Lorena Hickok Analysis

Lorena Hickok was an American journalist who had a very close relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1933, Hickok went on a two-month tour of the American South, where she was horrified by the poverty, lack of nutrition, and lack of education that she encountered.

Hickok’s point of view has biases about relief recipients. Her insight, humorous, caustic, sometimes obviously biased comments about relief recipients and often awkward to carry out the rescue undoubtedly influenced the ideas of new local dealers.

With her training into the eyes of the reporters, Hickok will arrive in a community; arrange to meet local politicians, rescue workers and those who can help her in Washington, D.C., to establish her reports. She visited 32 states and major works, witnesses reported that rich resources for those interested in the face of the great depression as well as the inherent difficulty of large-scale federal bailout plan.

Writing in 1934 from Columbia, South Carolina, Hickok wrote: Her biases sometimes seem shocking and undoubtedly they were shared widely. Convinced that rural poor in the South needed more than relief and showing her feelings about many poor southerners she wrote

Visiting Minneapolis just before Christmas in 1933, she saw shoppers jamming the streets on Saturday evening just as they had when she lived in the city before the crash of 1929. They had some money to spend, "Even last summer, when things started booming in the East, and the stock market was going up, there was very little optimism out there, they say. But this, you see, is a matter of a lot of people – thousands and thousands of them – having little money to spend, CWA wages, wheat money, corn money, after several years of being broke. I hope ...

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...e is considering writing a book about her experience, she maintained a mental file unsung heroes of the New Deal. She believes the massive federal relief, proper management, can cure social ills, the irony she plans to offer her book: liar and shovel - leaners had been living in taxpayers' money in the past four years.

Hickok think aid itself is an invalid deal with the problem of unemployment, one third of the country must assist what the President Roosevelt said. She wanted people to have a good job to maintain their lives, to give them dignity. Transition from the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to the Works Progress Administration which provides jobs and wages is a natural development of many new dealers. Although Hickok is not a historian, her lively writings, although she has some bias, it provides valuable information and history of the early New Deal.