America 1933
The Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Shaping of the New Deal
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The first account of the remarkable eighteen-month journey of Lorena Hickok, intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, throughout the country during the worst of the Great Depression, bearing witness to the unprecedented ravaged.
During the harshest year of the Great Depression, Lorena Hickok, a top woman news reporter of the day and intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, was hired by FDR’s right hand man Harry Hopkins to embark upon a grueling journey to the hardest hit areas across the country to report back about the degree of devastation.
Distinguished historian Michael Golay draws on a trove of original sources—including moving and remarkably intimate almost daily letters between Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt—as he re-creates that extraordinary journey. Hickok traveled almost nonstop for eighteen months, from January 1933 to August 1934, driving through hellish dust storms, rebellion by coal workers in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and a near revolution by Midwest farmers. A brilliant observer, Hickok’s searing and deeply empathetic reports to Hopkins and her letters to Mrs. Roosevelt are an unparalleled record of the worst economic disaster in the history of the country. Historically important, they crucially influenced the scope and strategy of the Roosevelt Administration’s unprecedented relief efforts.
America 1933 reveals Hickok’s pivotal contribution to the policies of the New Deal, and sheds light on her intense but ill-fated relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt and the forces that inevitably came between them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Golay (A Ruined Land) examines the first years of FDR's presidency through the lens of an unusual research project. In an effort to develop a clear picture of the impact of relief work, Harry Hopkins, the newly appointed head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, hired a former Associated Press reporter to travel across the country, observing the relief efforts and administrations in various communities, and sending him detailed reports. This woman was Lorena Hickok, an intimate friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Golay uses the correspondence of these two extraordinary women, as well as Hickok's reports, to describe a United States riven by want, struggling to right itself in the face of widespread unrest. The stories are rough going, a catalog of very difficult circumstances and bleak compromises. Hickok's practicality and willingness to see what was in front of her make what could have been a sob story into a frank but human accounting. Golay expertly weaves Hickok's travels into the larger events of the period, from massive Pennsylvania coal strikes to the closing of the Civil Works Administration, providing a useful and specific portrait of a very large and general crisis.
