Harry Hopkins

Harry Hopkins and Josef Stalin.

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, how he received compensation is something of a mystery.

Personal life

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.

According to Mr. Felix Belair in an article in Life, Postmaster General Walker, John D. Hertz, and other millionaire friends, raised a purse to pay Hopkins $5,000 a year as head of Franklin D. Roosevelt's library at Hyde Park. When the Lend Lease act was voted the President arranged a $10,000 a year salary for Hopkins under the Lend Lease program. During this period Tom Beck, the head of the CrowellCollier Publishing Company, began paying him $5,000 a piece for seven or eight articles in the American Magazine over a period of several years for articles written in Hopkins name. In the meantime, he had moved into the White House where he enjoyed the additional privilege of free board and lodging. His second wife had died and his daughter by this marriage lived with him in the White House. When Hopkins and his third wife later moved to Georgetown, his daughter, after remaining with them a while, went back to the White House. Mrs. Roosevelt writes how she fretted about the lonely life of this child and spoke to Hopkins about it. He said to her: "That's totally unimportant. The only thing that is important is to win the war." He found plenty of time, however, to pursue at intervals his favorite forms of diversions in the night clubs of New York and Washington.

New Deal

When Roosevelt became President and wanted a Federal Emergency Relief Administrator he named Harry Hopkins to this post at Mrs. Roosevelt's urging. Hopkins convinced the President on the idea of a relief program by means of grants-in-aid to the states. The National Recovery Act (NRA) had given Roosevelt $3,300,000,000 to spend. As soon as Roosevelt got hold of this $3,300,000,000, congressmen, senators, mayors, governors, chambers of commerce, charity organizations from every state and city began requesting money. Roosevelt thought the NRA was going to bring prosperity quickly, but at the end of July he put Hopkins in charge of the Civil Works Administration (CWA). In short order Harry had a vast army pulling weeds and raking leaves. He told the President: "I've got four million at work but for God's sake, don't ask me what they are doing."

The CWA developed a reputation very quickly as a leaf raking agency and so it was reorganized into the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Hopkins estimated that 25 million people got their living from Works Progress Administration alone. Roosevelt biographer John Flynn observed, " It became a part of Mr. Hopkins' WPA organization to learn how many of the down-and-­out had enough devotion to Franklin D. Roosevelt to be entitled to eat." Hopkins' performances in WPA became such that he had to leave that position after the 1938 elections were over and was appointed Secretary of Commerce. Significantly, one old associate who moved with Hopkins into his new world was David K. Niles who had been his chief political adviser and campaign strategist. A little more than a year and a half later Hopkins moved to the White House as a close presidential confidant, adviser and resident, paid a salary that was never authorized by Congress.

Hopkins' depended conspicuously on men such as Leon Henderson, Director of Price Administration and Civilian Supply, and Sidney Hillman.

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 Attaché (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.

Roosevelt biographer John T. Flynn remarked of Hopkins, "Men of high intellectual and spiritual caliber soon make themselves disagreeable to rulers who want abject subservience in their subalterns. They soon find the atmosphere of the court repulsive. They either depart or are dismissed. In the end, the only ones who remain are men of the type of Hopkins. ...one by one the abler men with some sense of personal dignity who were unequal to the role of sycophant drifted away ...The palace guard that survived were such men as Harry Hopkins... David Niles and Henry Wallace... men who were not interested in policy but only in discerning Roosevelt's pet mental drifts."

Zamestitel

Recent scholarship has concluded that Venona project codename Zamestitel (English translation, "Deputy"), is Harry Hopkins. Eduard Mark, historian at the United States Air Force Academy, builds a case that if Zamestitel is Henry Wallace, as some have hypothesized, than agent 19 at the Trident conference is Hopkins. Mark argues on the basis of a close reading of the attendance records of the Trident conference and other evidence that he located that the most likely Deputy (Zamestitel) was Wallace and Source no. 19 was Hopkins. Source no. 19 was very highly placed in as much as he was asked to join a private conversation with President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. Source no. 19 reported on a private conversation he had with Roosevelt and Churchill during the just ended 'Trident' conference of the two Allied powers in Washington. Source no. 19 reported on Churchill's views on why a 1943 Anglo-American invasion of continental Europe was inadvisable. The message also reported that Zamestitel supported a second-front and that it appeared that Roosevelt had been keeping Zamestitel in the dark about "important military decisions." The message, from the New York KGB office to Moscow, is signed by the KGB illegal officer, Iskhak Akhmerov. It states "19 reports that Kapitan [Roosevelt] and Kaban [Churchill], during conversations in the Country [USA], invited 19 to join them and Zamestitel."

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

External links

• Harry Hopkins, The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers
• Special Committee to Investigate Unemployment and Relief (June 10, 1937).