Harry Hopkins: Whipping Boy or Assistant President?

by RAYMOND SWING

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IN the perspective of public finance today, the New Deal should be losing its capacity to frighten and anger. Much of it will always be open to criticism, for it was hurriedly improvised and contained serious inconsistencies and unquestionable mistakes. The spending program was not wise in certain particulars. But what frightened and angered opponents of Roosevelt was spending as such, not its details. They believed quite honestly that the nation was being ruined, and their bitterness against President Roosevelt; and even more intensely against Harry Hopkins, was due to this alarm.

But since the days when a nine-billion-dollar budget was thought to be bankrupting the country, an astonishing discovery has been made about the potentialities of credit expansion in a modern industrial state. The country has come through a time of spending by whose standards President Roosevelt’s New Deal profligacy was Lilliputian. The largest Roosevelt depression budget was less than three fourths of next year’s out lav on defense alone. It was even a fraction less than last year’s budget surplus. We live under conditions that a decade ago would have appeared impossible to achieve. Already more than sixty million persons are employed, and the national income is more than two hundred billion, well over double the top income of any prewar year. The national tax revenue is almost as large as the total national income at the depth of the depression. Even allowing for today’s higher prices, such conditions make fools of many of our political thinkers of only a few years ago.

No one can deny that the country has spent its way to these economic heights. The pump-priming of the New Deal had little to do with achieving these results. They needed the astronomical spending of the war. But spending did it, and much of it was not constructive spending at that. People may be reluctant to attribute their unprecedented prosperity to spending, and may prefer to regard it as the fruit of private enterprise. But it was the direct consequence of the largest program of public spending ever carried through. Since this has not ruined America — even though the prosperity of today may be fatefully insecure — the attitude toward New Deal spending and New Deal personalities deserves to be re-examined, so that the bigotries of that era can be replaced by sober judgments.

The process might well begin by doing belated and posthumous justice to the dominant personalities of that time. Among these the chief, of course, is President Roosevelt himself. But even he does not rate vindication so much as Harry Hopkins, who became the whipping boy for the Administration, and who remains to this day the most underthanked man in American public life of his era.

Harry Hopkins has not benefited by the mellowing thought of his contemporaries. He still is the “leaf-raker.” He still counts as a shrewd, unprincipled, sharply partisan executant of Roosevelt’s schemes. To many he is the man, never elected to office, who lived at the White House and meddled irresponsibly in the affairs of the country and the world. His name was used in these familiar connotations to stir up antagonisms as recently as the Republican Convention last June.

Now that Robert Sherwood has written the history of the New Deal and the war years as revealed by the Hopkins papers (Roosevelt and Hopkins— An Intimate History, Harper, $6.00), it no longer will be excusable to abuse Hopkins in these terms. His bewildered disparagers will have to accept, the fact, however incredible, that Hopkins became one of the most powerful men in the world, that he exercised his power to the achievement of victory, to the deep satisfaction of the world leaders who came into close contact with him, and that he did so as an invalid condemned to death, under conditions that were heroically selfless. In the war years Harry Hopkins became one of the ranking Americans not only of his time but of American history.

It may be fairly easy to reconcile Hopkins’s critics to his patriotic services during the war, while his activities under the New Deal continue unforgiven. But he deserves justice for both periods. Let us look first at his contribution.

The nature of Hopkins’s importance during the war is both easy and difficult to state. It is easy to call him chief of the Munitions Assignments Board, for anyone can see that he who assigns the munitions in a war controls the strategy, and he who controls them in a coalition war controls world strategy. It is easy to call him executant of LendLease, appreciating that without this the war never would have been won. It is easy to say that as confidant and emissary of President Roosevelt he exercised more political influence than any other individual American save the President himself. Mr. Sherwood’s history substantiates these sweeping assertions with many absorbing documents from the Hopkins papers.

But his importance was great for obscure reasons as well. What emerges from the Sherwood story is the realization that the American Presidency is not organized to function well in the exercise of tremendous power. For all his capability, President Roosevelt was not great enough to handle the task by himself. What is made painfully clear is that he could not be assisted in it sufficiently by having just more secretaries. The job was too big for one man, no matter how many secretaries he used. There had to be two men, of stature, working in complete harmony as parts of a unity, who could cope with the mountainous labors entailed.

The President was not enough; he had to have an alter ego. This alter ego must not go off on his own, as Colonel House ultimately did a generation before. He must be the quintessence of loyalty and fidelity. He must be able to understand by persuasion or intuition all that a President, as the greatest world leader, wanted and must want to do in a world crisis. He had to be a first-class leader himself. This was the place Harry Hopkins filled. The Sherwood record disproves that Hopkins was no more than a super yes-man. Repeatedly he originated proposals (e. g., his first mission to Churchill, the first visit to Moscow, and the appointment of General Marshall as chief of staff). He was the most useful advocate the Army had at the White House. Occasionally he pressed views on the President which were not accepted. That is, he had the stature of independence, but he also had a clear concept of his function, which was to assist and complete the President and not primarily to express himself.

How close his friendship with President Roosevelt was is not analyzed by Mr. Sherwood. However, it was not and could not have been a friendship of the normal sort, the intimacy of equals. The President of the United States cannot, in the last analysis, have friends in the normal way. A true friend requires utter loyalty, and the President can have no utter loyalty other than to the people of the United States and to his own conscience.

The only intimate time I ever spent with President Roosevelt was at the instigation of Mr. Hopkins, who invited me to the White House one night after a broadcast to which, he said, the President and he had just listened. One detail I noticed on this occasion was that Mr. Hopkins addressed his chief respectfully as “Mister President,” and did not step over the line of being a subordinate. I was not prepared for this, but on considering it I appreciated that it was as it had to be, and revised my concept of the kind of friendship that existed.

That there were true intimacy and a wealth of friendliness, Mr. Sherwood’s quotation of many letters between the two testifies. Mr. and Mrs. Roosevelt were tireless in their concern for Mr. Hopkins’s health, and as warm as blood kin in devotion to him and to Diana, his daughter. The President served as best man at the wedding which brought Mr. Hopkins the last flare-up of emotional reward before his death. Many would be glad to have as much friendship in their entire lives as existed between Roosevelt and Hopkins. Yet it was not and could not be a complete friendship, because it was between a President and a subordinate. What is to the profound credit of Harry Hopkins is that he understood the limitations of the relationship, for without them he never could have attained the almost Olympian reaches of service which he was to perform.

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ONE may ask why President Roosevelt could not have worked by himself as successfully as Prime Minister Churchill, who managed without a Hopkins. The answer is not so much in the character of Mr. Churchill as in the difference between the Presidency and the Prime Ministership, and in a broad way between the American and British systems of government. Mr. Churchill, strong as he was, was subordinate to Parliament and only one of a team of cabinet ministers who jointly shared the responsibilities of government. Thanks to the system, there existed in London a smoothly running machinery which had no replica in Washington. Power being shared, all information and ideas were shared, and they were shared by written words, so that there always was a record. Britain was governed, and its war contribution was directed, by recorded words. In Washington powers were divided, the division being part of the very structure of government; whereas in London the work of the cabinet as a team, and its direct responsibility to Parliament, were the nature of the structure there.

One result of this difference was that when the British came to a conference with Americans they always showed superior staff work. They functioned in writing, when not actually talking; and much oftener than not, discussions were on texts supplied by the British, simply because there was no American machinery capable of producing good drafts so quickly. This was a continuous British advantage which I several times heard Hopkins deplore. Mr. Churchill has disclosed that in the course of the war he dictated more than a million words of official orders and communications. Notoriously Mr. Roosevelt committed relatively little to paper. Mr. Churchill was trained to put everything down; Mr. Roosevelt did not have to.

To a great extent, Mr. Hopkins had to supply in his person, to the American administration, the network of intercommunication which makes the British cabinet system function. He was the one to pass on to his chief the information from the cabinet members (who did not share his responsibility), and to the cabinet members the views of his chief; and this duty spread to the fighting services as well. Mr. Sherwood, in listing a few pages of the kind of activities in which Mr. Hopkins was engaged in one period, shows what a fantastically wide range of interests he was obliged to cover. It would be wonderful for a well man to oversee so many subjects. It is still more so that an invalid should do it.

But the testimony of those who know is that Mr. Hopkins had an extraordinary ability to grasp the essentials of the problems of war. Mr. Churchill once told him humorously that at the end of the war he was to be given a British peerage, with the title Lord Root-of-the-Matter. His participation in conferences at the highest level was usually to the end of clarification. He was a blunt man all his days. When he spoke about the root of the matter, he cleared the ground for action. And because he spoke always for the common victory, as conceived by world leaders at their best, his bluntness was constructive and awoke no resentment.

One must recognize that the American system of government of itself does not equip or assist a President in the exercise of world leadership. Mr. Roosevelt, to become a great world leader, had to be amplified, supported, and in a way duplicated. He needed this without at the same time being lessened in any way. It is the genius of Harry Hopkins that he supplied what the American system lacked. He became in reality Assistant President of the United States. It was an office that would be tolerable only if held by one who worked with complete humility and in true subjection to the President. He filled it so unselfishly that in his lifetime, so far as the public is concerned, he was unacknowledged, unrecognized, and unthanked.

The abuse to which he had been accustomed in the leaf-raking days continued, and he absorbed it without open notice. Quite humanly he would have liked to be appreciated, as I know, for I was commissioned by the editor of the Atlantic in the last war year to write an article about his extraordinary place in world affairs. Mr. Hopkins welcomed this proposal, and we sat down a couple of times to talk over the material for it. But he soon realized that to make his own position clear entailed making inside disclosures to his credit and in many cases to the discredit of his critics. He would not have his vindication at this price at the time, so the article was postponed. Now Mr. Sherwood’s book is a generous beginning of the rendition of justice.

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STUDENTS of history in the years ahead are bound to allot a high place to Hopkins because of the immense power he wielded during the world’s greatest war. The evidence of it is already overwhelming. When it comes to treating his pre-war services the honors need not be so lavishly bestowed. But taking this time into account, discerning historians may find Hopkins to have been one of the most American of all the men this nation developed for the crisis of the Great Depression and then the Great War. They also may see the broad truth that the New Deal, while it appeared to break with American tradition, remained basically American. Indeed the New Deal and Hopkins would have been unthinkable in any other country.

The philosophy which inspired the New Deal and motivated President Roosevelt and advisers like Harry Hopkins was peculiarly American. It was radical, but it was not radical along European lines. Only in a narrow sense was it revolutionary, and it was not revolution against the American social order. It was not socialistic or communistic like European radicalism. American labor unions had not been drilled in the theory and strategy of socialism as had workers in most European countries. When the depression rocked American foundations, there was no body of thought ready to sponsor either economic or political revolution. What needs to be admitted is that the revolution President Roosevelt worked was not in the social, economic, or political systems, but in philanthropy. He was not an enemy of wealth, or of the capitalism which produced wealth. He only disciplined wealth in regard to its distribution. Since many in the nation benefited from the unequal distribution of wealth, he required them to accept responsibility for those less fortunate than themselves.

Mrs. Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, and Frances Perkins give the characteristic by which the New Deal can be understood. They were social workers. Indeed some of the scorn for them came from those who could not bear to see social workers wielding political power. To some extent social work was to be found in England and France, but in both countries its importance had long been transcended by political and economic radicalism. What now should be clear is that social workers in the New Deal were a very special and American kind of reformers. They were quite sincere in regarding themselves as being in a very true sense the conservers of the basic American economic and political systems.

Harry Hopkins was an American boy, with all the passions of the typical American for sport, the outdoors, and fun. It is not unfair to say that he retained some of the qualities of the American adolescent all his life. His speech was colloquial and salty. He hated tidiness and attention to his personal appearance. These were not weaknesses, for they expressed a revolt against pomp, cant, and meaningless vanities. He loved horse-racing, and he played poker with his cronies (a reckless kind of varietyrich poker which was quite unpredictable gambling). In politics he was a picturesque antagonist, who could fight back with as much snap and zeal as he could put into any creative effort. These are all American traits.

There was another side to him, one which he hid, as do so many of his countrymen. He was sensitive to beauty. Mr. Sherwood publishes a letter he wrote during his first trip to London when he found himself on Hampstead Heath, and with a profound thrill realized he was treading the sacred ground of Keats, whose very presence he could feel. He had long been a special devotee of Keats. He also tried his hand at some verse, as so many Americans do, and with no greater failure than most of them.

During the depression, Hopkins had the social worker’s hypersensitive response to the human misery then engulfing the country. He genuinely suffered with people in want and in pain. When it came to expressing his sympathy in the political arena he could descend to a brash and boyish kind of argot, but he always worked with the ferocity of a tiger. This social worker, be it remarked, was without piety or manners. But he was not less American on that account. For, like many a Midwesterner, he was an enemy of sham, and all who came to know him learned that he was incapable of dishonesty. One could take him or leave him, he insisted on being unyieldingly himself.

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MR. HOPKINS for a time was President Roosevelt’s choice for the Presidency in 1940, and Mr. Sherwood holds his political ambition against him. One reason is that it entailed maintaining secrecy about a matter which the country was entitled to know if he were to become a candidate. That is his having suffered from cancer of the stomach. The cancer had been removed by surgical operation; even so the chances of recurrence remained, and surely bore on his “availability.”Mr. Sherwood also finds distasteful Mr. Hopkins’s actions to restore his Iowa connections, so as to become a Midwesterner in political fact.

But political ambition in itself is not discreditable, and one cannot say whether the secret about cancer would have been kept had Mr. Hopkins become the nominee. Mr. Sherwood seems to take it for granted that it would, but that is not quite fair. As to the mummery about becoming an Iowa citizen, it can be excused as being part of accepted American political theatricalities. Mr. Roosevelt was a master in practicing them. In this instance Hopkins was not, but his lack of subtlety is more to he blamed than the device itself.

It will come as a shock to many that President Roosevelt ever considered Hopkins to be Presidential material. In the light of his remarkable contributions during the war, he now begins to be visible in his true stature. Mr. Roosevelt, who knew him better than anyone else, appreciated his potentialities. In retrospect one may feel quite sure that Harry Hopkins could not have been elected President in 1940 whether the war had broken out or not. But in retrospect one may also wish that President Roosevelt, in running for the third term, had chosen him as Vice-Presidential candidate. Presumably he thought about it and decided against it. By that time Mr. Hopkins’s restoration to health had come into greater doubt. Also the President may not have counted Mr. Hopkins an asset in a third-term campaign. But as Vice-President Mr. Hopkins would have had official sanction for the place he filled, and in filling it he would have set a precedent of making this office only second in importance to the Presidency. Not only in wartime is the task of an American President beyond the capacity of a single man to perform adequately. And ththe lasting lesson of Harry Hopkins, once the truth about his services is accepted, may be that this country needs an Assistant President of the I nited States, and place for him should be made in the American system of government.

The Hopkins papers edited by Mr. Sherwood will not help much in settling the controversy over President Roosevelt’s Russian policy. Probably nothing will ever settle it, for what the world is experiencing is not the full effect of the policy, but the repudiation of that policy. The foundation of it was friendliness. The President sought to be a good neighbor to Russia precisely as he had been to Latin America. He was dealing with an even more suspicious neighbor than, say, Mexico, and imperious methods had to be avoided. He believed, and Mr. Hopkins encouraged him to believe, that the Russians, Stalin in particular, if treated generously and honorably, would coöperate to maintain peace in the post-war world. Roosevelt expected both the great military powers, America and Russia, to bear the responsibility of their might in a spirit of service.

The Hopkiits papers do not offer a rounded view of the Roosevelt post-war policy toward Russia, or even enough fragments to put together an approximation of it. They do give instance after instance showing Mr. Roosevelt preparing to apply the formula of internationalization to solve a whole range of perplexing problems. He wanted bases the world over to be held internationally for the maintenance of security. And in general it is clear that he thought only of working with and not against the Russians.

Roosevelt has been taken to task for his approach by his onetime friend William C. Bullitt, who has written in Life how he urged the President not to trust the Russians and to show that he did not trust them in his treatment of them, and how the President brushed aside his advice. Mr. Bullitt draws up what purports to be a grand indictment of Roosevelt for losing the peace, with special attention to Hopkins as his chief adviser on Russian matters.

The Roosevelt policy toward Russia is not easy to vindicate. This is not because it was not developed fully, which it was not, but chiefly because it was never tried. For the sake of argument, one can admit Mr. Bullitt is perhaps right: hard bargains with the Russians in their extremity might have been struck. But it is just as possible that he may be quite wrong. For the Western victory over Germany depended as certainly on Russia as the Russian victory depended on Western aid. The Russian contribution was in blood, while before tlie Normandy invasion the significant Western contribution was in treasure. The two were not simple to coördinate. It would not have been gracious — if the word is admissible — to bargain the treasure for the blood while Russians were dying in such numbers on the Eastern front. This Mr. Roosevelt fell but not Mr. Bullitt.

The difference continues to this day because many by now have forgotten, if they ever fully realized it, that the defeat of Germany depended no less on the Red Army than on American production and power. What was conceded to the Russians at Teheran and Yalta was in part due to the acute danger that they might consider themselves exploited in the crisis of their lives, decide the terms were too dear, and seek for better ones from the Nazis. In that event the victory of the West over Germany might not have been won for years, if at all. So it was not impractical to feel sensitive about pressing hard terms on the Russians.

It also must be remembered that the West had not lived up to its solemn promises to Moscow as to the time of opening the second front in Europe. However satisfactory the explanations may appear in retrospect, they did not satisfy either General Marshall or Marshal Stalin. So there was more than a little feeling of guilt toward the Russians which made it awkward to bargain with them sharply.

The restoration of peace will require long preparation, and the publication of such records as the Hopkins papers is a contribution to its coming. But it also is a temptation to those determined to distort history to give vent to their disappointments. A writer like Mr. Bullitt is ready to strip Mr. Roosevelt of credit for helping win the world’s greatest military victory because the peace was lost. The fact is that no man can know how Mr. Roosevelt would have fared with the peace had he lived. Il may be that his own country, which once repudiated Mr. Wilson, would also have rejected him if he had consented to a generous credit to the Russians. He made a cryptic remark to Mr. Sherwood about dreading some great failure by the American people, and this well might have been in his mind.

But the peace Mr. Roosevelt sought with the Russians was not lost by him. He died before the war ended. It was lost by those who survived him. It is lamentably true that his successors had to endure every aggravation, exasperation, and disillusionment in dealing with the Russians. But it also is true that they did not proceed with the breadth of neighborliness which animated Mr. Roosevelt. Surely it is no mark of intellect now to charge that President Roosevelt lost the peace because he, and advisers like Harry Hopkins, believed it would be served better by deeds of good will than by manifestations of power.