Hopkins, Harry L. (Harry Lloyd), 1890-1946

Harry Lloyd Hopkins (1890-1946) was born in Sioux City, Iowa. After graduation from Grinnell College in 1912, he became a social worker in New York City with the Christadora Settlement House and the Association for Improving the Conditions of the Poor (AICP). He was Executive Secretary of the New York Board of Child Welfare from 1915 to 1917 and worked for the American Red Cross in New Orleans and Atlanta from 1917 to 1921, when he rejoined the AICP in New York as Assistant Director. He headed the New York Tuberculosis Association from 1924 to 1933. Hopkins was appointed deputy administrator of the New York Temporary Emergency Relief Administration by Governor Roosevelt in 1931, and became that agency's administrator in 1932. President Roosevelt made him head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration on May 22, 1933, and authorized him to establish the machinery of the short-lived Civil Works Administration in November, 1933. Hopkins directed the Works Progress Administration from May 6, 1935 until he became Secretary of Commerce on December 24, 1938. Hopkins resigned his cabinet position on August 22, 1940. However, in 1941 President Roosevelt put him in charge of the Lend Lease program. During the World War II years, Hopkins served as Advisor and Assistant to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman as well as Chairman of the Munitions Assignments Board and the President's Soviet Protocol Committee, and a member of the War Production Board and the Pacific War Council. He undertook special diplomatic missions for both Presidents, particularly to Great Britain and the Soviet Union, and accompanied President Roosevelt to wartime conferences at Casablanca, Quebec, and Teheran in 1943, and at Yalta in 1945. He resigned from government service in July 1945. President Truman awarded him the Distinguished Service Medal the following November.

Government official, social reformer.

Hopkins served in several positions in the Roosevelt Administration including the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, 1933-1935; the Works Progress Administration, 1935-1938; and Special Assistant to President Roosevelt during the war, 1941-1945.