Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer

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.