Harry Lloyd Hopkins

• Harry Lloyd Hopkins
• Born: August 17, 1890
• Died: January 29, 1946

Dedicated social worker, effective New Deal administrator, and trusted World War II diplomat, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, the fourth child of four sons and one daughter of David Aldona Hopkins and Anna (Picket) Hopkins. David Hopkins was born in Bangor, Maine, moved west with his family after the Civil War, and worked, successively, as a gold prospector in South Dakota and as a harness maker, traveling salesman, and storekeeper in Nebraska, Illinois, and Iowa. But his main interest was bowling, at which he gambled. Anna Hopkins, a devout Methodist born in Hamilton, Ontario, lived with her family on a South Dakota homestead, and married David Hopkins at Vermillion, South Dakota. The Hopkins family eventually settled at Grinnel, Iowa. There Hopkins’s father operated a store popular with Grinnell College students, and his mother, who had worked as a schoolteacher, distinguished herself as a devoted worker in the Methodist Missionary Society of Iowa. Harry Hopkins entered Grinnell College in the fall of 1908, became president of his graduating class of 1912, and organized the Woodrow Wilson League, but was otherwise an average student. His two favorite professors, Jesse Macy and Dr. Edward A. Steiner, gave him instruction in political and social science. Dr. Steiner, a Jew who had become a Congregationalist minister, and authored a book on Tolstoy, influenced Hopkins’s later ideas about Christian ethics and social reform.

Upon graduation in 1912 Professor Steiner advised Hopkins of a summer counselor’s job at a Christadora camp for poor children in Bound Brook, New Jersey. Though Hopkins did not intend to become a social worker, the experience galvanized him, and that fall he went to work for Christadora House on the Lower East Side of New York City. That winter he met Dr. John A. Kingsbury, general director of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) and worked also for that organization. On October 21, 1913, he married a social worker, Ethel Gross. The couple had three sons and one daughter and divorced in 1928. In 1914 Dr. Kingsbury helped Hopkins become executive secretary of the Board of Child Welfare under the reform administration of New York City mayor John P. Mitchel. Active in city politics, in 1917 Hopkins supported Socialist candidate for mayor Morris Hillquit, who lost the election. After disqualification from military service in World War I due to a detached retina, Hopkins joined the Red Cross. He served in New Orleans and Atlanta, eventually as director of Red Cross activities in the Southeast. In 1921, again through Kingsbury’s help, Hopkins rejoined AICP and was made director of the Health Division of the Milbank Fund for public charities in New York City, where he analyzed health conditions. In 1924 Hopkins became Executive Director of the New York Tuberculosis Association. Under his direction the association expanded to absorb the New York Heart Association and other health agencies. A committee Hopkins organized resulted in reduction of silicosis, a dread occupational disease affecting construction workers.

The stock market crash of 1929 and resulting depression, which caused widespread unemployment, hunger, and misery, prompted Hopkins and some AICP colleagues to provide relief by funding ad hoc job assignments in New York City parks. Attacked by established welfare agencies for failing to investigate thoroughly the eligibility of relief applicants according to traditional procedures, one AICP colleague said “Harry told the agencies to go to hell.” Two years later on August 28, 1931, in the midst of continued high unemployment, New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt declared relief for the unemployed a state responsibility, and subsequently set up the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), modeled on Hopkins’s AICP program. In 1932 TERA’s new chairman Jesse Isador Straus appointed Hopkins his deputy. One year later Hopkins succeeded Straus as chairman of the largest, most progressive, unemployment relief program in the United States, which administered annually funds of some $30 million.

Governor Roosevelt was elected president in November 1932, and inaugurated on March 4 of the next year. Two months later, in May 1933, Hopkins moved to Washington, D.C. with his second wife Barbara Duncan, whom he married in 1929, and a new daughter, Diana, born in 1932, to be sworn in by President Roosevelt as chief of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Less than twenty-four hours after taking his oath Hopkins formed a staff, notified governors to organize state relief organizations, and disbursed $5 million of the half-billion dollars allocated to FERA.

By the time Hopkins took office, the United States had experienced, in the words of William E. Leuchtenburg, “the most harrowing four months of the depression.” Almost 15 million workers were unemployed, dependent on others for cash, food, and clothing. Men waited in bread lines for food. Some rioted, and as many as two million roamed the country searching futilely for work. Many families were homeless; children starved, banks failed. “Banks were crashing in all parts of the country,” Hopkins wrote later, “carrying with them the resources of all classes of the population. Relief stations were closing for lack of funds.” Many feared a complete collapse of the economy. By mid-1933, more than 1,000 homes were foreclosed each month, and ninety percent of residents of some counties were on relief.

As Federal Emergency Relief Administrator, Hopkins worked quickly to supply federal funds for relief of the needy to states for distribution by local governments. Hopkins instituted guidelines derived from his social work experience, which reformed local practices of poor relief. Formerly local relief officials regarded applicants as “morally deficient,” according to Hopkins. He demanded that officials understand “that the predicament of the worker without a job is an economic predicament not of his own making; that his religion, race or party is irrelevant.” FERA funds paid for work performed, cash grants, commissaries, grocery orders, shelter, clothing, and medical care. Hopkins worked to eliminate the stigma of accepting relief while preserving recipients’ self-respect. In the fall of 1933, after the slow start of Harold Ickes’s New Deal Public Works Administration (PWA), which was to stimulate economic recovery, Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt to authorize a Civil Works Administration (CWA) to provide extensive work relief. Under Hopkins, within thirty days CWA put more than 4,000,000 people to work. During the hard winter of 1933-4, some 20 million people benefited from federal relief funds. President Roosevelt dissolved CWA in May 1934, but Hopkins expanded FERA programs and took on some of CWA’s functions. Hopkins believed his policies altered American attitudes toward the workless, while providing immediate relief and long-term benefits: “A new standard of public decency was being set.” He made special efforts to help transients, feed the hungry, build secondary roads in rural areas to open markets to farmers and schools to children, fund employment for writers and artists, and assist those too old to work.

Under the Emergency Relief Appropriation of 1935, President Roosevelt authorized Hopkins to set up a new agency, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Under Hopkins’s direction, through 1938, WPA built more than 2,500 hospitals, 5,900 school buildings, 1,000 airports, and almost 13,000 playgrounds. Hopkins held that “worklessness” was more destructive to people than “want,” predicated WPA programs “only on the the right of the worker to his living,” and sought the “regeneration of the worker” who was unemployed. Hopkins supported federal government assistance to unemployable people, too, and helped to achieve passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. In December 1938, Roosevelt appointed Hopkins secretary of commerce.

Hopkins’s skill at organizing staff and planning programs, then executing and administering them, equalled his compassion for the needy and unemployed. His highly practical, abruptly activated policies opened him to charges of mismanagement, which were never substantiated, and caused friction with rival bureaucracies such as Ickes’s Public Works Administration. He directed disbursement of $9 billion without scandal or personal gain, if not without controversy. His aggressive postures and publicized forays to racetracks to bet money brought criticism. But his sincerity, honesty, and success in gaining and maintaining federal relief for the needy and unemployed won him respect nationwide, and, increasingly, the confidence of President Roosevelt. The modern social work practices he brought to his mission proved highly effective. He epitomized the New Dealers’ boldness in experimenting with imaginative solutions to economic and social problems, and worked to ameliorate causes of misery as well as symptoms.

In 1939 Hopkins resigned as secretary of commerce because of ill health, but after partial recovery helped Roosevelt as a special adviser on national defense. From 1941 he served as the president’s special representative to Churchill, De Gaulle, and Stalin, becoming “Roosevelt’s own personal foreign officer.” Frequently he lived in the White House as a member of Roosevelt’s family. During the nine months subsequent to Roosevelt’s death in April 1945 until his own in January 1946, he served President Harry S Truman, who awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal, and pushed Truman’s administration to support the United Nations. He died without wealth, of hemachromatosis, at fifty-five.

Hopkins’s papers are held at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, and in the National Archives in Washington D.C. Hopkins published a documentary account of economic and social conditions, and the measures he took to improve them as Spending to Save (1936). A thorough study of his career is R. E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948). S. F. Charles, Minister of Relief (1963) details and evaluates Hopkins’s FERA. Hopkins’s place within the context of New Deal social and economic reform is set forth in A. M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Coming of The New Deal (1958) and W. E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and The New Deal, 1932-1940 (1963). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, January 30, 1946.