by Adam Cohen
The Wagner bill immediately drew Republican attacks. “It is socialism,” Representative Robert Luce of Massachusetts protested. “Whether it is communism or not I do not know.” Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio, whose unswerving loyalty to the Republican Party earned him the nickname “Faithful Fess,” complained that “Uncle Sam is looked upon as a Santa Claus to give alms.” The critics, however, were heavily outnumbered. The Senate and House passed the bill by lopsided margins, and Roosevelt signed it into law on May 12, the same day he signed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. The relief law, the fifth of the fifteen major laws that would be passed during the Hundred Days, marked the first time the federal government gave funds to the states to fund relief programs. The $500 million appropriation was a substantial infusion of money, but Roosevelt recognized that it was just a small fraction of what was needed. When he signed the bill, he made clear that he expected the states and localities to put in significant amounts of their own money as well.7
There was still the question of who should run the new relief program. When Perkins told Roosevelt that Hopkins and Hodson hoped he would choose one of them, Roosevelt asked for her recommendation. Perkins considered both men “extraordinary,” but she thought they had different strengths. Hodson, a Harvard Law School graduate who was New York City commissioner of public welfare, was the “smoother operator,” she told Roosevelt. Hopkins, who had engaged in social work projects from the streets of the Lower East Side to flood-ravaged New Orleans, was the “more dynamic person.” Even though Hopkins had run his New York emergency relief program, Roosevelt did not know him well. A major factor in his decision was that the mayor of New York did not want to give Hodson up. Roosevelt sent a telegram to Governor Herbert Lehman saying he wanted to bring Hopkins, who was still running the state relief program, to Washington. Roosevelt said it was “imperative that I get a man on the job immediately,” but he suggested that the appointment would only be temporary. On May 19, a week after the Federal Emergency Relief Act became law, Hopkins was preparing to move to Washington. “It was as simple as that,” Perkins recalled, “the beginning of the Hopkins rise.”8
Harry Lloyd Hopkins was born August 17, 1890, in Sioux City, Iowa. Hopkins’s paternal grandfather had left Maine as a young man to fight in the Civil War. At the war’s end, he settled in Iowa with his wife and a young son, who grew up to be Hopkins’s father. David Aldona Hopkins, who went by “Al,” was an adventurous spirit. As a young man, he had joined an expedition into the Black Hills, which was Sioux territory, in search of gold. When the expedition failed, Al settled into the life of a small-town businessman. Hopkins’s mother, Anna, was the daughter of Canadian homesteaders. She had worked briefly as a schoolteacher, but after marrying she quit her job and gave birth to six children in quick succession: Adah, Lewis, Rome, Etta (who died in infancy), Harry, and John.9
Hopkins’s parents were opposites. Al was unfocused, particularly about work. He drifted from making harnesses to selling them, and then to running a sundries shop, struggling all the way. Al spent much of his time on fraternal organizations and bowling, which he liked to gamble on. Anna Hopkins was as quiet as her husband was gregarious, and as driven as he was easily distracted. She took her children to church as often as six days a week, and taught them hymns around the family pump organ. While Al bowled, Anna gave her time to the Methodist Home Missionary Society of Iowa, of which she would eventually become president, and impressed on her children the importance of good works. For Anna Hopkins, “service to others was the most important way to manifest one’s religious feelings,” her great-granddaughter, June Hopkins, has written. As a child, Hopkins navigated between these two strong personalities. One night, his father showed him $500 that he had just won bowling. “I wasn’t supposed to tell my mother there was that amount of money in the house,” Hopkins recalled, because “she would have made Dad give it away to church missions.”10
The family moved often—across Iowa, Nebraska, and Illinois—as Al searched for business success. When Harry was eleven, Anna steered the family to Grinnell, Iowa, to expose her children to two things she valued highly—education and religion. Grinnell was home to Grinnell College, a progressive institution built on land donated by the abolitionist minister Josiah Bushnell Grinnell. Grinnell attracted, as the college bulletin noted, “cultivated and intelligent people,” making it a sophisticated outpost on the Iowa prairie. At the same time, Grinnell had been founded as a temperance community, and the religious influence of the New England Congregationalists who founded the town remained strong.11
These were the disparate influences that shaped young Harry Hopkins. He would be, a family friend observed, a great case study for anyone interested in genetics. From his mother he got his industriousness, his moral compass, and his drive to reform the world. His father gave him his gregariousness, his love of adventure, and his charitable attitude toward people in difficult circumstances. Joseph E. Davies, who served with him in the Roosevelt administration, declared that the adult Hopkins had “the purity of St. Francis of Assisi combined with the sharp shrewdness of a race track tout.”12
Hopkins enrolled at Grinnell College in 1908. More than a decade before he arrived, the Social Gospel movement—with its emphasis on establishing the kingdom of God on earth by pursuing justice and social reform—had taken hold at Grinnell. The passion for the Social Gospel had died down, but it could still be felt throughout the college. The curriculum included a political science course in which students were sent into town to study local government, and a course on the settlement house movement. In attending Grinnell, Hopkins was following in the footsteps of his sister Adah, who had been a leading member of her own class. Adah had taken several courses with Edward Steiner, the Applied Christianity teacher who lectured about settlement houses, and in her junior year she had delivered a fiery speech against child labor. After being named outstanding senior at commencement, Adah went to work with the poor in Philadelphia and then New York, where she would once again pave the way for her younger brother.13
Hopkins was a prominent figure on campus. He played on several sports teams, was elected senior class president, and formed a Democratic club. Hopkins absorbed Grinnell’s social justice ethic, taking courses like Professor Steiner’s “The Development of Social Consciousness in the Old Testament.” In the spring of his senior year, he discussed his future with Louis Hartson, a professor with whom he had studied social reform. Hopkins was considering writing for a newspaper in Bozeman, Montana, but Hartson had heard from a friend back East that Christodora House, a settlement house on New York’s Lower East Side, was looking for a counselor for its summer camp. New York City appealed to the adventurous spirit Hopkins had inherited from his father, and the city’s vast immigrant neighborhoods were an ideal setting for the good works his mother expected him to engage in. When Hartson offered to give Christodora House his name, Hopkins accepted enthusiastically.14
After graduation, Hopkins traveled to New York with Hartson. They stopped in Chicago and Hopkins attended the Republican National Convention, talking his way onto the floor by claiming to be New York senator Elihu Root’s secretary. He watched as Theodore Roosevelt made his historic break with the Republican Party, on his way to becoming the Progressive Party candidate for president. Hopkins and Hartson also made a detour to Baltimore, where Woodrow Wilson won the Democratic nomination. When his travels were over, Hopkins reported to Christodora House’s summer camp in New Jersey. The experience was eye opening. Most of the boys at Northover Camp lived in tenements near Tompkins Square Park, the neighborhood around Christodora House. Hopkins had never encountered children like these, who had been brought up in rough urban poverty. He had also never seen a Jewish boy before. Northover was Hopkins’s introduction to the settlement house ethos. “It is not a ‘fresh air’ or ‘health’ camp,” the staff was told. “It strives to give each camper a proper experience through a well-balanced program, in living as an individual in a democratic community.”15
When the summer ended, Hopkins moved into Christodora House to help run the boys’ clubs. The settlement house was founded in 1897 by Christina MacColl and Sara Libby Carson, who met while working for the Young Women’s Christian Association. They established Christodora House, whose name is Greek for “gift of Christ,” to answer what MacColl called a “sob of the spirit.” The two women had been looking for the neighborhood most in need of a settlement house, but the one they chose was difficult terrain. The Lower East Side had the densest population of any neighborhood in the United States, and among the highest percentages of foreign-born residents. Adding to the challenge, the vast majority were Jews, who would resist MacColl and Carson’s Christian message. The women’s goal was to run a “social center” that was “educationally effective,” “tolerant,” and “non-sectarian.” They did, however, try to win people over to Christianity, something not all settlement house workers did, and they were pleased when they could claim a convert.16
Christodora House preached optimism, and emphasized poor people’s ability to rise above their grim surroundings. Its official song implored participants:
Look forward! move onward! the new work to do
Will strengthen our sinews, create life anew!
The splendor that beckons is life—it is youth
The sweetness of hope and the freshness of truth.
Newly arrived Eastern European immigrants eagerly signed up for English classes and courses to prepare for civil service examinations. There were lectures on current events and debates on subjects like “Resolved, that reading of history is more instructive than reading of novels.” Christodora’s clientele “entered college as soon as they entered the door of the House,” a history of the settlement house reported, “and when they left it they carried the college home.” There were clubs for all ages and both sexes, as well as “entertainments, musicals and social gatherings.”17
Hopkins had landed as far from Grinnell as any place in America. The gangly Iowan, a country boy with a cowlick, now lived in a neighborhood crowded with immigrant hordes, where the storefront signs were in Yiddish. The newsstands sold The Jewish Daily Forward, the Yiddish-language democratic socialist daily. The streets were jammed with peddlers selling fruits, vegetables, eggs, and kitchen utensils from pushcarts. The cafés rang with heated political conversations. It was a colorful world, but an oppressive one. The tenements were grossly overcrowded—less than one-quarter of families slept two to a room; half had three or four people in each room; almost one-quarter had five or more. The air, which barely circulated, was full of tuberculosis. One Lower East Side history noted “the assault of the smells: the odors of human waste only intermittently carried away from back-yard privies by a careless sanitation department, the stench of fish and meat starting to rot on pushcarts, the foulness of neglected sewers and gutters.” Hopkins decided to stay.18
The twenty-two-year-old Hopkins found himself at the center of life in Christodora House. He presided over the Club Council, which planned social events and attended to the physical plant. He was also editor-in-chief of the in-house journal, which printed such locally important news reports as “Loyalty Dance a Great Success.” In his free time, Hopkins wandered the gritty streets of the neighborhood and witnessed firsthand its foreign cultures, crushing poverty, and criminality. He watched bottle fights and kicked gangsters out of settlement house dances. He also got his first introduction to radical politics, something the Lower East Side had in great supply. “I climbed tenement stairs, listened to the talk of Morris Hillquit and William English Walling”—two renowned socialist politicians—“and really got exposed to the whole business of how the working class lived,” he recalled.19
Hopkins’s guide for much of this journey was Ethel Gross, a young secretary who worked alongside him. Gross had been born to a Jewish family outside Budapest, where her father’s family owned a glass factory. When he died of tuberculosis, her mother sailed for America with her five children. Gross grew up in a tenement and left school after eighth grade. While many of the young women around her led lives centered on family and synagogue, Gross was what Hutchins Hapgood, a Yankee journalist who published a study of the Lower East Side in 1902, called “The Modern Type”—emancipated and career-oriented. She grew up blocks from Christodora House, where she began working at age twelve, helping to run children’s programs. After taking lessons in secretarial skills, Gross became secretary to a wealthy woman who had founded the Equal Franchise Association to campaign among the upper classes for women’s suffrage. When she returned to Christodora House, Gross was far more knowledgeable about the world.20
Hopkins was immediately attracted to the pretty, dark-haired Gross. “I’m so happy Ethel,” Hopkins wrote her shortly after they met, “for I always felt there must be some girl like you on this earth somewhere but I must confess that I didn’t expect to find her working in a Settlement.” Gross admired Hopkins’s idealism, and she was taken by his Iowa farm-boy manner, which made him a living piece of the America she yearned to assimilate into. She was also charmed by his happy-go-lucky ways, a rare thing in the ghetto. “He was gay,” she said, “and he used to go every place singing and whistling.” When Hopkins proposed marriage, Gross was taken by surprise. “At the settlement at that time there were all these young college people who had all of these advantages, who had come from beautiful homes and were giving their time,” she said. “I had him all paired off, first with one and then another and they all liked him, at least so it seemed to me.”21
The couple married on October 21, 1913, at the Ethical Culture Society. Hopkins had left his mother’s intense Methodism behind. He had come to believe, Gross said, that “service to other was the most important way to manifest religion.” It was in many ways a shocking marriage, and one that upset Hopkins’s parents greatly. Ethel was foreign-born, working-class, poorly educated, and perhaps most disturbing of all to them, she was Jewish. As unhappy as his mother was, Hopkins assured Gross that his father was no less disappointed. “Ye Gods—it is lucky that he hasn’t any money for he certainly would leave me out,” he wrote to her. Hopkins was proud, however, of the new and very modern life he was making for himself.22
To bring in more money, Hopkins began working nights for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor, a seventy-year-old charity that was one of the nation’s largest. Like the settlement house movement, AICP aimed not only to offer aid to the poor, but to transform their lives. Its declared purpose was “to relieve none . . . whom we cannot elevate.” AICP’s director, Dr. John A. Kingsbury, hired Hopkins to do work along the water-front, an even rougher area than the Lower East Side. The extra $60 a month that Hopkins earned came in handy after Ethel gave birth, in October 1914, to their first son, David, named for Hopkins’s father. The job took Hopkins beyond the narrow world of Christodora House, and brought him under the guidance of one of the most important men in the social welfare field. Hopkins grew extremely close to Kingsbury and his wife. He moved his family to the same suburb the Kingsburys lived in, and got a summer home near their Woodstock, New York, retreat. He took on his mentor’s pastimes, including joining him on weekend mushroom collecting outings.2324
Kingsbury soon gave Hopkins a full-time job running AICP’s employment bureau. In these years just before the World War, New York State’s unemployment rate was above 16 percent, and the jobless were becoming more desperate by the day. Mobs had begun marching for relief, and showing up at churches demanding aid. In late 1913, Hopkins undertook a major study of the unemployment problem. His report—which was impressive for a twenty-three-year-old newly arrived in the city and inexperienced in social science research—challenged the widespread belief that, as he put it, “the men who can’t find work are drunkards and vagrants or else downright lazy.” Hopkins found that the vast majority of the unemployed were victims of a rapid influx of unskilled workers into the city. He recommended that the government create employment offices to help the jobless fin
d work. Later, working with the head of AICP’s family welfare division, Hopkins put together one of the city’s first work relief programs. Using private funds, AICP paid one hundred men two dollars a day to work three days a week on a construction project at the Bronx Zoo. With the limited resources at his disposal, it was the best Hopkins could do, but the AICP initiative was a forerunner of the more elaborate programs he would create during the New Deal.
In the fall of 1915, John Purroy Mitchel, the reform mayor who hired Frances Perkins’s husband as his budget director, created a Board of Child Welfare to help poor mothers and children. With the backing of Kingsbury, who had become Mitchel’s commissioner of public charities, Hopkins was named executive secretary. At age twenty-five, Hopkins controlled a sizable budget and had the power of the government behind him. Hopkins got money out to eligible mothers quickly and, in keeping with the social work precepts of the day, his staff helped them decide where to live, what schools to send their children to, and how to spend their money. Hopkins ran weekly meetings at which he helped his caseworkers analyze their cases, and lobbied for legislation to help the groups he served. His performance was widely praised. The New York Herald reported that “the mere mention of his name appears to exert a magic influence on the widowed mothers.” Despite his success, Hopkins’s tenure was brief. He clashed with his bosses and grew frustrated by how limited his resources were compared to the number of mothers and children who needed help. When Mayor Mitchel lost in 1917, Hopkins moved on.25