Harry Lloyd Hopkins was a social worker from Sioux City, Iowa, with a chain-smoker’s cough, a taste for racetracks, and no discernible interest in the dignity of office. He was also, between 1933 and 1938, the man who put more Americans to work than anyone else in the history of the republic.
He came to Washington in May 1933 to run the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Within two hours of being sworn in he had set up a desk in a hallway, because his office was not yet ready, and had begun spending money. He disbursed five million dollars that afternoon. Asked by a reporter whether the projects he was funding would work out in the long run, he gave the answer that has followed him ever since.
“People don’t eat in the long run. They eat every day.”— Harry Hopkins, 1933
The Civil Works Administration
The Civil Works Administration was Hopkins’s most extraordinary improvisation. Created in November 1933 as winter approached and the relief rolls were overwhelmed, it was designed to do one thing very fast: put four million unemployed people onto a federal payroll before the cold arrived.
It did. Within thirty days the CWA had hired four million workers. Within its four and a half months of existence it built or repaired 44,000 miles of road, 1,000 airports, 4,000 schools, and 3,700 playgrounds. It employed 50,000 teachers to keep rural schools open. It cost roughly a billion dollars and was wound up in the spring, over Hopkins’s objection, because Roosevelt feared a permanent dependency on federal work.
Work Relief, Not a Dole
Hopkins fought consistently against direct cash relief in favour of paid work, on the grounds that a wage preserved something a handout destroyed. “Give a man a dole,” he said, “and you save his body and destroy his spirit. Give him a job and you save both.” It was more expensive and administratively far harder. He judged it worth the difference, and the WPA was built on that judgement.
The WPA
The Works Progress Administration, which Hopkins ran from 1935, was the largest employer in the United States. Over its eight years it employed 8.5 million people and spent roughly eleven billion dollars. It built 650,000 miles of road, 125,000 public buildings, 8,000 parks, and 800 airports.
It also, at Hopkins’s insistence and against considerable congressional hostility, employed artists. Federal Project Number One put writers, painters, musicians, and actors on the payroll on the same principle as bricklayers: they were unemployed, they had a skill, and the country could use the output. The Federal Writers’ Project produced the state guidebooks that remain the best portrait of America in the 1930s. The Federal Art Project put murals in post offices in towns that had never had a public artwork. The Federal Theatre Project brought live drama to audiences who had never seen any.
Congress hated it and eventually killed the Theatre Project outright for suspected radicalism. Hopkins’s defence was characteristically unsentimental: “Hell, they’ve got to eat just like other people.”
The Second Career
Hopkins’s health, never good, collapsed in 1937 with stomach cancer and the removal of most of his stomach. He was told he had weeks to live. He lived another eight years, in a state of more or less permanent physical crisis, and spent them as Roosevelt’s closest personal adviser and wartime envoy.
He lived in the White House. He flew to London in January 1941 to assess whether Britain would survive, and his judgement — that it would, and should be supported — shaped Lend-Lease. He went to Moscow to meet Stalin. Churchill, who did not distribute praise casually, called him “Lord Root of the Matter” for his capacity to cut through a briefing to the single question that mattered.
Hopkins in the Film
Hopkins is the film’s answer to the charge that the New Deal was all theory. He appears in shirtsleeves, coughing, signing authorisations, arguing with accountants, and refusing on principle to visit a project he has funded because he does not want to be photographed at it.
His scenes are deliberately unlovely. The camera is handheld for the only time in the picture. The film wants the audience to feel the difference between a policy being decided and a policy being executed by a sick man at a desk against a deadline.