Harry Hopkins

For more information on Harry Lloyd Hopkins, visit Britannica.com.

Beginning in 1940, this Iowa‐born social worker and New Deal relief administrator became President Franklin D. Roosevelt's surrogate in matters of international security. Residing in the White House and heading a staff that oversaw interagency preparation for American participation in World War II, Hopkins visited England to accelerate assistance against Nazi Germany and became Lend‐Lease coordinator in March 1941. Following Germany's attack on the Soviet Union in June, Hopkins flew to Moscow and recommended immediate Lend‐Lease to the Russians. In London, he accompanied Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill to his Atlantic Charter meeting with FDR in August 1941. Hopkins then expedited military aid to Allies ahead of America's own rearmament in the remaining months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

At wartime conferences, Hopkins supported Roosevelt's “grand design” for a liberal postwar international order shaped and supervised by the Big Three. With a naval‐oriented president, Hopkins, who emphasized the goal of defeating Nazi Germany in Europe, proved a “Godsend” to Gen. George C. Marshall and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson; at the Teheran conference in 1943, he vigorously opposed Churchill's proposed Balkan invasion. At Yalta, early 1945, he optimistically viewed the compromise agreements as “the first great victory of the peace.” Hopkins served as President Harry S. Truman's special envoy to Josef Stalin in June 1945; he died of stomach cancer six months later.

[See also Lend‐Lease Act and Agreements; World War II: Military and Diplomatic Course; World War II: Postwar Impact.]

Bibliography

• Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins, 1948.
• George McJimsey, Harry Hopkins, 1988

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (1890-1946), American statesman, was a Federal relief administrator and personal confidant and emissary of President Roosevelt during World War II.

Harry Hopkins was born in Sioux City, lowa, on Aug. 17, 1890, the son of a harness maker. He graduated from Grinnell College in 1912. His first job was in social work, and he became increasingly committed to this field. Hopkins was a strong partisan of New York governor Alfred E. Smith and of Franklin Roosevelt. In 1931 Hopkins became chairman of New York State's emergency relief administration. When Roosevelt became president, Hopkins was appointed to head the Civil Works Administration.

In May 1935 Hopkins became administrator of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He was a determined foe of "the dole, " insisting upon the principle that men should be given useful work to do, not subsidized in idleness. He showed remarkable administrative ability. Though he was compelled to attend to political considerations in appointing subordinates, the operations of his agency were carried out efficiently. In the course of his activities more than $8.5 billion was disbursed, and at the height of WPA more than 3 million people were on its rolls. Hopkins got highways, bridges, public buildings, and parks constructed and initiated important projects in conservation and public health. An important aspect of Hopkins's program was the employment of displaced musicians, artists, actors, and writers. An agency was established to resettle or provide loans for indigent farmers; a subordinate agency, the National Youth Administration, gave young people a chance to earn money to pay for part of their education. A rural electrification program was also enacted. In all, some 15 million people benefited from the program.

In 1938 Hopkins was appointed secretary of commerce, but in this office he accomplished little. In May 1940, after his wife's death, Hopkins moved into the White House with his daughter. After the 1940 election he became interested in foreign affairs and acted as Roosevelt's emissary on trips to Great Britain and, later, to the Soviet Union. He won the complete confidence of Winston Churchill, who described him as "Lord Root of the Matter." During his first trip to the Soviet Union he procured useful information on conditions there through personal conversations with Premier Stalin.

Though racked by severe pain, and the victim of a wasting disease, Hopkins outlived Roosevelt. His last public service was a mission to Moscow at the request of President Harry S. Truman to prepare for the Potsdam Conference of 1945. Hopkins died in New York City on Jan. 29, 1946.

Further Reading

Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (1948; rev. ed. 1950), contains considerable biographical material on Hopkins. For the political background see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt (3 vols., 1957-1960).

Noted Progressive education theorist, consultant, and curriculum leader, L. Thomas Hopkins completed his major writings while a professor and laboratory school director at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Born in Truro, Massachusetts, Hopkins received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Tufts University in 1910 and 1911, respectively. Hopkins claimed that the central ideas of his philosophy of education derived principally from the influence of his mother, careful observation of nature, and inter-action with students he taught.

In 1922 he completed the Ed. D. degree at Harvard University under the mentorship of professors Alexander Inglis and Walter Dearborn. Following his work at Harvard, Hopkins accepted an offer to become a tenured faculty member at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Through that post he began an extensive consulting career. One of his first major consultations was with the Denver Curriculum Revision Project, 1923 through 1925; its notoriety launched consultations with many other school districts across the country. His consulting and curriculum ideas are explicated in his Curriculum Principlesand Practices (1929), which was built heuristically around a wide array of questions to guide curriculum leaders, school administrators, and teachers.

In 1929 Hopkins was invited to join the faculty of Teachers College, Columbia University, as professor of education; he remained there for twenty-five years. At Teachers College he also held the position of director of Lincoln School.

Following his retirement from Teachers College in 1954, Hopkins was a Fulbright scholar in Egypt (1956 - 1957). He surveyed Italian schools in 1957 and taught at Wheelock College in Boston and at the University of Maine in the 1960s. In 1960 he chaired the Committee on Schools and Moral Values for the White House Conference on Education. In 1971 he retired for a second time with his wife, Hester Hopkins, to Truro on Cape Cod. There, he continued to write, speak, complete his memoirs, and organize his papers until shortly before his death in 1982. His papers are located at the University of Colorado Library in Boulder, Colorado.

Hopkins's major ideas are outlined in three of his numerous books. In Integration, Its Meaning and Application (1937), he argued, contrary to many current interpretations of integrated curriculum, that integration is much more than merely combining subject matter areas around a common theme (i.e., the thematic unit). For Hopkins, integrating the curriculum meant integrating the person; thus, the organizing center for the integrated curriculum was not principally subject matter, but the individual. Drawing analogies from the study of physiology and embryology, Hopkins saw educative growth as moving through three phases: expansion, differentiation, and finally integration. He labeled these phases the normal learning process. In his view of integrated curriculum, subject matter and informal personal knowledge are to be acquired through inquiry that is expressly directed to build the self into a more diverse and integrated human being. An integrated person was, for Hopkins, one whose personal development incorporated the physical, social, mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the human organism into a functioning whole.

In Interaction: The Democratic Process (1941), Hopkins incorporated a social dynamic to expand the idea of the development of the individual or personal organism. Again, the process of the interacting forces of the normal learning process (expansion, differentiation, and integration) come into play in a social or political realm that argues for a democratic society as well as for the individual. Like John Dewey, Hopkins saw curriculum, writ large, as a dynamic interaction of school and society, experience and nature, and democracy and education. In the Emerging Self in School and Home (1954), Hopkins showed that education is not a function of schooling alone. In this book, he developed the image of an organic group, contrasting it with a mere aggregate group, to depict the integration of school, home, and community. Therein he argued that the needs and interests of the individual and those of the community and society are reciprocal. In fact, he argues for the home as a major site for education to take place, leading to speculation about the need to study other societal venues in which education takes place, which could include homes and families, nonschool organizations, mass media, peer groups, vocations and avocations, and more.

In the early twenty-first century, consistent interpretation of Hopkins's work can be seen in the writings of James A. Beane and in curriculum leadership. Hopkins condemned much that is fashionable in education (memorized knowledge, standardization, external control, extensive testing), calling it the "was curriculum" and characterizing it as useless. In contrast, he advocated the "is curriculum," which "celebrates the experiential … deals with the whole pupil who develops through internal control of the learnings that he or she self-selects … for personal growth." The is curriculum "is what each pupil can take from the teacher-pupil relationship to help him or her better understand and develop the self, for growth toward the highest possible maturity is the direction of all living organisms" (1970, p. 213).

Bibliography

Beane, James. 1997. Curriculum Integration: Designing a Core of Democratic Education. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

Hopkins, L. Thomas. 1929. Curriculum Principles and Practices. New York: Sandborn.

Hopkins, L. Thomas, ed. 1937. Integration, Its Meaning and Application. New York: Appleton-Century.

Hopkins, L. Thomas. 1941. Interaction: The Democratic Process. Boston: Heath.

Hopkins, L. Thomas. 1970. The Emerging Self in School and Home (1954). Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Schubert, William H. 1995. "Toward Lives Worth Living and Sharing: Historical Perspective on Curriculum Coherence." In Toward a Coherent Curriculum, ed. James A. Beane. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

Scotten, Gregory. 1977. "A Study of the Formulation, Promulgation, and Defense of L. Thomas Hopkins's Position on the Curriculum." Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Albany.

Wojcik, Jenny T. 1992. L. Thomas Hopkins (1889 - 1982): Profiles in Childhood Education. Wheaton, MD: Association for Childhood Education International.

— WILLIAM H. SCHUBERT, JENNY T. WOJCIK

This article is about the politician, for the British tank named for him, see Light Tank Mk VIII

Harry Lloyd Hopkins
8th United States Secretary of Commerce
In office December 24, 1938 – September 18, 1940
President	Franklin D. Roosevelt
Preceded by	Daniel Calhoun Roper
Succeeded by	Jesse Holman Jones
Born	August 17, 1890 Sioux City, Iowa
Died	January 19, 1946 (aged 55) New York City, New York
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Barbara Duncan (died 1937) Louise Macy Ethel Gross (divorced)
Children	David Hopkins Robert Hopkins Stephen P. Hopkins Barbara Hopkins Diana Hopkins

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (August 17, 1890 – January 29, 1946) was one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's closest advisers. He was one of the architects of the New Deal, especially the relief programs of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which he directed and built into the largest employer in the country. In World War II he was Roosevelt's chief diplomatic advisor and troubleshooter and was a key policy maker in the $50 billion Lend Lease program that sent aid to the allies.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Social and public health work 3 New Deal 4 World War II 5 Relations with spies 6 Death and remembrance 7 Notes 8 References 8.1 Secondary sources 8.2 World War II 9 External Sources

Early life

Harry 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 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 "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, one of the first public employment programs in the U.S.^[1]

Social and public health work

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.

New Deal

In March 1933, Roosevelt summoned Hopkins to Washington as federal relief administrator. Convinced that paid work was psychologically more valuable than cash handouts (the "dole"), 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 PWA which also created jobs but did not require applicants be unemployed or on relief.

Although Hopkins denied saying "We will tax and tax, and spend and spend, and elect and elect," conservative critics thought the slogan fit the New Deal very well

FERA, the largest program from 1933-35, 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 in order to receive a government sponsored job. In less than four months, the Civil Works Administration 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 Works Progress Administration, 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, and selected projects with the cooperation of local and state government but operated them with its own staff and budget. Hopkins started programs for youth (National Youth Administration) and for artists and writers (Federal One Programs). He and Eleanor Roosevelt worked together to publicize and defend New Deal relief programs. He was concerned with rural areas but more and more focused on cities in the great depression.

World War II

News photo of Hopkins departing for Britain, January 1941

During the war years, Hopkins acted as Roosevelt's unofficial emissary to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Roosevelt dispatched Hopkins to assess Britain's determination and situation. Churchill escorted Hopkins all over the United Kingdom, and converted him to the British cause. At a small dinner party before he returned, Hopkins rose to propose a toast. "I suppose you wish to know what I am going to say to President Roosevelt on my return. Well I am going to quote to you one verse from the Book of Books ... "Whither thou goest, I will go and where thou lodgest I will lodge, thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God." Hopkins became the administrator of Lend Lease. ^[5]

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 USSR. He went to Moscow in July 1941 to make personal contact with Stalin. Hopkins recommended, and the president accepted, the inclusion of the Soviets in Lend-Lease. He then accompanied Churchill to the Atlantic Conference. Hopkins promoted an aggressive war against Germany and successfully urged Roosevelt to use the Navy to protect convoys before the US entered the war in December 1941. Roosevelt brought him along as advisor to his meetings with Churchill at Cairo, Tehran, Casablanca in 1942-43, and Yalta in 1945. He was a firm supporter of China, which received Lend Lease aid for its military and air force. Hopkins wielded more diplomatic power than the entire State Department. Hopkins helped identify and sponsor numerous potential leaders, including Dwight D. Eisenhower.^[6] He continued to live in the White House and saw the president more often than any other advisor. Although Hopkins' health was steadily declining, Roosevelt sent him on additional trips to Europe in 1945; he attended the Yalta Conference in February 1945. He tried to resign after Roosevelt died, but President Harry S. Truman sent him on one more mission to Moscow.

Relations with spies

Hopkins was the top American official charged with dealing with Soviet officials during World War II and spoke with many Russians, from middle ranks to the very highest. He often explained to Stalin and other top Soviets what Roosevelt was secretly planning in order to enlist Soviet support for American objectives. As a major decision maker in Lend Lease, he expedited the sending of as much war material as possible to the Soviet Union, as Congress had ordered, in order to end the war as fast as possible. As was common in totalitarian societies, Soviets who spoke to Hopkins routinely reported the contact to the KGB, so Hopkins is listed as a "source" of information for Moscow, which indeed was his role. No one has ever identified any secrets that Hopkins gave away that he should not have, or any decision in which he distorted American priorities in order to help Communism.^[7]

Death and remembrance

Hopkins, a chain-smoker, died in New York City in January 1946, succumbing to a long and debilitating battle with stomach cancer. His body was cremated and the ashes interred in his old hometown of Grinnell, Iowa.

There is a house on the Grinnell College campus named after him.

Notes

1. ^ June Hopkins, "Harry Hopkins" (1999) p.61,67-69
2. ^ June Hopkins, Harry Hopkins (1999) p. 128 online
3. ^ June Hopkins p.139-41
4. ^ Jean Edward Smith, p. 251.
5. ^ Goodwin, pp. 213-213 and Meacham and History Boys Clothing
6. ^ Dwight William Tuttle, Harry L. Hopkins and Anglo-American-Soviet Relations, 1941-1945 (1983) p. 160
7. ^ Verne W. Newton, "A Soviet Agent? Harry Hopkins?," New York Times Oct. 28, 1990

References

Secondary sources

• Adams, Henry Hitch. Harry Hopkins: A Biography (1977)
• Andrew, Christopher and Gordievsky, Oleg. KGB: The Inside Story, HarperCollins, (1990).
• Hopkins, June. Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (1999) biography by HH's granddaughter.
• Hopkins, June. "The Road Not Taken: Harry Hopkins and New Deal Work Relief" Presidential Studies Quarterly Vol. 29, 1999
• Howard; Donald S. The WPA and Federal Relief Policy (1943)
• Kurzman, Paul A. "Harry Hopkins and the New Deal", R. E. Burdick Publishers (1974)
• McJimsey George T. Harry Hopkins: Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy (1987), biography.
• Meriam; Lewis. Relief and Social Security The Brookings Institution. 1946. Highly detailed analysis and statistical summary of all New Deal relief programs; 900 pages
• Sherwood, Robert E. Roosevelt and Hopkins (1948), memoir by senior FDR aide; Pulitzer Prize. Enigma Books (2008)
• Singleton, Jeff. The American Dole: Unemployment Relief and the Welfare State in the Great Depression (2000)
• Smith, Jason Scott. Building New Deal Liberalism: The Political Economy of Public Works, 1933-1956 (2005)
• Smith, Jean Edward. FDR, Random House (2007)
• Romerstein, Herbert and Breindel, Eric. The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America's Traitors, Regnery Publishing, Inc., (2000).
• Jordan, George Racey. From Major Jordan's Diaries, Harcourt, Brace and Company (1952).
• "Harry Lloyd Hopkins". Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 4: 1946-1950. American Council of Learned Societies, 1974.

World War II

• Allen, R.G.D. "Mutual Aid between the U.S. and the British Empire, 1941—5", in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society no. 109 #3, 1946. pp 243–77 online at www.jstor.org detailed statistical data on Lend Lease
• Clarke, Sir Richard. Anglo-American Economic Collaboration in War and Peace, 1942-1949. (1982), British perspective
• Dawson, Raymond H. The Decision to Aid Russia, 1941: Foreign Policy and Domestic Politics (1959)]
• Dobson, Alan P. U.S. Wartime Aid to Britain, 1940-1946 London, 1986.
• Herring Jr. George C. Aid to Russia, 1941-1946: Strategy, Diplomacy, the Origins of the Cold War (1973)]
• Kimball, Warren F. The Most Unsordid Act: Lend-Lease, 1939-1941 (1969).
• Louis, William Roger. Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941-1945. 1977.
• Reynolds, David. The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance 1937-1941: A Study on Competitive Cooperation (1981)
• Thorne, Christopher. Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941-1945 1978.
• Woods, Randall Bennett. A Changing of the Guard: Anglo-American Relations, 1941-1946 (1990)

External Sources

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Harry Hopkins

• Works by the Works Progress Administration at Project Gutenberg slave narratives
• Living New Deal project, California
• Posters from the WPA at the Library of Congress
• Database of WPA murals
• Text and Graphics from 1937 WPA Brochure: "Our Job with the WPA"
• Text and Graphics from 1939 WPA Brochure: "QUESTION'S AND ANSWERS ON THE WPA"
• WPA Membership Card and Lapel Pin
• Samples of WPA Work Assignment Forms used in the 1930s
• How We Gave the Russians the Bomb, David Martin, December 3, 2006.
• [1]

Political offices
Preceded by Daniel C. Roper	United States Secretary of Commerce Served under: Franklin D. Roosevelt December 24, 1938–September 18, 1940	Succeeded by Jesse Holman Jones

v • d • e United States Secretaries of Commerce Secretaries of Commerce & Labor Cortelyou • Metcalf • Straus • Nagel Secretaries of Commerce Redfield • Alexander • Hoover • Whiting • Lamont • Chapin • Roper • Hopkins • Jones • Wallace • Harriman • Sawyer • Weeks • Strauss • Mueller • Hodges • Connor • Trowbridge • Smith • Stans • Peterson • Dent • Morton • Richardson • Kreps • Klutznick • Baldrige • Verity • Mosbacher • Franklin • Brown • Kantor • Daley • Mineta • Evans • Gutierrez • Locke

v • d • e Cabinet of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) Vice President John Nance Garner (1933–1941) • Henry A. Wallace (1941–1945) • Harry S. Truman (1945) Secretary of State Cordell Hull (1933–1944) • Edward Stettinius, Jr. (1944–1945) Secretary of War George Dern (1933–1936) • Harry Hines Woodring (1936–1940) • Henry L. Stimson (1940–1945) Secretary of the Treasury William Hartman Woodin (1933–1934) • Henry Morgenthau, Jr. (1934–1945) Attorney General Homer Stille Cummings (1933–1939) • Frank Murphy (1939–1940) • Robert H. Jackson (1940–1941) • Francis Biddle (1941–1945) Postmaster General James Farley (1933–1940) • Frank Comerford Walker (1940–1945) Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson (1933–1939) • Charles Edison (1940) • Frank Knox (1940–1944) • James Forrestal (1944–1945) Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes (1933–1945) Secretary of the Agriculture Henry A. Wallace (1933–1940) • Claude R. Wickard (1940–1945) Secretary of Commerce Daniel Calhoun Roper (1933–1938) • Harry Hopkins (1939–1940) • Jesse Holman Jones (1940–1945) • Henry A. Wallace (1945) Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins (1933–1945)

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