Harry Hopkins Quotes
I will not last 6 months in this town because I am going to say what I damn well please.
He not only lasted 6 months but he became the most powerful man in the government next to the President, yet he was brutally candid to all including the President. Harry Hopkins was the special assistant to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt through the two great American crises, the Great Depression and World War II. Although he was a social worker with not a shred of political experience, Hopkins was originally selected by the President to operate the national relief program in the midst of the Great Depression. Soon he had spent more money than any human being in history without a taint of scandal. He had never been elected nor was he even ratified by the Senate. He also paid virtually no attention to members of Congress as he became the most successful manager in American Government history. Soon he became FDR’s most important aide. Then he and his wife actually moved into the White House and lived there with the Roosevelts and was a favorite of not only FDR but Eleanor Roosevelt as well.
Harry Hopkins, 1890-1946, U. S. Secretary of Commerce (Democrat), Director, Works Progress Administration, Director, Federal Emergency Relief Administration, Special Assistant to the President, Statement to friends when he first accepted the government job that President Roosevelt offered him
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This quotation may be apocryphal and not real. We have not been able to find an eyewitness or even a quotation the citation of which gave a date or suggested how the quote was ever made public given that it passed between these two men. However it is so frequently quoted that we have decided to include it. A further argument in its favor is that it fits the circumstances of the time. FDR had given Hopkins a huge budget and told Hopkins to get the American people working again. Hopkins did not believe in payments to the able bodied unless worked and his programs created an astounding array of jobs for the unemployed to do ranging from fixing benches in parks to writing poetry about poverty. He spend more money than any human being in history and started and implemented a nationwide program at a pace that has never been matched, Incredibly, no one was ever able to find any dishonesty in the administration, but it took years for the information of exactly what had going on at the local level to filter back to Washington. So the quote is plausible factually. Style-wise Hopkins was brutally honest with Roosevelt and others so well might have admitted that he did not know all that was going on in his programs. See {642829}.
Harry Lloyd Hopkins was 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, 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.
