Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomati) [Hardcover]

June Hopkins (Author)

Book Description

Series: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomati | Publication Date: February 15, 1999

From 1912 to 1940, social worker Harry Hopkins committed himself to the ideal of government responsibility for impoverished Americans. This look at Hopkins' life and social work career broadens our understanding of the political and cultural currents that led to the Social Security Act of 1935, the bedrock of the American welfare state. Hopkins' experiences as an advocate and administrator of work relief and widows' pensions in New York City during the Progressive Era informed his contribution to welfare legislation during the New Deal years. Written by his granddaughter June Hopkins, this book not only clarifies the emergence of welfare policy but sheds considerable light on the present welfare debate. It also illuminates the life of one of the most influential Americans of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A scholarly biography of one of the great American policy makers and innovators of the 20th century. Hopkins was among the most powerful advisors to Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the New Deal and Second World War. He was in on the creation of some of the boldest experiments in social welfare reform and government assistance to the poor in the nation's history. And he headed many of the national relief agencies that helped to carry millions of Americans through the Great Depression and left enduring legacies to current social policies. Yet this man, so identified with succor and relief in such American cities as New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York, was a son of small-town Iowa. What propelled him from modest origins to the pinnacle of national influence is the subject of this academic study by his granddaughter. Adding to existing scholarship about the man and the work in which he was for decades so deeply involved, Hopkins (History/Armstrong Atlantic State Univ.) emphasizes her grandfather's upbringing and education in the world of Grinnell, Iowa, where he also attended its renowned college and drank deep draughts of the Social Gospel and Christian activism. In concentrating on his preNew Deal social workthe freshest part of her bookHopkins reveals her ancestor's openness to new thought and experience and his easy respect for and reliance on women for ideas and guidance. There's still, however, a whiff of the dissertation about the book; we don't get as much sense of who this man was, strange when the biographer is also a close family member. Nevertheless, Hopkins's research adds considerably to the history of modern American welfare policy. (7 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About the Author

June Hopkins is assistant professor of history at Armstrong Atlantic State University in Savannah, GA. She is Harry Hopkins' granddaughter.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (February 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312212062
• ISBN-13: 978-0312212063
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,274,025 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Roosevelt's Conscience, March 26, 2008

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomati) (Hardcover)

Among the more bombastic and preposterous myths of the anarcho-capitalists and libertarians these days is the strongly-held conviction that Harry Hopkins was a Soviet agent. This reverent biography by Hopkins's granddaughter says nothing at all about alleged spying. The anti-FDR crowd can be heard already howling Big Surprise! while the pro-FDR cohort will frown Why would she? there's nothing to it. Honestly, partisans, it doesn't matter, unless you seriously hope to impugn Roosevelt's patriotism also. Do you?

Hopkins was closer to Roosevelt for longer, and had more influence on his economic thinking, than almost any other member of the "Brain Trust." To what degree their aspirations and intentions coincided is an important question in assessing the long-term impact of the New Deal. It's often assumed that Hopkins was the paraclete and FDR the exegete, or shall we say, Hopkins the mind and FDR the hand. Unfortunately the current title doesn't offer the sophisticated long-term historical perspective, or the grasp of labor history in particular, to help much with that assessment. It's an action-hero sort of bio, and not too bad as such, though Harry's sort of heroism will hardly grab the average reader.

The best part of the book comes early, as Ms. Hopkins traces the roots of her grandfather's social conscience in the Social Gospel movement. The programs of the New Deal, which Hopkins helped write, didn't spring out of thin air; proposals for government regulation of working conditions, pension plans, steeply graduated income taxes, the use of building projects to jump start the economy, unemployment insurance, and other reforms were not so new. The Social Gospel, Henry George's Progress and Poverty, the Grange, the Populists and the Progressives, all lay in the background education of that small town boy from Iowa who became FDR's workhorse of reform. Look at American history through a wide-angle lens and you'll find that the current orthodoxy of laissez-faire free-marketism has been slugging it out with the basic tenets of redistributive justice in courts and congresses for the last 150 years. Those who don't study history.... are condemned to have the same unresolved arguments for eternity.

8 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Response to quack, January 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomati) (Hardcover)

The reader from PA is a quack. There is no evidence, Venoma included, that proves Hopkins a Soviet spy! There were many in the Roosevelt Administration, especially in the Treasury Department, but among those closest to FDR Hopkins was not a spy.

Hopkins' book is excellent and should be read in conjunction with the works by McJimsey, Tuttle, and Sherwood.

6 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Horse of a Different Color, May 18, 2004

By 

Patricia B. Ross (Wellesley, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomati) (Hardcover)

The reviews listed on Amazon don't begin to address the fact that for most historians, and those living during the 1930's and 1940's, Harry Hopkins was Roosevelt's right hand man, and after reading the 1987 biography of Hopkins, it's very easy to come to the unestablished but logical analysis that it was all about Harry from 1935 when Roosevelt was elected until 1946 when Truman came into office. The attempt to discredit Hopkins or write him out of history is a big mistake, and the entire history needs to be done again with a view toward his very large role to prove or disprove the 1987 biography which doesn't say so, but doesn't have to say so, that Roosevelt would have been nowhere without the efforts of this close friend, inhabitant of the White House, negotiator, New Dealer, and operations genius behind the Roosevelt throne.