Harry Hopkins
Harold Lloyd "Harry" Hopkins (August 17, 1890 – January 29, 1946) was an American statesman, public administrator, and presidential advisor. A trusted deputy to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Hopkins directed New Deal relief programs before serving as the eighth 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.
For other uses, see Harry Hopkins (disambiguation).
Harry Hopkins
Position established
Position established
Position abolished
Position established
Position abolished
January 29, 1946 (aged 55)
New York City, New York, U.S.
5
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 World War II. From 1940 until 1943, Hopkins lived in the White House and assisted the president in the management of American foreign policy, particularly toward the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union. He traveled frequently to the United Kingdom, whose prime minister, Winston Churchill, recalled Hopkins in his memoirs as a "natural leader of men" with "a flaming soul." Hopkins attended the major 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[edit]
Hopkins was born at 512 Tenth Street in Sioux City, Iowa, the fourth child of four sons and one daughter of David Aldona and Anna (née Pickett) Hopkins. His father, born in Bangor, Maine, ran a harness shop (after an erratic career as a salesman, prospector, storekeeper, and bowling-alley operator), but his real passion was bowling, and he eventually returned to it as a business. Anna Hopkins, born in Hamilton, Ontario, had moved at an early age to Vermillion, South Dakota, where she married David. She was deeply religious and active in the affairs of the 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 Grinnell College and soon after his graduation in 1912 took a job with Christodora House, a social settlement house in New York City's Lower East Side ghetto. In the spring of 1913, he accepted a position from John A. Kingsbury of the New York Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) as a "friendly visitor" and superintendent of the Employment Bureau within the AICP's Department of Family Welfare. During the 1915 recession, Hopkins and the AICP's William Matthews, with $5,000 from Elizabeth Milbank Anderson's 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[edit]
In 1915, New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchel appointed Hopkins executive secretary of the Bureau of Child Welfare which administered pensions to mothers with dependent children.
Hopkins at first opposed America's entrance into World War I, but, when war was declared in 1917, he supported it enthusiastically. He was rejected for the draft because of a bad eye.[2] Hopkins moved to New Orleans where he worked for the American Red Cross as director of Civilian Relief, Gulf Division. Eventually, the Gulf Division of the Red Cross merged with the Southwestern Division and Hopkins, headquartered now in Atlanta, was appointed general manager in 1921. Hopkins helped draft a charter for the 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 Milbank Memorial Fund and the State Charities Aid Association in running three health demonstrations in New York State. Hopkins became manager of the Bellevue-Yorkville health project and assistant director of the AICP. In mid-1924 he became executive director of the New York Tuberculosis Association. During his tenure, the agency grew enormously and absorbed the New York Heart Association.[3]
In 1931, New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt named R. H. Macy's department store president Jesse Straus as president of the 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]
Personal life[edit]
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[edit]
In mid-1939, Hopkins was told that he had stomach cancer, and doctors performed an extensive operation that removed 75% of his stomach. What remained of Hopkins's stomach struggled to digest 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 malnutrition related to his post-cancer digestive problems. Another suggestion is that Hopkins died from liver failure due to hepatitis or cirrhosis,[41] but Robert Sherwood authoritatively reported that Hopkins' postmortem examination showed the cause of death was hemosiderosis[42] due to hepatic iron accumulation from his many blood transfusions and 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.