by Adam Cohen
With the United States entering the World War, Hopkins applied to work for the Red Cross’s Division of Civilian Relief, which gave aid to the families left behind by the men serving overseas. He ended up being put in charge of disaster relief for the gulf division, based in New Orleans. The division, which covered Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, helped victims of crises in the area, including a major flooding of Lake Charles. “Thousands homeless,” Hopkins informed Ethel by telegram. “Am in charge of all relief work.” The Hopkins family moved to New Orleans, though Ethel and David spent the summer in Far Rockaway, New York, with her family to escape the southern heat. While they lived apart, Ethel began to have doubts about her husband’s faithfulness. She would later say that unlike the “social workers in the North who were trained and were very serious minded,” the women Hopkins worked with in the South were often “just beautiful southern girls” eager to help in the war effort, and she understood that several were in love with her husband. During this time, she gave birth to a daughter, who died in infancy of whooping cough, and the following year, 1921, to a second son, Robert.26
When the war ended, Hopkins was put in charge of the Red Cross’s Atlanta-based southern division, running operations in nine states. Without the sense of mission that the war provided, however, he enjoyed the work less, and in 1922 he returned to New York. After taking on a few other social work jobs, in 1924, with the help of his old mentor Kingsbury, Hopkins was named executive director of the New York Tuberculosis Association. The “white plague” was the scourge of the city’s immigrant neighborhoods. The situation had improved since the turn of the century, when one in four deaths of New Yorkers between fifteen and sixty-five were from tuberculosis, but the disease still claimed the lives of thousands of New Yorkers every year. Hopkins fought for better medical care and healthier living conditions. “He never failed to point out,” Frances Perkins recalled, “that poor people could not get the milk, eggs, fresh air [and] sunshine” they needed. Hopkins, whose work for the disadvantaged had always been combined with personal ambition, pushed the Tuberculosis Association to take on new diseases. Under his leadership, it absorbed the New York Heart Committee and renamed itself the New York Tuberculosis and Health Association. The association also entered an alliance with the Children’s Welfare Federation, extending its reach still further. Hopkins, who was now in his thirties, exhibited the personality traits that he would carry with him for the rest of his career. He was hard driving and “intense,” Dr. Jacob Goldberg, secretary of the Tuberculosis Association, recalled, and he seemed “to be in a permanent nervous ferment—a chain smoker, and black coffee drinker.” Hopkins showed up at work in clothing that was in disarray, and often shaved at the office. His focus was on his work. 27
The October 1929 stock market crash sent shock waves throughout the city, including the charitable community. The ranks of the unemployed were growing rapidly, and the federal and state governments were doing little to provide them relief. A former colleague of Hopkins’s from AICP, William Matthews, obtained a $75,000 grant from the Red Cross to help the city’s unemployed. Matthews, Hopkins, and Dr. Goldberg used the money to develop a public works program that put jobless men to work keeping up the city parks. Hopkins worked on it every night after he was done at the Tuberculosis Association, helping to match unemployed people with work assignments. When the initial $75,000 ran out, the men raised more money. Well-meaning as the effort was, it could help only a very small fraction of New Yorkers in desperate need of work.28
While the economy was in turmoil, Hopkins’s private life was also in crisis. His marriage, which had produced three sons—David, Robert, and Stephen, who had been born in 1925—was unraveling. Hopkins had begun an affair with Barbara Duncan, a secretary at the Tuberculosis Association, who was a decade his junior. Hopkins began psychoanalysis in an attempt to work out his difficulties, and went to Paris with Kingsbury to study social work, hoping the break might help him to save his marriage. The Hopkinses divorced, however, in May 1931. A month later, Hopkins and Duncan were married.29
Hopkins’s life was set on a new course in August 1931, when Governor Roosevelt spoke to a special session of the New York legislature. After making his famous “What is the State?” speech, in which he declared that it was the state’s duty to care for those who could not care for themselves, Roosevelt created the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration, with a budget of $20 million to be spent on relief and public works. He appointed his friend and political supporter R. H. Macy & Co. president Jesse Isador Straus to head the three-member board. When the board failed to get its first choice, New York City Welfare Council director William Hodson—who would later become Hopkins’s partner in developing a federal relief plan—it hired Hopkins to be its executive director. Hopkins began work on October 8, 1931.30
As director of the TERA, the forty-one-year-old Hopkins faced the greatest challenge of his professional life. The Depression was causing human suffering on an unprecedented scale from one end of the state to the other. According to the New York State Department of Labor, there were 750,000 unemployed people in New York City alone, and many were facing homelessness and malnutrition. Lines outside of soup kitchens stretched for blocks. Hodson warned Congress that “the specter of starvation faces millions who never were out of work before.” In an eight-month period in 1932, 185,794 families received eviction notices. It was common to see evicted families sitting on the sidewalk surrounded by their furniture. Hopkins tried to move the $20 million out to those in need as quickly as possible. Within three months, the TERA was providing relief to almost 10 percent of all New Yorkers. Hopkins tried to spend the money in innovative ways. One TERA-FUNDED program hired unemployed garment workers to make overcoats for poor children. Hopkins also lobbied in favor of relief, urging local officials to keep up their own spending. “The desire to cut down expenses cannot be matched against the tragic hunger and distress” of the state’s citizens, he told a conference of mayors. “There is no question of taxes versus life.” In March 1932, Straus resigned to devote more of his time to Macy’s. Roosevelt appointed Hopkins to take his position as head of the TERA, and extracted another $5 million in relief funds from the legislature.31
The economy continued to spiral downward. Hoovervilles were springing up, including in Manhattan, where there were now large encampments of the unemployed along the Hudson and East rivers, and in Central Park. The Hooverville on the East River at Tenth Street had about one hundred “dwellings, each the size of a doghouse or chicken coop, often constructed with much ingenuity out of wooden boxes, metal cans, strips of cardboard or old tar paper,” journalist Matthew Josephson observed. The occupants “lived on the margin of civilization by foraging for garbage, junk, and waste lumber.” Twenty percent of the city’s schoolchildren were found to be malnourished. Health authorities warned that rickets, scurvy, anemia, and other diseases were likely to follow. “The situation here is very bad,” Hopkins wrote his brother Lewis in the fall. “[I]n spite of the ‘pollyannish’ announcements that are coming from Washington,” he said, “there is a steady decline in employment and an increase in the number of those in need of relief.” Hopkins believed more money was needed, and the voters agreed. On November 8, 1932, the same day Roosevelt was elected president, New Yorkers voted in favor of a bond issue giving Hopkins another $30 million to disburse.32
Hopkins had come to see the TERA not as a temporary state initiative, but as a new model for government-run relief that should be taken to the national level. In January 1933, he had the chance to make the case to Congress. In an effort to build support for federal relief legislation, Senator La Follette was holding hearings at which social workers and others with direct knowledge of the unemployment crisis were invited to testify. Hopkins talked about how dire conditions were even in New York, the first state with a substantial relief program. He predicted that 10 percent of the nation, or three million families, would require relief in 1933, at a cost of over $1 billio
n. The only place that money could come from, he said, was the federal government. Hopkins laid the groundwork for the Federal Emergency Relief Act that Congress would soon pass. He urged that federal funds be given in grants not loans, so states that needed money the most would get it. He also argued for a truly federal program, not just a mechanism for distributing money to the states.33
When Roosevelt chose people for his administration, he did not seriously consider Hopkins. Although he had performed well at the TERA and had done his part for Roosevelt’s campaign, organizing a campaign committee of social workers, Hopkins was just one of thousands in the Roosevelt orbit. He had not been part of the Brain Trust or the campaign apparatus, and he lacked close connections to Roosevelt or his inner circle. Hopkins accepted Governor Herbert Lehman’s invitation to continue heading up the TERA, but he could not resist the pull to be part of the new administration forming in Washington. “Particularly in the weeks following the Inauguration, when the New Deal was bursting out in a series of bewildering pyrotechnical explosions, he felt that he must be part of this historic show,” Hopkins’s biographer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Sherwood, observed. This was when Hopkins and his friend William Hodson developed a plan for federal relief and presented it to Perkins. After Roosevelt accepted the plan, Hopkins began working with Wagner on drafting the Federal Emergency Relief Act. When the law passed, and Roosevelt offered him the administrator’s job, Hopkins had his ticket to the historic show.34
CHAPTER NINE
“People Don’t Eat in the Long Run—They Eat Every Day”
On Sunday, May 21, after accepting the position of federal relief administrator, Hopkins took the train down to Washington. Hopkins’s appointment was widely praised when it was announced. Progressives were impressed by Hopkins’s relief experience, and by his background in the settlement house and social work movements. The centrist New York Times was pleased that Roosevelt had not chosen one of the Brain Trust professors he was so enamored of and had instead named a “practical man.” Hopkins arrived in Washington with as much knowledge as anyone in the nation about how to administer relief. He also brought with him a philosophy that Roosevelt’s personal secretary, Grace Tully, described as “a profound distaste for a laissez-faire system that reduced men of intelligence and virtue to selling apples while others took to their ermine-lined economic storm cellars.” On Monday morning, Hopkins was sworn in. He spoke briefly with Roosevelt, who offered him two guiding principles: distribute adequate relief to those in need, and do not worry about the politics. On day 79 of the Hundred Days, Hopkins went to work.1
Hopkins faced a relief crisis that was breathtaking in scope. Since 1929, national income had fallen by more than 50 percent. On May 1, the Commerce Department had reported that unemployment had reached an “all-time peak.” As many as 16 million people were jobless, representing about one-quarter of the workforce, and each unemployed worker had an average of three dependents relying on him for support. Even in New York, conditions were bleak. The week Hopkins left for Washington, a committee of clergymen and social workers held hearings that called attention to the inadequacy of the state’s cutting-edge relief program. Joseph Felbinger, a seventy-one-year-old jeweler laid off from Tiffany & Co., testified that he and his disabled wife received $7 in food aid every two weeks but nothing for rent, and he worried that if they were evicted it would kill his wife. Charles Holden, an unemployed black man from Harlem, told the hearing tearfully that he could not afford to feed his five children, including three-month-old twins, and his utilities had been shut off. Reports from the rest of the country were even more desperate. “We have unemployment in every third house,” J. Prentice Murphy of the Children’s Bureau of Philadelphia reported. “It is almost like a visitation of death to the households of the Egyptians at the time of the escape of the Jews from Egypt.” In many places, local resources were completely exhausted. Detroit had been paying out a woeful 15 cents per person a day until it ran out of money. In Chicago, teachers who had gone for months without paychecks were drawing on their own meager resources to feed eleven thousand students who had no other source of food.2
After his meeting with Roosevelt, Hopkins rushed to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration’s headquarters in the Walker-Johnson Building, a run-down yellow-brick building on New York Avenue. The FERA was moving into offices that had been occupied by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation’s unemployment relief office, and boxes filled with outgoing employees’ belongings were everywhere. When the wiry, chain-smoking Hopkins showed up he was, as one observer noted, a “slender bundle of ideas and nervous energy.” His desk was still in a hallway, but he simply sat down at it and got to work. Hopkins treated the applications that states had submitted to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation as FERA applications, which allowed him to start handing out money right away. He sent $2,500,000 to Illinois, $1,630,540 to Michigan, $611,865 to Texas, and more money to Ohio, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, and Mississippi. “The money will be made available immediately,” Hopkins promised Governor Miriam A. “Ma” Ferguson of Texas in a telegram. In his first two hours, Hopkins dispensed more than $5 million to eight states that had run out of money and were on the brink of shutting down their relief programs. Hopkins’s pace astonished a nation used to the Hoover administration’s dilatory ways. In a story headlined “Money Flies,” The Washington Post reported that “the half-billion dollars for direct relief of States won’t last a month if Harry L. Hopkins, new relief administrator, maintains the pace he set yesterday.” Hopkins kept the money coming. On June 3, he handed out another $2,747,426 to five states and the District of Columbia.3
Hopkins quickly became a national ambassador for an expansive federal relief program. He traveled extensively, speaking out about the importance of helping victims of the economic crisis. Despite his message of compassion, Hopkins did not come across as a typical do-gooder social worker. A Chicago Daily News columnist noted, with admiration, that Hopkins defended his mission to a parade of reporters in language that was “forceful, salted with slang and masculinity.” Journalist Ernest K. Lindley concurred, noting that Hopkins had the virtue of being “direct,” and that “when he means ‘lousy,’ he says ‘lousy.’ ” Hopkins was an advocate not only for relief, but for the people who relied on it. Drawing on his own years of experience working with the poor, he tried to dispel stereotypes about what sort of people accepted government aid. “Are they hobos?” he asked a conference of mayors. “Are they unemployables? Are they a bunch of people who are no good and who are incompetent?” They were not, Hopkins insisted. “Take a look at them if you have not and see who they are . . . carpenters, bricklayers, artisans, architects, engineers, clerks, stenographers, doctors, dentists, ministers,” he said. “I think there are the best people in the United States on these relief rolls.”4
Critics were quick to attack the FERA as a waste of taxpayers’ money, and a gravy train for the shiftless and the lazy. Hopkins responded sharply, often with his standard retort: “Some people just can’t stand seeing others make a decent living.” When someone told Hopkins things would work out for the unemployed “in the long run,” he responded, “People don’t eat in the long run—they eat every day.” Faced with charges that the relief program was wasting tax money, Fortune magazine noted, “Mr. Hopkins is likely to return merely a sarcastic jab.” He did not hesitate to take the critics on personally. When Eugene Talmadge, the Georgia governor who would become an outspoken New Deal critic, attacked the FERA, Hopkins attacked back. “All that guy is after is headlines,” he said. “He doesn’t contribute a dime, but he’s always yapping.” The most valid criticism of the FERA, Hopkins insisted, was the one that was almost never made: that it was not giving enough relief.5
Hopkins wasted little money on the FERA’s headquarters, preferring to put funds directly into the hands of the unemployed. The paint on the walls of the Walker-Johnson Building “was peeling,” one visitor noted, and “the corridors reeked of
disinfectant.” Hopkins’s own office was “terrible,” journalist Ernie Pyle noted in a column. “It’s so little in the first place, and the walls are faded and water pipes run up the walls and your desk doesn’t even shine,” he observed. “Maybe it wouldn’t look right for you to have a nice office anyway,” Pyle added, “when you’re dealing in misery all the time.” Hopkins would later turn down the chance to move into the ornate, new marble Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue to remain in what Collier’s dubbed “the shabbiest building in Washington.” Hopkins’s frugality about operating expenses would become legendary, and it extended well beyond FERA headquarters. In its first year, the FERA would support 17 million people with a staff of just 121, who earned a combined $22,000 a month. “Our job is to relieve the unemployed, not to develop a big social-work organization,” he insisted.6
Despite the low pay scale, the FERA attracted a first-rate staff. Hopkins sought out people who shared his philosophy of relief, and he valued real-world experience. One of the first people he brought in as an adviser was Frank Bane, whom he had met during his Red Cross days. Bane, who had organized the American Public Welfare Association, was a strong believer that relief was the responsibility of government, and as a consultant to Hoover’s President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief, he had urged it to abandon its reliance on private agencies. Hopkins later brought on Aubrey Williams, another American Public Welfare Association social worker, who would become his most important deputy. Williams, who had grown up in poverty in Alabama, had traveled through small-town Mississippi, helping to set up local public welfare departments. He had faced fierce resistance when he encouraged county officials to give the breadwinners in poor families $3 worth of work a week. Hopkins had no patience with bureaucracy or bureaucrats. When Lewis Douglas sent someone to ask for an “organizational chart,” he was told that there was none, because Hopkins did not believe in them. “I don’t want anybody around here to waste any time drawing boxes,” Hopkins told his staff. “You’ll always find that the person who drew the chart has his own name in the middle box.”7