Harry Hopkins, ally of the poor and defender of democracy.

Harry Hopkins, Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy

I arrived in Washington to take up a positionin the New Deal almost exactly 53 years ago as this issue of The Washington Monthly comes off the press. I was not a decisive figure in that great current of change. As I've elsewhere told, I was passing through the capital on my way from graduate study in Berkeley and a job in Davis, California, to an instructorship at Harvard. Such, in those days, was the shortage of economists--a most rewarding deprivation that I hope will always persist--that I was put on the payroll in a matter of hours and there remained until the Harvard term began.

My assignment was to the Agricultural AdjustmentAdministration, the Triple A, a highly improbable center of radicalism at the time. Alas, my position in the hierarchy did not bring me even remotely in touch with Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, or Jerome Frank, to whose views I would have been dangerously vulnerable had opportunity allowed. I yearned to belong. Also well above me were such reputable figures as Adlai Stevenson and George Ball, and yet further in the upper distance, Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, and Harry Hopkins, the epitome of New Deal activism. They were figures of heroic proportions. Had I heard that they were visiting the South Building of the USDA, then occupied while still under construction, I would have lingered by a lavatory door just to get a glimpse.

Later I was much in Washington and, duringthe war years, was in charge of price control, a job of some responsibility. Harry Hopkins, nonetheless, remained for me as well as for others a distant and, in light of all that was said of his influence, a mystical or perhaps mythical figure. His influence on F.D.R. was a compulsive topic of conversation as was his role as a lightning rod for conservative criticism. There was also, more specifically, considerable talk about what might be accomplished if, as was often desired, "you could get to him.' Those who had access--Leon Henderson, Averell Harriman, Edward Stettinius --were deemed to be, pro tanto, men of power.

In the early Roosevelt years Hopkins wasthought the ultimate New Dealer, the man who did not make concessions to the opposition, who did not assume, in the manner of the modern liberal (taking advice from the accomplished political strategists), that his own constituency was safe and seek to enlarge it by selling out to the opposition.

Later, early in the war, Hopkins was a solid anchorof support to Britain (and Winston Churchill) and thereafter of aid to the British and the Soviets. He was also in those years, in the role in which my associates most admired him, an ally in the great mobilization battle of the time.

This conflict, which could take our attentionaway from Hitler and the Japanese for weeks at a time, is still not sufficiently celebrated in the wartime histories. It was brought about by the myopic and on occasion perverse vision of the great corporate bureaucrats who came, or were brought, to Washington to mobilize the American economy. Some had as their principle qualification that they were, in a manner of speaking, employed. Some were professional spokesmen for their firms or industries and otherwise nonfunctional. Some were aging and thus expendable. With some notable exceptions, all thought it their wartime duty to protect the economic system from the disruptive regulation they associated with F.D.R. and the New Deal. For seven years they had deplored the New Deal intrusion on economic life; now the war mobilization seemed more of the same. Let us win the war but not by sacrificing the free enterprise system.

Curtailment of civilian production and consumption,expansion of steel and other plant capacity, manpower and materials allocation, and much else, should be left to the voluntary cooperation and good sense of the American businessman and to the beneficent magic of the market. Against this relaxed attitude, solemnly avowed, the New Dealers and their academic allies who had come to Washington were in strenuous, unrelenting, and, as I look back, greatly enjoyed conflict. For determining the outcome of the war it could have been a more important battle than some that were fought with guns.

With us in this confrontation was HarryHopkins at the White House. F.D.R. was in general support; Hopkins was specifically engaged. He had a sense of the issues and, even more important, an accurate view of the motivation (or lack of it) and the personalities, generally, of the players.

Ceremonial complaints

Hopkins in his several roles has not beenneglected by the histerians. Arthur Schlesinger, Frank Freidel, and Robert Sherwood have all dealt with him with competence and respect. Now George McJimsey, professor of history at Iowa State, has published a major volume on the Hopkins peacetime and wartime activities.*

* Harry Hopkins, Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy.George McJimsey. Harvard University Press, $25.00.

It is a generally excellent piece of work.McJimsey tells of Hopkins's origins in Iowa, his education at Grinnell College, his work as an administrator of diverse social services in New York. He then tells in admirable detail of the energy and competence Hopkins brought to the organization and administration of relief and work relief--FERA, CWA, WPA--the tasks that more than anything else expressed the concern and compassion of the early Roosevelt years. He goes on to describe Hopkins's role in the months before Pearl Harbor as a bridge between Churchill and Roosevelt, as an ardent and effective supporter of the British struggle for survival, and then as an extended arm of the president reaching out to and dealing with the armed services and the war agencies. Hopkins was especially involved with Lend-Lease and policy and strategy in support of our wartime allies, including the intransigent problem of shipping and its allocation between our military operations and the allies' needs.

With all else, Professor McJimsey revealsHopkins's often strained and chaotic personal life and his terrible bouts of ill health, the latter the result of various medical misadventures exacerbated by intense and prolonged strain, and a strong commitment to self-damage. He died only a few months after F.D.R.; it is a miracle that he survived so long.

There is a convention in book-reviewing thatrequires the reviewer, however admirable the book, to find something, somewhere, that is wrong. There must be some display of critical judgment. I think Professor McJimsey, especially in the war years, spreads himself a bit thin over Hopkins's exceedingly diverse activities and does not sufficiently assess the depth and reality of his intervention and exercise of influence. In 1942, for example, he has him coordinating anti-inflation strategy. Doubtless he was concerned therewith, but as the person principally coordinated, I have no real recollection of being so moved. Elsewhere, also, there is not sufficient distinction between the matters Hopkins touched and those he truly changed.

However, as noted, this is in some measure aceremonial complaint. I endorse the jacket comment of Frank Freidel, which concludes by saying, "Overall, this is a splendid and important book.' I am not, I must confess, acquainted with the recent generation of White House operatives --Mr. Deaver, Mr. Regan, Admiral Poindexter, and the peripatetic Lt. Colonel North. I somehow doubt, however, that they will ever command quite such an excellent and generally admiring work.