Harry Hopkins was an American social worker, relief director, and presidential assistant.
Background
Harry was born on August 17, 1890, in Sioux City, Iowa, United States; the fourth of five children born to David Aldona Hopkins and Anna (Pickett) Hopkins. He was born one of the short-term residences of his salesman, harness maker, storekeeper father. After moves through several small towns in Nebraska and a stay in Chicago, the family settled in Grinnell, Iowa, United States.
Education
In 1912 Harry graduated from Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. Influenced by the college’s teaching of Social Gospel Christianity and political science professor Jesse Macy’s advocacy of honest public service, he moved to New York City, where he secured a position with a social settlement house.
Hopkins rose rapidly in the social work profession. In 1923 he became director of the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. He also served as president of the American Association of Social Workers. Early in his career, Hopkins came to believe that during times of economic decline, the government should relieve the distress of the unemployed, so he experimented with “work relief” programs in New York City. When the Great Depression produced massive unemployment throughout New York, Hopkins accepted a nomination from the newly inaugurated Democratic Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt to direct his Temporary Emergency Relief Organization. Hopkins’s strenuous and imaginative efforts to create work relief jobs earned Roosevelt’s respect so that when Roosevelt became president, he chose Hopkins to head his Federal Emergency Relief Administration.
Both Roosevelt and Hopkins expected that federal relief would be temporary, lasting only until Roosevelt’s New Deal programs for industry and agriculture restored prosperity. But prosperity remained elusive, and Hopkins’s role grew correspondingly. During the winter of 1933-1934, Hopkins responded to a rise in unemployment by setting up the Civil Works Administration, which created some four million jobs. The next year Roosevelt obtained a $3.6 billion appropriation to relieve unemployment, much of which he allocated to Hopkins’s newly created Works Progress Administration.
Hopkins threw himself into making the Works Progress Administration an instrument to aid the spectrum of the nation’s unemployed. Although most Works Progress Administration employees worked on construction projects, others produced or performed works of art, literature, and music. As an administrator, Hopkins showed a talent for hiring capable, dedicated persons and inspiring them to their best effort. As his programs gained national attention, they also became targets of Roosevelt’s political opponents. Hopkins responded by outspokenly defending Roosevelt and the New Deal and by channeling Works Progress Administration projects to the president’s supporters. Hopkins’s loyalty and effectiveness led Roosevelt to encourage him to run for president in 1940. As preparation, Roosevelt nominated him to be secretary of commerce, for which he was confirmed in 1938.
But Hopkins’s political advancement was not to be. In 1937 he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Surgery removed a large portion of his stomach, saving his life but leaving him debilitated with a dangerously poor digestive system. In May 1940, Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House and asked him to spend the night. Hopkins would remain there for nearly four years. In the summer of 1940, Roosevelt sent him to Chicago to manage his nomination for a third presidential term. Hopkins resigned from the government, expecting that after the election he would leave Washington. But Roosevelt would have other plans.
Roosevelt had run for a third term because of the crisis created by the outbreak of war in Europe and the gathering threat from Japanese expansion in the Pacific. Determined to help Great Britain’s war effort against Nazi Germany, he proposed that Congress permit him to ship war supplies to nations he identified as necessary to America’s defense. In January 1941, in order to ascertain Britain’s military needs, he sent Hopkins to confer with British prime minister Winston Churchill.
Hopkins returned to Washington with a list of Britain’s supply requests and with a heroic impression of Churchill. Roosevelt appointed Hopkins a presidential assistant to implement the Lend-Lease Act, which Congress passed in March. During 1941, Hopkins became a key person in the American defense effort, working to remove obstacles in finance, production, and shipping. In the process, Hopkins created a network of persons strategically located in key civilian and military agencies. As Roosevelt’s principal diplomatic spokesman, Hopkins again flew to London to prepare for the Atlantic Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and to Moscow to offer American support to the Soviet Union, recently invaded by Germany.
After the United States entered the war, Hopkins continued to play a major role in developing war strategy, especially with Great Britain. He worked with Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall to coordinate production and shipping with military strategy. He continued to untangle a myriad of problems and to resolve conflicts large and small. He also continued to perform his diplomatic work at the major war conferences at Casablanca and Tehran.
During 1944, Hopkins and Roosevelt drifted apart. Hopkins’s third marriage resulted in a move out of the White House, in late 1943. Then about of ill health kept him in the hospital until the summer of 1944. He returned to help Roosevelt reorganize the State Department and to accompany him to the Yalta Conference in February 1945, after which he re-entered the hospital, remaining there until Roosevelt’s death in April.
Hopkins’s last public service came in May 1945, when President Harry Truman sent him to Moscow to resolve problems that had arisen over forming the United Nations. Hopkins’s mission succeeded, and President Truman later awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal, the nation’s highest civilian decoration. Hopkins retired to New York City, where he lived only a few months before dying of liver failure.
Quotations:
"We shall tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect".
"People don't eat in the long run, they eat every day".
"The things they have actually accomplished all over America should be an inspiration to every reasonable person and an everlasting answer to all the grievous insults that have been heaped on the heads of the unemployed".
"They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!"
"I thank God that I live in a country where dreams can come true, where failure sometimes is the first step to success and where success is only another form of failure if we forget what our priorities should be".
"Hunger is not debatable".
"Communities now find themselves in possession of improvements which even in 1929 they would have thought themselves presumptuous to dream of...everywhere there had been an overhauling of the word presumptuous. We are beginning to wonder if it is not presumptuous to take for granted that some people should have much, and some should have nothing, that some people are less important than others and should die earlier; that the children of the comfortable should be taller and fatter, as a matter of right, than the other children of the poor".
"Three or four million heads of households don't turn into tramps and cheats overnight, nor do they lose the habits and standards of a lifetime...They don't drink any more than the rest of us, they don't lie anymore, they're no lazier than the rest of us...An eighth or a tenth of the earning population does not change its character which has been generations in the molding, or, if such a change actually occurs, we can scarcely charge it up to personal sin".
Membership
Harry was a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers. Also, he was a member of the Briarwood Country Club, Northwood Country Club, Klondike Hunting Club.
Personality
Harry Hopkins combined love of public service with a selfless dedication to accomplishing a task, be it helping the unemployed or winning the war. He had a gift for understanding the essentials of a given problem, winning people’s confidence, and inspiring them to work together to solve it. During the war, Churchill said he should be dubbed “Lord Root of the Matter.”
Quotes from others about the person
In 2013 John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr concluded: "The case advanced for Hopkins' guilt has two parts. The first is a highly specific claim that Hopkins was a Soviet agent code-named "19," a high-level source that appears in a Soviet cable deciphered by the U.S. National Security Agency. That claim, however, is entirely mistaken. The fallback position is that even if Hopkins is not "19," there is nonetheless convincing evidence that he was a Soviet agent. That claim is based on evidence too weak to be the basis for a confident conclusion".
Connections
In 1913, Hopkins married Ethel Gross. They had three sons, David Hopkins, Robert Hopkins, and Stephen Hopkins. In 1930 Gross divorced Hopkins, shortly before Hopkins became a public figure, the two kept up an intimate correspondence, until 1945.
In 1931, Hopkins married Barbara Duncan, who died of cancer six years later. They had one daughter, Diana Hopkins. In 1942, Hopkins married Louise Gill Macy. Macy was a divorced, gregarious former editor for Harper's Bazaar. The two continued to live at the White House at Roosevelt's request, though Louise eventually demanded a home of their own.
Father:
David Aldona Hopkins
Mother:
Anna Mary Pickett Hopkins
Spouse:
Louise Gill Macy
ex-spouse:
Ethel Gross
ex-spouse:
Barbara Duncan
Brother:
Lewis A Hopkins
Brother:
John Emery Hopkins
Son:
Stephen Peter Hopkins
Son:
David Hopkins
Son:
Robert Hopkins
Son:
Stephen Hopkins
Daughter:
Diana Hopkins
References
The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa
Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.