Harry Hopkins's Continuing Relevance

In January 1941, when President Roosevelt told a press conference that he was sending Harry Hopkins to London as his personal representative, those in Britain who knew something of this special emissary’s background expected Winston Churchill to be hosting “a nice Sunday-school teacher,” a do-gooder who would concern himself with social issues and, perhaps, postwar egalitarian dreams.

It was a natural-enough conclusion, since Hopkins in the 1920s had developed  a national and even international reputation as a social worker and social reformer. A few persons better acquainted with the American scene, however, appreciated his role as the New Deal’s hard-headed, pragmatic, and focused point man with very clear ideas about how to fight a depression.

When a desperate Congress gave the president the funds to support Hopkins’s drive to put people not onto relief rolls but into jobs, Hopkins had produced remarkable results: just two weeks after the creation of the Civil Works Administration was announced, 2 million people had gotten jobs; two weeks later, another 2 million had joined them. To those who counseled patience, maintaining that the economic situation would sort itself out in the long run, Hopkins delivered  a legendary rebuttal:: "People don't eat in the long run, they eat every day."  His “caustic good nature is seemingly unchangeable,” a reporter noted.

Hopkins “took all the heat for the boondoggles of the WPA,” Roosevelt’s son Franklin Jr. observed. “But he put a hell of a lot of people to work and saved their self-respect and did a remarkable job in a very short time.” But only slowly did the administration realize the significance of the contribution that work programs could make to the recovery of the economy as a whole as well as to the individual worker; when Hopkins put $5 in a ditchdigger’s pocket, the money went immediately into circulation. Joblessness still lingered for millions, and unemployment remained the No. 1 challenge for the administration.

In September 1937, when President Roosevelt undertook a cross-country train trip to give himself a first-hand view of the economy, he found a troubling national economic picture. In the previous November he had won a triumphal, record-breaking re-election, carrying all but two of the forty-eight states. The economy was growing at a rate of about 15 percent a year (a level never before reached in peacetime), and even if much of this was credited to the influx of gold fleeing the increasing turbulence in Europe, the nation’s prospects had looked highly encouraging for 1937. But in August, the stock market had begun a slide into what would become known to some as the Roosevelt Recession.

Still as uncomfortable with spending on relief measures  as he had been four years earlier when Hopkins had induced him to authorize the creation of the Emergency Relief Administration, and feeling confident about the progress of recovery (the Dow-Jones index hit a summer 1937 high of 194.40—still only about half the 1929 peak but a great advance from the 1932 low of 41.22), Roosevelt had sought fiscal respectability (and a measure of support from business) by approving the creation of a balanced budget for the next fiscal year. Combined with an unfortunate Federal Reserve move to constrain credit, the ending of even the moderate deficit spending then practiced had almost immediately brought on the new slump.

After being away from Washington for six months, convalescing from an operation for stomach cancer, Harry Hopkins made an emphatic return to action in March 1938. Responding to the economic signal sent by a black day on the stock exchange, he hurried to FDR’s Little White House at Warm Springs, Georgia, to press his friend into undoing the balanced-budget move of the previous year: recession must be met by government spending. On the same March 25, John Maynard Keynes dispatched another letter in his continuing transatlantic correspondence with Roosevelt. While regretting what he considered the president’s naiveté concerning economics, Keynes, who was moving steadily toward his ultimate rank as the most influential economist of the twentieth century, nevertheless had earlier adopted FDR as the only vigorous, forward-looking leader the Western democracies could claim. Now he gave Roosevelt a sharp warning about “treading a very dangerous middle path. You must either give more encouragement to business or take over more of their functions yourself.” And he also must educate public opinion. Previously, Keynes had insightfully suggested to FDR that “businessmen have a different set of delusions from politicians; and need, therefore, different handling.”

Hopkins proposed money for highways and other public works of all kinds, for the New Deal job-creating agencies, for slum clearance and flood control. The president not only agreed but in his message to Congress went considerably further, calling for plumping up the credit market by reducing the reserve requirements for banks; money, in other words, would become more accessible.  Congress (at this point still the one elected in the 1936 sweep) gave Roosevelt essentially what he asked for. But the impact came too late; in the November elections the Republican Party, which had seemed almost beyond resuscitation just two or three years earlier, made fateful gains—winning enough seats in the Senate and the House of Representatives to create, together with anti–New Deal Democrats, the formidable conservative coalition that would go on to stifle the New Deal, not only limiting Roosevelt’s influence in domestic affairs but hampering him as an actor on the world stage amid the developing crises abroad.

Yet, though the administration could not bring itself to act boldly enough to revolutionize the situation and restore prosperity, the new measures had stemmed the negative tide. A second depression establishing itself inside the original collapse would simply have been too much for the country to stomach.

We always have a president, good or bad, up to the job or not, a Harding or a Lincoln; the Constitution requires that the presidential chair always have an occupant. Hopkinses, though, are a different matter. Existing outside the web of constitutions and statutes, they seem almost abstractions, hard to pin down. Their very being depends on the existence of a president who not only can find them but will listen to them—a presidential fellow pragmatist.

By paying heed to Harry Hopkins and moving into effective  even  if limited action, FDR may have prevented a tragedy somewhere between a collapse and a revolution. Thanks in good part to the legacy of the first five Roosevelt years, our world in its structure differs greatly from that of the 1930s. But we can still listen today, amid all the self-serving clamor, for the voice of a wisecracking government official speaking up for jobless people.  You know, a job creator who is personally concerned when unemployment benefits are used up and can tell a critic that poets, just like any other workers, have to eat. "

The British in 1941 could not really be blamed for expecting FDR’s first man in London to be a do-gooder concerned purely with social questions. They would learn better when their pragmatic visitor told Churchill: “We’re only interested in beating that son of a bitch in Berlin. "