Harry Hopkins

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (August 17 1890 – January 29 1946) was a close advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt and was frequently known as the Assistant President. The President referred to him as Harry the Hop. While working in the White House, Hopkins is not known to have recieved any pay or to have been a federal employee.

New Deal

Hopkins married as a young man a fellow welfare worker. They had three sons. In 1930 his wife filed suit against him for divorce in New York State, the charge being infidelity. She secured the divorce and an order for the payment of $5,000 a year in alimony. Hopkins was making $10,000 a year at the time. Shortly after the divorce, he took a second wife. He became WPA Administrator at a salary of $10,000 a year. Marquis W. Childs, in an article in the Saturday Evening Post of April 19 and 26, 1941, said Hopkins was hard pressed for funds under the circumstances and was having a difficult time meeting the alimony payments to his first wife. To cure this situation, social workers were brought together to raise a fund of $5,000 a year to take care of Hopkins' alimony. A number of small salaried little social welfare workers were assessed to pay Hopkins' obligation to support his children. In theory the money was collected to pay him for lectures. This arrangement went on for two years. Then in January, 1936, his salary was raised to $12,000 and the welfare workers were relieved of the burden of Hopkins' alimony.

Childs relates in the same article, that during those WPA days, Hopkins, who was so pressed for funds was, with the men around him, playing poker with losses so stiff they ran to $500 or $600 an evening and that he found the time and the means to spend weekends in the homes wealthy friends and to make frequent visits to the race tracks at Saratoga, Pimlico and Warrenton. Life magazine has printed much the same stories about him.

Mission to Moscow

During the war years, Hopkins acted as FDR's unofficial emissary to Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, and as administrator of Lend-Lease.

An April 14, 1941 Memorandum from the U.S. Military Attache (G-2) in Moscow, found in the Harry Hopkins Papers at the FDR Library, entitled NKVD of the USSR , it states in part,

“

Although the Soviets disclaim forced labor in this country, the organization of this commissariat is interesting to note. In it are the means to apprehend (militia), try and sentence (advisory council) and imprison offenders (corrective labor). Any governmental organization that has a crying need for labor simply calls upon the NKVD to supply it. If the amount of labor is insufficient to supply the need, it is relatively an easy matter to institute a reign of terror on any pretext and fill up labor colonies to meet requirements....Its close supervision over the people, its pogroms, its raids and arrests, has instilled fear...[1]...The NKVD has every individual under observation from birth to death...its secret agents are everywhere; its actions are swift. An individual simply disappears in the middle of the night and no one ever sees or hears of him again. ...When Stalin needs scapegoats to cover government mistakes he unleashes his NKVD...The Soviet Union is in itself a prison and the NKVD and State Security are its keepers. [2]

”

In July, 1941, Moscow learned of President Roosevelt's decision to send Hopkins to the Kremlin in order to negotiate Lend-Lease. For a number of days, no pertinent information from the Soviet Embassy in Washington was available. Consequently, the Kremlin readied for a stiff and prolonged bargaining session.

Vyacheslav M. Molotov was appointed chairman of a committee which was to determine in advance how far the U.S.S.R. might have to go in yielding to American demands. This included the right of Americans to inspection of lend-lease distribution on Russian soil, the admission of American military advisers into Soviet lines. The Soviet Union was willing to give concessions for mining manganese ore as well as special privileges in the Baku and Volga oil fields. The Soviet Union was even prepared to give a solemn pledge to maintain freedom of speech and freedom of religion.

Shortly before Hopkins arrival Molotov informed Mikoyan, Vassilensky, Trainin, and Bogolepov that "A man at the very highest level of the Roosevelt administration," notified the Soviet espionage officers "Mr. Hopkins will demand no concessions whatever. The sole wish of Mr. Hopkins," Molotov assured the tovarisches, "is to ask nothing and give everything. What he wants is to keep us in the fighting—and that is all. Mr. Hopkins is completely on our side and may be trusted absolutely." Hopkins said of Stalin, "It is ridiculous to think of Stalin as a Communist. He is a Russian nationalist."

Despite the protests of military officials, Hopkins demanded that the American government give the Soviet Union a large amount of uranium as part of the Lend-Lease program. On a diplomatic trip to the Soviet Union in 1945, he shunned the American position of free elections for Poland and told Stalin that America’s goal was actually to have a post-war Poland that the Soviet Union was comfortable with. Earlier, when a Soviet government official defected, Hopkins unsuccessfully urged Roosevelt to return the man to the USSR even though he knew that it would mean the man’s certain death.

Hopkins died January 29, 1946, succumbing to a long and debilitating battle with stomach cancer.

External links

• Harry Hopkins, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
• Interview with Ralph de Toladano
• [http://www.archives.gov/legislative/guide/senate/chapter-18-1921-1946.html#18D-8 Special Committee to Investigate Unemployment and Relief (June 10, 1937).