Kinship created ‘Golden’ opportunity
Times Union writer authors book about older cousin, a pioneering woman journalist
When Joseph Dalton landed in Washington, D.C., as a high school student for a weeklong model Congress on Capitol Hill, he met his older cousin for lunch. Hope Ridings Miller, a former society editor for The Washington Post who chronicled presidential administrations and wrote books, took him to the National Press Club. Later, she was a source of inspiration to Dalton, who also became a journalist. Dalton, a general arts reporter and classical music critic for the Times Union, began playing with the notion that he’d like to write a book about his cousin 16 years ago. He read all of her books, starting with “Embassy Row: The Life and Times of Diplomatic Washington.”
“She goes for the drama and the humor and you realize as youreaditthatmanyofthe things she’s talking about
she was there,” Dalton said. “She’s not writing from historic sources, she’s writing from her own memories and notes and that was pretty exciting.”
After about a decade of intense research, following her life from her Texas roots to her 70-year career in the nation’s capital, what’s resulted is the fascinating “Washington’s Golden Age: Hope Ridings Miller, the Society Beat, and the Rise of Women Journalists” (Roman & Littlefield).
“She told me about the basics of her career. I always knew she was a society editor for The Washington Post and I knew she had some books. But I never
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grasped what she really saw and all the people she really knew until I started doing the research,” Dalton said.
While Miller embodied white-gloved Washington society with her manners and presence, she also was the only woman on The Washington Post’s city desk for a time, covered administrations from FDR to LBJ and later edited a glossy magazine.
Dalton’s research is exhaustive. He traveled to D.C. and Texas multiple
times, reading her papers and was able to download all of her Washington Post bylines through the Williams College library. He read all 1,200 stories, as well as her books and her magazine writing.
The book is filled with choice excerpts from her stories, like an account of the 1939 royal visit by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth:
“While the King, who looks much younger than his photographs, and the Queen, who is twice as pretty as any of her pictures, mingled with their guests on the portico, others who had come to see them stood silently, hopefully, watching every move. Many a feminine eye weighed her Majesty’s gown in the balance and found it more than satisfactory. Flounced and full, it was fashioned of white net with embroidered panels, edged with ruffles, and horizontal tucks giving it a quaint, Victorian effect … one of the prettiest frocks ever seen in Washington.”
But her writing wasn’t limited to hemlines and appearances. Soon after, she was reporting on Eleanor Roosevelt’s response to claims of her possible ties to communists:
“The First Lady said she had no way then, or now, of determining political philosophies of her guests; that she had no intention then, or now, of having any censorship imposed on her guest lists.”
In July 1942, Miller’s column “Farewell to Society” proposed a change to how the paper covered society during the war. She wrote that they would focus on people, rather than parties and what people ate and wore: “For the duration – and probably longer – we are finished with society-as-such. We are interested only in contributing our bit toward preservation of the only kind of world in which any of us would care to live.”
Dalton opens and closes the book with his relationship with Miller. She attended his concerts while he was a student at Catholic University in D.C. and she threw a graduation dinner party for him.
Miller, who kept her age a carefully guarded secret through her life, died in 2005 at age 99. One of Dalton’s favorite stories about her is when he asked her age:
“Well,” she replied, “Can you keep a secret?”
“Oh yes, yes,” he told her. “Definitely.”
“So can I.”
Donna Liquori is a frequent contributor to the Times Union, and writes the occasional Bibliofiles books column in Unwind.