Harry Hopkins, ally of the poor and defender of democracy.

• Author: Galbraith, John Kenneth

Harry Hopkins, Ally of the Poor and Defender of Democracy

I arrived in Washington to take up a positionin the New Deal almost exactly 53 years ago as this issue of The Washington Monthly comes off the press. I was not a decisive figure in that great current of change. As I've elsewhere told, I was passing through the capital on my way from graduate study in Berkeley and a job in Davis, California, to an instructorship at Harvard. Such, in those days, was the shortage of economists--a most rewarding deprivation that I hope will always persist--that I was put on the payroll in a matter of hours and there remained until the Harvard term began.

My assignment was to the Agricultural AdjustmentAdministration, the Triple A, a highly improbable center of radicalism at the time. Alas, my position in the hierarchy did not bring me even remotely in touch with Alger Hiss, Lee Pressman, or Jerome Frank, to whose views I would have been dangerously vulnerable had opportunity allowed. I yearned to belong. Also well above me were such reputable figures as Adlai Stevenson and George Ball, and yet further in the upper distance, Henry Wallace, the secretary of agriculture, and Harry Hopkins, the epitome of New Deal activism. They were figures of heroic proportions. Had I heard that they were visiting the South Building of the USDA, then occupied while still under construction, I would have lingered by a lavatory door just to get a glimpse.

Later I was much in Washington and, duringthe war years, was in charge of price control, a job of some responsibility. Harry Hopkins, nonetheless, remained for me as well as for others a distant and, in light of all that was said of his influence, a mystical or perhaps mythical figure. His influence on F.D.R. was a compulsive topic of conversation as was his role as a lightning rod for conservative criticism. There was also, more specifically, considerable talk about what might be accomplished if, as was often desired, "you could get to him.' Those who had access--Leon Henderson, Averell Harriman, Edward Stettinius --were deemed to be, pro tanto, men of power.

In the early Roosevelt years Hopkins wasthought the ultimate New Dealer, the man who did not make concessions to the opposition, who did not assume, in the manner of the modern liberal (taking advice from the accomplished political strategists), that his own constituency was safe and seek to enlarge it by selling out to the opposition.

Later, early in the war, Hopkins...