Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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.

I'm writing this "review" to bring some clarity to the previous reviews. Supposedly, according to the book the "Verona Secrets," Harry Hopkins was a spy. However, please note that this declaration seems to be the opinion of the far right. (Note the reviews on Amazon.com for the "Verona Papers" as well as the conservative internet zine NewsMax.com .) On the other hand, any knee-jerk hero worship is equally suspect. So draw your own view! But not from this book - its emphasis is pre- New Deal!

I felt like I had entered the twilight zone. A fawning tale about the highest ranking foreign spy in American history that fails to even deal with the now universally accepted truth that Hopkins was a Soviet Agent. How this book could have been published subsequent to the release of the Venona documentation is a mystery that can only be explained by the fact that the publisher is The Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute Series on Diplomatic and Economic History. Your grandfather was a traitor, Ms. Hopkins deal with it.