ELEANOR & THE HISTORIANS
EMERY, NOEMIE
ELEANOR & THE HISTORIANS Looking for Lesbians Under Every Bed By Noemie Emery Biography is a dishonest science. No author can slip himself entirely into the skin of another, seeing life through...
...And she has made the fatal mistake against which feminists always warn women: She has given up her own identity to live through and for another person...
...In his 1982 volume, Love, Eleanor: Eleanor Roosevelt and Her Friends, Joseph Lash notes that her first model and idol was the lesbian Marie Souvestre, whose Swiss boarding school trained a generation of upper-class women...
...It is at this point that the story becomes less like Pygmalion and more like a same-sex version of A Star Is Born...
...In 1992, feminist scholar Blanche Wiesen Cook came out with the first volume of her revisionist study, in which Mrs...
...She is no longer quite so terribly needy...
...Meanwhile, Cook charges a conspiracy of supres-sion and silence to stifle what she sees as the truth...
...Since 1994, this thesis has been strenuously and, on the whole, successfully denied by many responsible Roosevelt scholars...
...To Hickok, a homely woman who had survived a terrible background (she claimed to have been beaten and raped by her father), it all seemed too good to last...
...What the subjects themselves might have felt or thought is secondary to what the writers want them to have felt or thought...
...Two-thirds of the letters in Rodger Streitmatter's Empty Without You date from 1933 to 1935...
...decades-long liaison and numerous children with Sally Hemings, the house slave who was his dead wife's half-sister...
...Roosevelt to hold regular press conferences and write regularly for magazines and newspapers—with Hickok giving them the benefit of her hard-won professional skill...
...But those who knew her insist that while Mrs...
...But was Mrs...
...And she was right...
...And sometimes the result is a battle, as biographers with rival agendas and constituencies go to war over their subject's helpless body...
...A surprising modesty and not-so-surprising sorrow seem permanent parts of her life...
...In each case, supportive facts are emphasized and inconvenient ones explained away as deceptive...
...One should consume all its products with care...
...And something quite similar happened four years later, when a woman writing a children's book about Lore-na Hickok, the pioneering female journalist of the 1920s, came across a collection of letters suggesting in tone and phrasing that Hickok's close friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt was more than platonic...
...The story begins in late 1932, as New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt nears his inexorable victory over the incumbent Herbert Hoover...
...She is afraid of being reduced to a hostess, afraid she will fail as a hostess, afraid of becoming once more the shadow of a man with whom she now shares little...
...Roosevelt did have a great deal of contact with androgynous and homosexual people: Her closest friends in the mid-1920s were lesbian couples, among them Nan Cook and Marion Dickerman with whom she built a cottage at Hyde Park...
...Hick" not only adores the soon-to-be first lady, she sees her as having the possibility to become a remarkable woman...
...The fight nowadays is between the two wings of the Democratic party the Roosevelts once unified: what might be called the Scoop Jackson wing and the George McGovern wing...
...There were scenes, complaints, recriminations, and apologies, but Hickok inexorably faded from the center of Eleanor Roosevelt's life, becoming reclusive, eccentric, and querulous...
...It is Hickok who tells Mrs...
...I know you often have a feeling for me which for some reason or another I may not return in kind, but I feel I love you just the same," Eleanor wrote on May 13, 1935...
...She finds it useful to keep people guessing as to how much of his backing she has...
...And three months earlier, she had also written: "Hick, dearest, of course you should have had a husband and children and it would have made you happy if you loved him and in any case it would have satisfied certain cravings and given you someone on whom to lavish the love and devotion you have to keep down all the time...
...half the week in Albany, serving as hostess—that permits her damaged marriage to survive...
...I truly don't think that what I do or say makes much difference," she muses...
...When not on the road, she lived in the White House, sleeping like a dog or a valet on a camp-bed outside Eleanor's door...
...The evidence is mixed, but tends to run against the lesbian tale Streitmatter concocts in Empty Without You...
...The treatment of the Hickok-Roosevelt papers since their discovery has not been edifying...
...No author can slip himself entirely into the skin of another, seeing life through other eyes...
...Hickok, a life-long, out-and-out lesbian, was surely besotted by Eleanor Roosevelt...
...And her father, Elliott (perhaps in reaction to his brother, the hypermale Theodore Roosevelt), was known in his family as "Nellie," or "she...
...Her public appearances are working out nicely...
...Streitmatter includes these two letters, but dismisses them as "perplexing," never admitting that they undermine his thesis...
...At the Democratic convention, she sends to Louis M. Howe a letter saying she would not move into the White House...
...Historians from both these camps follow their own interests and give their readers what they want to believe...
...But "one can be personally indifferent and still do one's duty," she added later that year...
...Without further evidence, we simply can't know...
...She and her husband work out a way to serve both themselves and each other...
...Roosevelt and Hickok, spinning around them a tale of an intense, two-year love affair inside the women's thirty-year friendship...
...The Jacksonites, who think their party has become altogether too strange since the late 1960s, fight the effort to define as deviant one of the most widely loved of their national idols...
...And it was immediately trumpeted by the untraditional liberals who had already made a policy heroine out of the former first lady and could now declare her a cultural heroine as well...
...The two women correspond several times a day, exchange gifts and pictures, go together on trips, and make vague plans to retire together in some unspecified future...
...The glimpses these letters give of Eleanor Roosevelt's character, however, are fascinating...
...Into this emotional tumult steps Lorena Hickok, a brash professional woman who exudes a dynamic competence...
...By the end of 1934, a change appeared in the tone of Eleanor's letters...
...Roosevelt's need to connect with her one source of confidence...
...In that brief, intense time, Hickok becomes Eleanor's mirror...
...The McGovernites of the cultural Left—the gays, the feminists, and the gender-benders—fight even harder to make themselves mainstream through association with notable figures...
...She seems to be pulling away...
...Warmed by the approval of someone she admires, Eleanor recovers her spirits...
...At the start of the administration, Hickok—in a decision she later regretted bitterly—left her newspaper job to work for the Roosevelts...
...But some biographies are particularly dishonest, written with a particular political agenda and aimed at a particular constituency the author wants to placate and appease...
...Howe tears the letter to pieces...
...Did the emotional urgency stem from an erotic feeling, or Mrs...
...I kept thinking of the mess we had made of our young lives here and how strange it was that after all these years I should return here as indifferent and uninterested as a stranger," she wrote Hickok from Hyde Park in 1934...
...Like the Jefferson questions, the Roosevelt mystery is being fought, not on the grounds of probability, but on the bloody terrain of the culture wars...
...I feel, as usual, completely objective and oh, Lord, so indifferent," she wrote during the 1936 campaign...
...And then there are the clues from the Roosevelt-Hickok letters themselves...
...Roosevelt—suppressed, beaten down, and all but destroyed by a patriarchal system in the persons of her elegant cad of a husband and his impossible mother—found liberation and happiness, first in her friendships with lesbian women and then as a happy lesbian herself...
...Roosevelt loved her lesbian friends as people, she found their lifestyles unnatural and was, in many ways, a conventional, church-going moralist...
...But that, of course, is the old, old story of biography, the least credible of sciences...
...While Eleanor blooms into a second youth, the much younger Hickok seems to age sud-denly—Eleanor's occasional notes to her reading like notes from the world to a cranky old woman...
...The first clutch of letters from 1933 to 1934 reveals an emotional urgency perhaps a shade too intense for a putative friendship, with much talk of kissing pictures, kissing lips, touching hair and faces, holding in one another's arms, and hugging...
...But Roosevelt's wife is moved by the prospect to near-panic...
...the letters from 1945 to 1962 occupy only twenty-six pages...
...Mrs...
...But now Rodger Streitmatter, a professor of journalism at American University, has collected and published in Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok three hundred letters between Mrs...
...He finds it useful to have an activist spouse whom he can endorse or disavow as he needs...
...As she fades, Hickok does not wear well as a character...
...Roosevelt "in love" with her...
...This is what happened back in 1974, when Fawn Brodie claimed that Thomas Jefferson had not only had a full-fledged extra-marital affair while in France but also had a A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia...
...Peter Collier, coauthor of a multi-generational account of both Roosevelt families, also dismisses the homosexual thesis...
...This sounds like too much for an average friendship, but the descriptions stay non-specific...
...Hickok slips from being the life-giving confidant to being merely one of the many satellites who revolve around famous and powerful people, begging for attention the stars are too busy to give...
...About her husband, she seems neither bitter nor angry, but burned out and almost numb...
...The suggestion was immediately denied by traditional liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr., fearful that it might drive down the Roosevelts' stock among middle Americans...
...She dreads life in the White House, thinks it will shatter her new independence, fears it will damage the delicate balance— half the week in Manhattan, working and teaching...
...Her self-confidence—bruised from the beginning by her horrible mother and damaged by her husband's affairs—has never been shakier...
...Immediately, a claque of stodgy white male biographers issued non-paternity declarations on behalf of the president, while historians of the class-race-and-gen-der school declared their thrill at learning that the racist, sexist, classist pig of a male-chauvinist founding father was as bad as they always assumed him to be...
Vol. 4 • October 1998 • No. 7
