became a lifelong friend.
Miller was homeless by the age of 12 and held a variety of jobs throughout his life including, stuntman, prison warden, boxer and acrobat. After FDR was elected president in 1932, he appointed Miller director of personnel for New York state's Department of Correction. In World War II, Miller served as a lieutenant commander in the Navy and became the director of physical training at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida.
Miller was completely devoted to Eleanor. Handsome and athletic, he gave her riding lessons (and later bought her a chestnut mare named Dot), coached her in tennis and swimming, taught her to shoot a pistol, and generally built her confidence. Eleanor came to rely on Miller, perhaps even held romantic feelings for him. Her son James described the relationship as possibly "the one real romance in mother's life outside of marriage." She always kept a room for him wherever she lived. Numerous framed photos of Miller decorated the rooms of Val-Kill and Eleanor's New York City apartment.
Miller was married three times and had two children—Eleanor and Earl Jr. He died on May 2, 1973 in Hollywood, Florida.
“[Earl was the] one real romance [with a man] in mother's life outside of her marriage. [He] encouraged her to take pride in herself, to be herself, to be unafraid of facing the world. He did a lot for her. She seemed to draw strength from him when he was by her side, and she came to rely on him ... He became part of the family, too, and gave her a great deal of what her husband and we, her sons, failed to give her. Above all, he made her feel that she was a woman.” James Roosevelt (son)

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Jews

1. USCOM
In June of 1940, Eleanor formed a committee to coordinate rescue efforts for children who were refugees and/or victims of the War. She called a meeting at her New York residence with representatives of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the German-Jewish Children’s Aid, and other organizations to form the US Committee for the Care of European Children (USCOM). Chicago department store magnate and philanthropist Marshall Field III was asked to chair the committee and oversee fundraising, but the driving force behind its work was Eleanor.
The first task of the committee was to figure out how, logistically, the children could enter the United States outside of the stringent immigration quotas that were put in place after World War I. Eleanor and the other members of USCOM recognized that the fastest way to admit refugee children to the United States was on temporary visitor visas, which could be issued as long as the children planned to return home when it was safe again, and exempted the children from needing individual financial affidavits. Since the children were all under the age of fourteen, the State Department could not reasonably claim that any of them could be spies or saboteurs.
Between June and September 1940, when conditions in occupied Europe and the dangers of crossing the Atlantic caused the committee to suspend its evacuation efforts from Great Britain, just over 800 children were rescued and resettled in American homes.
With Eleanor's continued support, USCOM continued their work, refocusing from Great Britain to western Europe, particularly on children in Vichy France. The AFSC chose children, both Jewish and non-Jewish, from children's homes and refugee camps in southern France for transfer to the United States. By 1943, the committee had succeeded in rescuing several hundred Jewish children from western Europe.
2. SS Quanza and Eleanor Roosevelt
In August 1940, the SS Quanza, a ship bound for Mexico with over 300 passengers on board, mostly refugees fleeing Europe, arrived in New York. Nearly 200 passengers with US visas were permitted to land. When the ship arrived in Veracruz, Mexican officials denied entry to 85 of the Quanza’s passengers, claiming their paperwork was invalid. These passengers desperately began contacting friends in the United States, who in turn contacted leaders of Jewish organizations, government officials—and Eleanor Roosevelt—for help.
The passengers sent a telegram to Eleanor directly, signed by the “Women Passengers,” and it is likely that Eleanor asked the President to assist the refugees on the Quanza. A representative of Roosevelt’s President's Advisory Committee on Refugees interviewed the passengers. Based on his recommendations, the State Department allowed five children to land using the USCOM procedures, liberally interpreted the qualifications for a “non-quota” immigration visa for 41 passengers, and granted the remainder temporary transit visas. All of the passengers were permitted to disembark in Norfolk, VA.
3. Fort Ontario
In June 1944, President Roosevelt announced his plan to create an emergency refugee shelter at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York. Under this plan, 982 refugees from eighteen different countries were selected and transported from Italy to upstate New York. Roosevelt circumvented the rigid immigration quotas by identifying these refugees as his “guests,” a status that gave them no legal standing and required their return to Europe once conditions permitted their repatriation. In September 1944, Eleanor made a well-publicized visit to the camp and as she did so often to rally support for her husband's policies, wrote about her visit in “My Day.” The refugees who did not wish to return to Europe after the war were admitted to the United States in 1946.

Eleanor Roosevelt and Race

Eleanor Roosevelt and Japanese Internment

Put simply, Eleanor was vehemently opposed to her husband’s authorization of internment camps for people of Japanese ancestry. Francine Uenuma in a Time Magazine article from 2022 says in part: In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, [...] Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox attributed (without evidence) their precision in hitting military targets to a “fifth column” in Hawaii who had aided the enemy. Speculation and panic proliferated—fishermen aiding the Japanese navy, farmers poisoning vegetables, and strikes on power lines and other critical infrastructure. Amid this frenzied atmosphere, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt appealed for calm. She traveled to California just days after the attack and made a point to meet and be photographed there with Japanese Americans—a decision that angered many. Eleanor, who decried “foolish prejudices about other races,” implored readers of her newspaper and magazine columns that those of Japanese ancestry “must not feel that they have suddenly ceased to be Americans,” and that such a crisis was the time for “really believing in the Bill of Rights and making it a reality for all loyal American citizens, regardless of race. Once the Order [ to establish internment camps] was in effect, Eleanor faced a quandary as the nation’s wartime first lady. “Unlike [her husband], she does not believe that wartime emergencies override civil liberties protections,” says Allida Black, editor emeritus of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project and a distinguished visitor scholar at the University of Virginia Miller Center for Public Affairs. So what she could not contradict, she mitigated. She offered her support in myriad ways, corresponding with Japanese Americans, donating from her own funds, meeting with civic groups, helping to establish scholarships—and later, meeting with wounded Japanese American soldiers.”
https://time.com/6148899/eleanor-roosevelt-japanese-internment/
1905 with FDR
c. 1930s with Earl Miller
At Val-Kill after FDR death
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