Harry Lloyd Hopkins (August 17, 1890 – January 29, 1946) was an American social worker, the 8th
Secretary of Commerce, and President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's closest advisor on foreign policy during World War II. He was one of the architects of the
New Deal,
[1] especially the relief programs of the
Works Progress Administration (WPA), which he directed and built into the largest employer in the country. In
World War II, he was Roosevelt's chief diplomatic troubleshooter and liaison with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. He supervised the $50 billion
Lend Lease program of military aid to the Allies.
Born in Iowa, Hopkins settled in New York City after he graduated from
Grinnell College. He accepted a position in New York City's Bureau of Child Welfare and worked for various social work and public health organizations. He was elected president of the
National Association of Social Workers in 1923. In 1931,
Jesse I. Straus hired Hopkins as the executive director of New York's Temporary Emergency Relief Administration. His leadership of the program earned the attention of Roosevelt, then the governor of New York, and Roosevelt brought Hopkins into his presidential administration after his victory in the 1932 presidential election. Hopkins supervised the
Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the
Civil Works Administration, and the
Works Progress Administration. He also served as Secretary of Commerce from 1938 to 1940.
Hopkins served as an important foreign policy adviser and diplomat during World War II. He was a key policy maker in the
Lend-Lease program that sent $50 billion in aid to
the Allies;
Winston Churchill in his memoirs devotes a veritable
panegyric to this "natural leader of men" who had "a flaming soul".
[2] Hopkins dealt with "priorities, production, political problems with allies, strategy—in short, with anything that might concern the president".
[3] He attended the major conferences of the Allied powers, including the
Cairo Conference, the
Tehran Conference, the
Casablanca Conference, and the
Yalta Conference. His health declined after 1939 due to stomach cancer, and Hopkins died in 1946 at the age of 55.
