Harry Hopkins

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For other uses, see Harry Hopkins (disambiguation).

Harry Hopkins
8th United States Secretary of Commerce
In office
December 24, 1938 – September 18, 1940
PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded byDaniel C. Roper
Succeeded byJesse H. Jones
Administrator of the Works Progress Administration
In office
May 6, 1935 – December 24, 1938
PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byFrancis C. Harrington
Administrator of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration
In office
May 12, 1933 – May 6, 1935
PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Administrator of the Civil Works Administration
In office
November 8, 1933 – March 31, 1934
PresidentFranklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded byPosition established
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Personal details
Born
Harold Lloyd Hopkins

(1890-08-17)August 17, 1890
Sioux City, Iowa U.S.
DiedJanuary 29, 1946(1946-01-29) (aged 55)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Political partyDemocratic
Spouses
Ethel Gross
​
​
(m. 1913; div. 1929)​
Barbara Duncan
​
​
(m. 1931; died 1937)​
Louise Gill Macy
​
(m. 1942)​
Children5
EducationGrinnell College (BA)

Harold "Harry" Lloyd Hopkins (August 17, 1890 – January 29, 1946) was an American statesman, public administrator, and presidential advisor. A trusted deputy to President

United States secretary of commerce from 1938 to 1940 and as Roosevelt's chief foreign policy advisor and liaison to Allied leaders during World War II. During his career, Hopkins supervised the New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Civil Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration, which he built into the largest employer in the United States. He later oversaw the $50 billion Lend-Lease program of military aid to the Allies and, as Roosevelt's personal envoy, played a pivotal role in shaping the alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom
.

Born in Iowa, Hopkins settled in New York City after he graduated from Grinnell College. He accepted a position in New York City's Bureau of Child Welfare and worked for various social work and public health organizations. He was elected president of the National Association of Social Workers in 1923. In 1931, New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration chairman Jesse I. Straus hired Hopkins as the agency's executive director. His successful leadership of the program earned the attention of then-New York Governor Roosevelt, who brought Hopkins into his federal administration after he won the 1932 presidential election. Hopkins enjoyed close relationships with President Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and was considered a potential successor to the president until the late 1930s, when his health began to decline due to a long-running battle with stomach cancer.

As Roosevelt's closest confidant, Hopkins assumed a leading foreign policy role after the outset of

conferences of the Allied powers, including the Casablanca Conference (January 1943), the Cairo Conference (November 1943), the Tehran Conference (November–December 1943), and the Yalta Conference
(February 1945). His health continued to decline, and he died in 1946 at the age of 55.

Early life

Hopkins was born at 512 Tenth Street in

Methodist church. Shortly after Harry was born, the family moved successively to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Kearney and Hastings, Nebraska. They spent two years in Chicago and finally settled in Grinnell, Iowa
.

Hopkins attended

Milbank Memorial Fund, organized the Bronx Park Employment program, which was one of the first public employment programs in the US.[1]

Social and public health work

In 1915, New York City Mayor

Bureau of Child Welfare
which administered pensions to mothers with dependent children.

Hopkins at first opposed America's entrance into

American Association of Social Workers
(AASW) and was elected its president in 1923.

In 1922, Hopkins returned to New York City, where the AICP was involved with the

New York Heart Association.[3]

In 1931, New York Governor

Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA). Straus named Hopkins, then unknown to Roosevelt, as TERA's executive director. His efficient administration of the initial $20 million outlay to the agency gained Roosevelt's attention, and in 1932, he promoted Hopkins to the presidency of the agency.[4] Hopkins and Eleanor Roosevelt began a long friendship, which strengthened his role in relief programs.[5]

New Deal

WPA head Harry Hopkins speaking to reporters (November 1935)
FDR and Hopkins (September 1938)

In March 1933, Roosevelt summoned Hopkins to Washington as federal relief administrator. Convinced that paid work was psychologically more valuable than cash handouts, Hopkins sought to continue and expand New York State's work relief programs, the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. He supervised the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the Civil Works Administration (CWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Over 90% of the people employed by the Hopkins programs were unemployed or on relief. He feuded with Harold Ickes, who ran a rival program, the Public Works Administration, which also created jobs by contracting private construction firms, which did not require applicants to be unemployed or on relief.[6]

FERA, the largest program from 1933 to 1935, involved giving money to localities to operate work relief projects to employ those on direct relief. CWA was similar but did not require workers to be on relief to receive a government-sponsored job. In less than four months, the CWA hired four million people, and during its five months of operation, the CWA built and repaired 200 swimming pools, 3,700 playgrounds, 40,000 schools, 250,000 miles (400,000 km) of road, and 12 million feet of sewer pipe.

The WPA, which followed the CWA, employed 8.5 million people in its seven-year history, working on 1.4 million projects, including the building or repair of 103 golf courses, 1,000 airports, 2,500 hospitals, 2,500 sports stadiums, 3,900 schools, 8,192 parks, 12,800 playgrounds, 124,031 bridges, 125,110 public buildings, and 651,087 miles (1,047,823 km) of highways and roads. The WPA operated on its own on selected projects in co-operation with local and state governments, but always with its own staff and budget. Hopkins started programs for youth (

Federal One Programs). Hopkins and Eleanor Roosevelt worked together to publicize and defend New Deal relief programs. He was concerned with rural areas but increasingly focused on cities in the Great Depression.[7]

In the years after he resigned, Hopkins expressed pride in the WPA's key role in building internment camps for Japanese Americans. On March 19, 1942, for example, he lauded the then WPA head WPA, Howard O. Hunter, for the "building of those camps for War Department for the Japanese evacuees on the West Coast."[8]

Before Hopkins began to decline from his struggle with stomach cancer in the late 1930s, Roosevelt appeared to be training him as a possible successor.[9] With the advent of World War II in Europe, however, Roosevelt ran again in 1940 and won an unprecedented third term.[10]

World War II

News photo of Hopkins departing for Britain in January 1941

On May 10, 1940, after a long night and day spent discussing the German invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg that had ended the so-called "Phoney War," Roosevelt urged a tired Hopkins to stay for dinner and then the night in a second-floor White House bedroom. Hopkins would live out of the bedroom for the next three-and-a-half years.[11][12] On December 7, 1941, at 1:40 pm, Hopkins was in the Oval Study, in the

Harold Rainsford Stark
called a few minutes later to confirm Pearl Harbor had in fact been attacked.

Ernest Hamlin Baker's portrait of Hopkins appeared on the cover of Time magazine (January 22, 1945) as the Roosevelt administration began its fourth term.
Hopkins standing behind President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill aboard the British battleship HMS Prince of Wales on August 10, 1941

During the war years, Hopkins acted as Roosevelt's chief emissary to British Prime Minister

China, and other Allied nations food, oil, and materiel
including warships, warplanes and weaponry. Repayment was primarily in the form of Allied military action against the enemy, as well as leases on army and naval bases in Allied territory used by American forces.

Hopkins had a major voice in policy for the vast $50 billion Lend-Lease program, especially regarding supplies, first for Britain and then, upon the German invasion, the Soviets. He went to Moscow in July 1941 to make personal contact with

Casablanca in 1942–43, and Yalta
in 1945.

He was a firm supporter of

State Department. Hopkins helped identify and sponsor numerous potential leaders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.[17]
He continued to live in the White House and saw the President more often than any other advisor. In mid-1943, Hopkins faced a barrage of criticism from Republicans and the press that he had abused his position for personal profit. One Representative asserted that British media tycoon
Nicholas II of Russia, but he was dissuaded by Roosevelt.[18]

Although Hopkins's health was steadily declining, Roosevelt sent him on additional trips to Europe in 1945. Hopkins attended the Yalta Conference in February 1945. He tried to resign after Roosevelt died, but President Harry S. Truman sent Hopkins on one more mission to Moscow.

Hopkins had three sons who served in the armed forces during the war: Robert, David and Stephen. Stephen was killed in action while he was serving in the Marine Corps.[19]

Relations with Soviet Union

Hopkins with Joseph Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov, Vyacheslav Molotov and George Marshall at the Tehran Conference in Iran, December 1943

Hopkins was the top American official assigned to dealing with Soviet officials during World War II. He liaised with Soviet officials from the middle ranks to the very highest, including Stalin. Anastas Mikoyan was Hopkins' counterpart with responsibility for Lend-Lease. He often explained Roosevelt's plans to Stalin and other top Soviet officials to enlist Soviet support for American objectives, an endeavor that met with limited success. A particularly striking example of bad faith was Moscow's refusal to allow American naval experts to see the German experimental U-boat station at Gdynia captured on March 28, 1945, and thus to help the protection of the very convoys that carried Lend-Lease aid.[20] In turn, Hopkins passed on Stalin's stated goals and needs to Roosevelt. As the top American decision maker in Lend-Lease, he gave priority to supplying the Soviet Union, despite repeated objections from Republicans. As Soviet soldiers were bearing the brunt of the war, Hopkins felt that American aid to the Soviets would hasten the war's conclusion.[21]

On August 10, 1943, he spoke about the USSR's decisive role in the war, saying that "Without Russia in the war, the Axis cannot be defeated in Europe, and the position of the United Nations becomes precarious. Similarly, Russia's post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces."[22]

Hopkins continued to be a target of attacks even after his death.

Edward Stettinius Jr and the minutes of the Soviet protocol committee, were declassified in the 1970s, long after opinions about Soviet espionage had hardened into dogma. These files are now open, and they confirm the veracity of nearly all of Jordan’s claims, except for his allegation that Hopkins’s actions were illegal”.[24]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Saki before setting out to Yalta
.

It is likely that any Soviets who spoke to Hopkins would have been routinely required to report the contact to the NKVD, the Soviet national security agency. Eduard Mark (1998) says that some Soviets, such as spymaster Iskhak Akhmerov, thought that Hopkins was pro-Soviet, but others thought that he was not.[25] Verne W. Newton, the author of FDR and the Holocaust, said that no writer discussing Hopkins has identified any secrets disclosed or any decision in which he distorted American priorities to help communism.[26] As Mark demonstrated, Hopkins was not pro-Soviet in his recommendations to Roosevelt; he was anti-German and pro-American. Any "secrets" disclosed were authorized. Mark says that at the time, any actions were taken specifically to help the American war effort and to prevent the Soviets from making a deal with Hitler.[27]

It is currently considered likely that Laurence Duggan was the titular agent "19" mentioned in the Venona Project decryptions of Soviet cables.[28][29] Hopkins may simply have been naïve in his estimation of Soviet intentions. The historian Robert Conquest wrote that "Hopkins seems just to have accepted an absurdly fallacious stereotype of Soviet motivation, without making any attempt whatever to think, or to study the readily available evidence, or to seek the judgement of the knowledgeable. He conducted policy vis-a-vis Stalin with mere dogmatic confidence in his own (and his circle's) unshakeable sentiments."[30]

Personal life

In 1913, Hopkins married Ethel Gross (1886–1976), a Hungarian-Jewish immigrant active in New York City's

Progressive movement. They had three sons: David, Robert, and Stephen,[31] (they had lost an infant daughter to whooping cough)[32] and though Gross divorced Hopkins in 1930 shortly before Hopkins became a public figure, the two kept up an intimate correspondence until 1945.[33][34][35] In 1931, Hopkins married Barbara Duncan, who died of cancer six years later.[34] They had one daughter, Diana (1932–2020).[36] In 1942, Hopkins married Louise Gill Macy (1906–1963) in the Yellow Oval Room at the White House.[37] Macy was a divorced, gregarious former editor for Harper's Bazaar. The two continued to live at the White House at Roosevelt's request,[38] though Louise eventually demanded a home of their own. Hopkins ended his long White House stay on December 21, 1943, moving with his wife to a Georgetown townhouse.[39]

Cancer and death

In mid-1939, Hopkins was told that he had

proteins and fat, and a few months after the operation, doctors stated that he had only four weeks to live. At this point, Roosevelt brought in experts, who transfused Hopkins with blood plasma that halted his deterioration. When the "Phoney War" phase of World War II ended in May 1940, the situation galvanized Hopkins; as Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote, "the curative impact of Hopkins' increasingly crucial role in the war effort was to postpone the sentence of death the doctors had given him for five more years".[40]

Though his death has been attributed to his stomach cancer, some historians have suggested that it was the cumulative

iron supplements. James A. Halsted, a medical doctor, noted nutrition researcher, and the third husband of Franklin D. Roosevelt's daughter Anna Roosevelt Halsted,[43] concluded that "in light of all the available facts up to his death in 1946, it seems justifiable to speculate that he had non-tropical sprue or adult celiac disease (gluten enteropathy)."[44]

Hopkins died in New York City on January 29, 1946, at the age of 55. His body was cremated and his ashes interred in his former college town at the Hazelwood Cemetery in Grinnell, Iowa. There is a house on the Grinnell College campus named after him and his childhood home, with a plaque, is located at Sixth Avenue and Elm Street.

References

  1. ^ Hopkins 1999, p. 61, 67–9.
  2. ^ Hopkins 1999, p. 128.
  3. ^ Hopkins 1999, pp. 139–41.
  4. ^ Jean Edward Smith, p. 251.
  5. ^ George T. McJimsey, Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (1987)
  6. ^ McJimsey, Harry Hopkins (1987) ch 5–7
  7. ^ Donald S. Howard, The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (1943)
  8. ISBN 978-1598133561
    .
  9. ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4
    .
  10. ^ Goodwin 1994, p. 107.
  11. ISBN 978-1-4000-6964-4
    .
  12. ^ Goodwin 1994, p. 37.
  13. ^ Peter Grier (December 7, 2010). "Pearl Harbor Day: How FDR Reacted on December 7 1941". Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved December 7, 2021.
  14. ^ Goodwin 1994, p. 212–13.
  15. ^ Larson, Erik. The Splendid and the Vile: The Sage of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz. New York: Penguin/Random House: 2020.
  16. ISBN 9781442222229
    .
  17. ^ Dwight William Tuttle, Harry L. Hopkins and Anglo-American-Soviet Relations, 1941–1945 (1983) p. 160
  18. ^ Goodwin 1994, p. 458–59.
  19. ^ 15 Stars, Stanley Weintraub, p. 234-235
  20. ^ Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Norton, 2001, p 150
  21. ^ David Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (2012) ch 6
  22. ^ "The Executive of the Presidents Soviet Protocol Committee (Burns) to the President's Special Assistant (Hopkins)". www.history.state.gov. Office of the Historian. Archived from the original on August 21, 2018. In War II Russia occupies a dominant position and is the decisive factor looking toward the defeat of the Axis in Europe. While in Sicily the forces of Great Britain and the United States are being opposed by 2 German divisions, the Russian front is receiving attention of approximately 200 German divisions. Whenever the Allies open a second front on the Continent, it will be decidedly a secondary front to that of Russia; theirs will continue to be the main effort. Without Russia in the war, the Axis cannot be defeated in Europe, and the position of the United Nations becomes precarious. Similarly, Russia's post-war position in Europe will be a dominant one. With Germany crushed, there is no power in Europe to oppose her tremendous military forces.
  23. ^ David Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler (2012) p 399
  24. ^ Sean McMeekin, Stalin's War (2021) p 534.
  25. ^ Eduard Mark, "Venona's Source '19' and the 'Trident' Conference of May 1943: Diplomacy or Espionage?" Intelligence & National Security, April 1998, Vol. 13 Issue 2, p 20
  26. ^ Newton, Verne W. (October 28, 1990). "A Soviet Agent? Harry Hopkins?". The New York Times. Retrieved May 18, 2010.
  27. ^ Eduard Mark, "Venona's Source '19' and the 'Trident' Conference of May 1943: Diplomacy or Espionage?" Intelligence & National Security, Apr 1998, Vol. 13 Issue 2, p 1–31
  28. ISBN 978-0-465-00312-9
    .
  29. S2CID 153925442
    .
  30. ^ Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Norton, 2001, p 151
  31. ^ Hopkins 1999, p. 144–145.
  32. ^ David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch, 2013, page 24
  33. ^ Hopkins 1999, p. 147.
  34. ^
    ISBN 978-0674543461
    . p. 191.
  35. ISBN 978-0739105023
    .
  36. ^ "DIANA HALSTED Obituary (2021) – Vienna, DC – The Washington Post". Legacy.com.
  37. ^ The White House Historical Society. "How many weddings have been held at the White House?"
  38. ^ Goodwin 1994, p. 349–50.
  39. ^ Goodwin 1994, p. 459, 480.
  40. ^ Goodwin 1994, pp. 31–32.
  41. ^ David L. Roll, The Hopkins Touch, 2013, pages 404–405
  42. ^ Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 2001 revised edition, page 889
  43. ISSN 0362-4331
    . Retrieved June 30, 2023.
  44. PMID 1101513
    .

West, Diana. "American Betrayal" =(2014)

Further reading

World War II

External links

Political offices
Preceded by U.S. Secretary of Commerce
Served under: Franklin D. Roosevelt
December 24, 1938 – September 18, 1940 		Succeeded by
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