Harry Hopkins: President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Deputy President

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JOKING TO THE PRESS that ‘we are going to Christmas Island to buy Christmas cards, and to Easter Island to buy Easter eggs,’ President Franklin Delano Roosevelt left the White House in early December 1940 for a two-week cruise in the Caribbean. Aside from the crew, the only passengers aboard the cruiser USS Tuscaloosa were three reporters, select members of Roosevelt’s staff, and his close friend and adviser, Harry L. Hopkins.

It was a largely uneventful trip. After stopping in Cuba to pick up cigars, Roosevelt and his companions spent most of their time fishing and watching movies. On December 9, however, a navy seaplane slid alongside the Tuscaloosa to deliver mail to the president. Among the stacks of newspapers and correspondence was a long letter from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In his remarkable, 4,000-word discourse, Churchill detailed the military situation in Great Britain and across Europe. After a year of war with Germany, he wrote, Britain was running out of money to pay for war goods and needed American help. He could not, however, suggest exactly how the president would provide it.

History turned on that letter. While German bombers unleashed their heaviest attack of the war on London on the night of December 29, Roosevelt delivered a ‘Fireside Chat’ in which he declared that the United States ‘must be the great arsenal of democracy.’ Harry Hopkins, who was also one of Roosevelt’s speechwriters, suggested the key phrase. A week later, Roosevelt dispatched Hopkins on a special mission to London.

Born in 1890 in Sioux City, Iowa, Harry Hopkins grew up imbued with traditional Midwestern values of self-reliance, thrift, and pragmatism. At Grinnell College he studied American politics and the British Parliamentary system. He began his career working for charitable organizations such as the American Red Cross, New York City’s Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, and the New York Tuberculosis Association. From the start, Hopkins’ own well-being took a back seat to his work. Jacob A. Goldberg, secretary of the Tuberculosis Association, later described the chain-smoking Hopkins as ‘the ulcerous type.’ Intense and driven by nervous energy, Goldberg recalled, Hopkins reported to work ‘looking as though he had spent the previous night sleeping in a hayloft. He would wear the same shirt three or four days at a time. He managed to shave almost every day–usually at the office.’

In 1928 Hopkins supported Democrat Franklin Roosevelt for the governorship of New York, and Roosevelt rewarded him three years later by naming Hopkins the head of the state’s new Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. Hopkins subsequently supported Roosevelt’s campaign for the presidency and his promise of a ‘New Deal’ for Americans. In 1933, President Roosevelt tapped the 42-year-old social worker to be his federal emergency relief administrator, and from 1935 to 1938 Hopkins headed the Works Progress Administration.

Rather than giving needy people handouts, Hopkins liberally granted money to the states for work programs. His critics scornfully referred to him as the leader of a bunch of ‘leaf-rakers.’ Robert E. Sherwood, a Roosevelt speech writer and director of the Foreign Information Service, later wrote that ‘Hopkins came to be regarded as the Chief Apostle of the New Deal and the most cordially hated by its enemies.’

Hopkins also repeatedly clashed with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who ran the Public Works Administration (PWA), over the amount of federal money allocated to their respective programs. Despite agreeing that his organization would handle projects costing $25,000 or less, Hopkins simply divided more expensive projects into smaller parts and funded them separately.

Meanwhile, Hopkins’ personal life suffered terribly. In October 1937, his second wife, Barbara, died of cancer, and in December surgeons removed two-thirds of Hopkins’ stomach in order to stave off the same disease. The gangly Iowan survived, but his health remained fragile for the rest of his life. Encouraged by Roosevelt, who originally hoped to retire at the end of his second term, Hopkins briefly entertained thoughts of the presidency. His hopes were further legitimized when Roosevelt appointed him secretary of commerce in December 1938. Hopkins’ tenure as commerce secretary, however, proved frustrating and brief. Afflicted with hemochromatosis–a result of his chronically inadequate digestive system–he was unable to fully dedicate himself to his job and by the following August was at death’s door. Roosevelt arranged for the best navy doctors to treat his friend. Hopkins rallied, but his ordeal drained him of political ambition. He resigned his cabinet position in August 1940, determined to serve Roosevelt and his country in other ways for as long as possible.

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