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Book Review: The Hopkins Touch by
David L. Roll
Jerry L. Modisette, PhD
Trolling through the history section of the Ruby Sisson Library on the off chance of
finding a WWII book I had not read, I came upon The Hopkins Touch, published in
2013. The title of the 409 page book was inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry V, in which
the king is described as going from tent to tent on the eve and morning of Agincourt
speaking with his soldiers incognito, encouraging them with: ”…a little touch of Harry
in the night.”; fetching up with his St. Crispin’s day speech (“…men in England, now
abed, shall hold themselves accursed they were not here…”). Then Henry and his 5,000
men marched out and defeated a French force of 30,000.
The subtitle of the book is: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat
Hitler. The Alliance took a lot of forging. The British Empire stood alone, with Hitler
controlling every country in Europe except for neutral Sweden and Switzerland.
Roosevelt was determined England should not fall, but Congress was dominated by
isolationists supported by a large majority of the people in the United States who
wanted no part of another European war. Roosevelt skirted impeachment to give
increasing amounts of aid and assistance to the British and later the Russians. Running
the Lend-Lease program, Hopkins became the liaison between Roosevelt, Churchill,
and Stalin.
Harry Hopkins started out as a social worker, running small charities in the 1920s,
running a relief program for Roosevelt when he was governor of New York, and going
with him to Washington where he became the director of the WPA, which during the
depression provided jobs to about 8,000,000 Americans on public works projects.
Neither the WPA nor any of Roosevelt’s other programs ended the depression; it took
the onset of WWII to do that; but the WPA let a lot of families feed themselves with a
degree of dignity. I still occasionally see park facilities built by WPA workers 80 years
ago.
Hopkins’ transition from the WPA to Lend-Lease was natural: Both were charities
requiring the recipients to mostly fend for themselves. The United States was the
Arsenal of Democracy, but was not in the war. That all changed on 7 December 1941.
Hopkins almost immediately became Roosevelt’s enabler, allowing the President to act
as his own Secretary of State. For four years Hopkins was at Roosevelt’s side at
Casablanca, Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and Yalta guiding negotiations with Churchill,
Stalin, and de Gaulle.
Rolls asserts that the 1942 decision to invade French North Africa instead of France gave
Eastern Europe to the Soviets. All the American generals wanted to invade France.
Roosevelt over-ruled them and decided to go with the British. The delay in getting into
Europe let the Soviets get there first. However, Rolls does not address what might have
happened if we had gone into the Adriatic, as Churchill wanted. Perhaps we would
have gotten to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, etc. ahead of the Soviets.
There have been several earlier books about Hopkins and his role in the depression and
the war. One of Rolls’ reasons for writing another one was that new documents have
become available providing information on what actually occurred. Perhaps the most
important are documents and testimony from former Soviet agents disproving
accusations that Hopkins passed atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union.