Hopkins, Harry

Hopkins, Harry (1890–1946), social worker, New Deal relief administrator, and key advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Harry Hopkins had a distinguished early career with various New York City social‐work agencies. In the Depression year 1931, Roosevelt, then governor of New York, named him deputy director of the state's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. With Roosevelt's election as president, he brought Hopkins to Washington, D.C., in 1933 to head the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, charged with providing assistance to the unemployed. Believing that most of the needy were not at fault, Hopkins pushed for government‐created jobs rather than handouts. A dole keeps a person physically alive, but often destroys self‐respect and undermines job skills, Hopkins argued, while work sustains spirit and mind, as well as body. This argument produced the short‐lived Civil Works Administration (1933–1934) and the Works Progress Administration, which Hopkins supervised from its start in 1935.

From 1936 until Roosevelt's death in 1945, Hopkins was the president's closest confidant. He hoped to succeed Roosevelt as president in 1940, but his poor health and opposition from key Democrats blocked this ambition. Roosevelt sent Hopkins on critical missions to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in 1941. During World War II, Hopkins served as assistant to the president and became his alter ego.

A central figure during the nation's two largest twentieth‐century crises, Hopkins brought to his varied assignments a combination of idealism and practicality summarized by his retort to the claim that a plan would work in the long run: “People don't eat in the long run—they eat every day.”
See also Depressions, Economic; New Deal Era, The; Welfare, Federal.

Bibliography

Robert E. Sherwood , Roosevelt and Hopkins, 1948.
George McJimsey , Harry Hopkins, 1987.

Robert S. McElvaine