Harry Hopkins

Part of a series of engagement posts I wrote for the Warren campaign on the All In platform.

Lately there's been so much in the news regarding people who are "products of their time," or worse, just plain monsters, that I thought it would be nice to talk about someone who was simply and unequivocally good.

Harry Hopkins had run a relief program for Governor Roosevelt, so when FDR became President, he knew exactly who to appoint to set up and run relief nationwide. Hopkins was given carte blanche to set it up and run it. As the relief project got bigger and bigger, it assumed new names. First came the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which gave money to local governments to put people to work. The next was a direct federal program called the Civil Works Administration, which morphed into the Works Progress Administration, and over seven years employed eight and a half million people working on one and a half million projects. It was the first relief program in US history to focus on putting people to work, rather than giving them cash. It's important to note, however, that this wasn't out of some ever-suspicious Reaganite view of people as deadbeats, but rather the simple and generous notion that people feel better when they're useful. While there was segregation, especially in the south, Hopkins, with help from Eleanor Roosevelt, made sure that African-Americans and Native Americans participated roughly along the lines of their share of the population at large. In 1941, the NAACP said, "It is to the eternal credit of the administrative officers of the WPA that discrimination on various projects because of race has been kept to a minimum and that in almost every community Negroes have been given a chance to participate in the work program. In the South, as might have been expected, this participation has been limited, and differential wages on the basis of race have been more or less effectively established; but in the northern communities, particularly in the urban centers, the Negro has been afforded his first real opportunity for employment in white-collar occupations."

As I mentioned in another post, one of the main divisions of the WPA, Federal Project Number One, was dedicated to artists and writers working as artists and writers, while contributing to the public good. As Hopkins himself put it, "Hell, they've got to eat, too."

From 1938 to 1940, Hopkins served as Commerce Secretary. After that, he administered the Lend-Lease program, and became FDR's main emissary to Britain and the Soviet Union. He was so indispensable that after one late meeting at the White House in 1940, he spent the night and didn't leave for three and a half years. He did all this until the very end of the war, despite having been given four weeks to live in 1939 due to stomach cancer.

In subsequent posts, I want to discuss the constituent projects of Federal Project Number One. I want to contemplate the sheer breadth of the project and the disciplines it encompassed. I'd like to examine the feasibility of such a thing in the 21st century, the nature of art and commerce, whether the state should have any role in the production of art, and other topics that might arise. I want to talk about how the WPA helped paved the way towards a postwar aesthetic that could be called distinctly American in painting, music, and literature; its role in abstract expressionism, American 20th century "classical" music, the evolution of jazz, and possibly even the birth of rock and roll.

But today, I just want us to remember Harry Hopkins. :-)