Professor June Hopkins
We are pleased to present a summary of Professor June Hopkins’ presentation to the Columbia Seminar Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare, and Equity (May 12, 2025): “A Social Worker’s Fight for Full Employment.” Professor Hopkins is the granddaughter and biographer of New Deal Relief Administrator and Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins. Attending the presentation were June Hopkins’ son David Giffen, Executive Director, Coalition for the Homeless, New York, and six other descendants of Harry Hopkins. Also present was President Franklin’s D. Roosevelt’s grandson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, III, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Sarah Lawrence College, a long-time Associate of the Columbia University Seminar on Full Employment. Social Welfare, and Equity.
Co-sponsoring this event was Living New Deal, New York Chapter.
The Granddaughter of Harry Hopkins, June Hopkins taught American history at Armstrong State University for 17 years and retired Emerita in 2016. She earned a BA in English at UC Berkeley, a MPA from Pace University in New York, a MA in history from Cal State Northridge and a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. Her work experience includes five years as a social worker in New York City before becoming a historian.
June Hopkins has published three books:
Harry Hopkins: Sudden Hero, Brash Reformer, St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Issued as a paperback by Palgrave McMillan, January 2009, World of the Roosevelts.
Jewish First Wife, Divorced: The Correspondence of Ethel Gross and Harry Hopkins. Co-editor, Allison Giffen, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, Lexington Books, March, 2003.
Harry Hopkins and the Grand Alliance of the Second World War, Amazon, 2023.
A Social Worker’s Fight for Full Employment
As a social worker who rose to become one of Franklin Roosevelt’s closest advisors, Hopkins dedicated his career to combating poverty through government-led job creation, establishing principles that remain urgently relevant today. His core philosophy maintained that ensuring citizen welfare through employment represented government’s fundamental responsibility, a conviction crystallized during his early work with New York’s Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.
Hopkins’ innovative approach first materialized in 1915 through a pioneering work-relief project at New York’s Bronx Zoo. Confronted with widespread unemployment during an economic downturn, he secured an agreement where private charity funds paid workers to develop public infrastructure. This initiative employed 231 men at wages avoiding charitable stigma while completing municipal projects the city could not afford. The model established Hopkins’ lifelong belief in work over cash relief, asserting that jobs preserved human dignity while stimulating local economies through wage circulation.
When the Great Depression created an unprecedented national crisis, Hopkins’ methods gained federal scale. As director of New York’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration under Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hopkins had deployed twenty million dollars for unemployment assistance, insisting on socially useful jobs paying prevailing wages without discrimination. His success led Roosevelt to appoint Hopkins Federal Emergency Relief Administrator in 1933, where Hopkins disbursed half a billion dollars in grants—the first direct federal aid to states for relief—to support four million families within weeks of taking office.
The apex of Hopkins’ achievements emerged through the Civil Works Administration, launched in November 1933. Defying conventional bureaucratic timelines, he employed 800,000 workers within two weeks and four million within four months. Half came from official relief rolls while the other half represented the hidden unemployed who had refused charity. Projects focused on labor intensive infrastructure like schools, roads, and airports, with eighty percent of the program’s nine hundred million dollar budget allocated directly to wages. Hopkins framed this as mobilizing both economic and spiritual forces, declaring meaningful work a democratic right.
Despite these accomplishments, Hopkins faced significant setbacks. His proposal for permanent federal job assurance was excluded from the landmark 1935 Social Security Act due to fiscal concerns. When Roosevelt reduced New Deal spending in 1937, triggering the Roosevelt Recession, Hopkins argued the retreat proved his long-held view that only sustained public employment could achieve recovery. As head of the Works Progress Administration until 1942, he directed eight million workers in diverse projects from construction to arts programs under Federal One, which employed thousands of artists, writers, and performers. Critics dismissed cultural work as wasteful, but Hopkins maintained that all workers deserved sustenance, regardless of profession.
Throughout his career, Hopkins confronted ideological opposition with pragmatic resolve. He dismissed concerns about program costs by emphasizing America’s capacity to fund societal well-being, famously telling an Iowa questioner that citizens collectively pay for what they value. Having administered over twelve billion dollars without personal wealth—dying penniless in 1946—Hopkins embodied public service integrity. His 1939 address at Grinnell College distilled his vision: government must ensure economic inclusion so that poverty becomes indefensible in a nation of abundance.
Whereas Hopkins created agencies to employ Americans, current policies eliminate public jobs; where he viewed government as democracy’s stronghold, modern rhetoric vilifies public institutions. With homelessness persisting, and employment and wages failing to cover basic needs, we must revitalize Hopkins’ conviction that job creation remains the most effective antidote to poverty and despair.
NJFAN expresses our thanks and appreciation to Vignesh Ramesh Gaikwad, Rappourteur of the Columbia Seminar on Full Employment, Social Welfare and Equity (2024/25) for preparing this summary of Professor Hopkins’ presentation.