Harry Hopkins

The house at 512 Tenth Street in Sioux City held a father who ran a harness shop and cared more about the bowling alley, and a devout Methodist mother who kept the church at the center of everything. Harry Hopkins graduated from Grinnell College in 1912 and went straight to Christodora House, a settlement on New York's Lower East Side. Within a year he was a friendly visitor for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, running its employment bureau. Rejected for the draft over a bad eye, he spent the First World War directing Red Cross civilian relief out of New Orleans and later Atlanta. He was a professional social worker for two decades before he was anything else, and that is the key to him.

Roosevelt made him federal relief administrator in March 1933. Hopkins ran the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, then built the Civil Works Administration from nothing in November and had four million people at work within two months. In five months it built or improved 40,000 schools, nearly 1,000 airports and 250,000 miles of road. The Works Progress Administration followed in 1935, employed 8.5 million people across 1.4 million projects, and paid writers, actors, musicians and painters. Told a plan would work better in the long run, he said people do not eat in the long run, they eat every day.

In December 1937 surgeons at the Mayo Clinic took roughly three-quarters of his stomach out. What was left could not process protein or fat, and by 1939 doctors gave him four weeks to live before plasma transfusions pulled him back. He was a sick man for every day of the second career. On May 10, 1940, Roosevelt kept him overnight in a second-floor bedroom, and Hopkins stayed three and a half years. From there he ran the 50 billion dollar Lend-Lease program, flew to London in January 1941 to judge whether Britain would hold, and to Moscow that July to take the measure of Stalin. Churchill named him Lord Root of the Matter. He was a personal envoy with no department behind him, and he wielded more diplomatic authority than the State Department, which did not forgive it.

The attacks were constant: spendthrift, political fixer, and in 1943 Roosevelt's Rasputin in the Chicago Tribune, the same year a congressman claimed Lord Beaverbrook had given his wife half a million dollars in emeralds. The graver charge came after his death, when George Racey Jordan told a House committee in 1949 that Hopkins had shipped nuclear material to Moscow. Historians have discarded Jordan, but the Venona decrypts kept the wider question of a Soviet source alive and it is not settled. Most now read agent 19 as Laurence Duggan, and several conclude Hopkins disclosed nothing unauthorized, while others find him credulous about Stalin. He died in New York on January 29, 1946, months after the war ended.

Harry Hopkins's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Federal Emergency Relief Administration other
  Federal grants to states for work relief, run from May 1933 1933
• Civil Works Administration other
  Four million people at work within two months of its November launch 1933
• Works Progress Administration other
  8.5 million people employed across 1.4 million projects in seven years 1935
• Federal One arts programs other
  Federal wages for writers, actors, musicians and artists 1935
• National Youth Administration other
  Work and training for young Americans, created under the WPA 1935
• Lend-Lease Act law
  He administered the program, which reached some 50 billion dollars 1941

• August 17, 1890 aged 0 Born at 512 Tenth Street in Sioux City, Iowa Fourth of five children of David and Anna Hopkins.
• 1912 aged ~22 Graduates from Grinnell College and takes a settlement house job in New York Christodora House, on the Lower East Side.
• 1931 aged ~41 Hired to run New York's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration Jesse Straus picked him. Governor Roosevelt, who did not yet know him, noticed the results.
• November 8, 1933 aged 43 Roosevelt launches the Civil Works Administration and puts him in charge Four million on the payroll within two months. It closed on March 31, 1934.
• May 6, 1935 aged 44 Becomes administrator of the Works Progress Administration It became the largest employer in the United States.
• December 1937 aged 47 Surgeons remove about three-quarters of his stomach He never absorbed nutrition properly again. Some accounts place the diagnosis in 1939.
• May 10, 1940 aged 49 Stays the night at the White House and does not leave for three and a half years He moved out to a Georgetown house on December 21, 1943.
• January 1941 aged 50 Flies to London to judge whether Britain will hold Churchill called him Lord Root of the Matter.
• January 29, 1946 aged 55 Dies in New York at 55 His ashes were interred at Hazelwood Cemetery in Grinnell, Iowa.

• Franklin D. Roosevelt 1882–1945
  32nd President who led the nation through the Great Depression and most of World War II. served
• Eleanor Roosevelt 1884–1962
  First Lady and human rights advocate who chaired the UN committee that drafted the Universal Declaration. allied with
• Frances Perkins 1880–1965
  First woman in a presidential cabinet and labor secretary who helped create Social Security, minimum-wage, and workplace protections. New Deal colleague
• George C. Marshall 1880–1959
  Army chief of staff who organized U.S. victory in World War II and later designed the Marshall Plan. wartime colleague
• Alger Hiss 1904–1996
  State Department official whose perjury conviction made Richard Nixon's career and split American opinion for decades. named in the same postwar accusations