Reading Journal: The Hopkins Touch

David Roll, The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler. Oxford University Press, 2013. 

“The political biographies most popular in the modern era often tell us less about their subjects than about the moment in which the books themselves are published.” Jill Abramson, reviewing Jon Meacham’s Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (New York Times Book Review November 2, 2012)

In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President and faced the daunting challenge of leading a nation in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The new President responded with a $800 million dollar stimulus package, the American Resource and Recovery Act of 2009 (ARRA), with the goal of creating jobs, investing in infrastructure, and strengthening the social safety net for those affected by the economic downturn. As the result of ARRA, President Obama has been compared to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his economic stimulus package has been called “the new New Deal.”

Meanwhile, Republicans concerned about the increasing national debt and opposed to government spending began to call for reform of entitlements like Social Security and Medicare, leading to accusations that the GOP was attempting to roll back the New Deal. “If it was not clear before,” the New York Times editorialized in April 2011, “it is obvious now that the party is fully engaged in a project to dismantle the foundations of the New Deal and the Great Society.”

With a Democrat in the White House and an increasingly conservative Republican majority in the House after 2010, partisan gridlock took hold of Washington, resulting in a series of fiscal crises in 2012—the debt ceiling crisis in the spring, and the fiscal cliff crisis in the winter. In 2010, when Senator Evan Bayh (D-Indiana) announced his retirement after twelve years in the Senate, among the reasons he cited for his decision were “dwindling social interaction between senators of opposing parties, and a caucus system that promotes party unity at the expense of bipartisan consensus.”

It’s not surprising that, at such a time, there should be a rash of new books about members of FDR’s circle, both architects of the New Deal and significant contributors to the U.S. involvement in World War II. The past four years have seen biographies of Frances Perkins (Kristin Downey’s The Woman Behind the New Deal, 2010) and Joseph P. Kennedy (David Nasaw, The Patriarch, 2012), and group biographies of FDR’s Supreme Court appointees (Noah Feldman, Scorpions, 2010) and of the Americans who helped forge the alliance between the United States and Great Britain during the War (Lynne Olson, Citizens of London, 2010). And 2013 will see the publication of David Roll’s biography of Harry Hopkins (January 2013) and Susan Dunn’s history of the Presidential election of 1940 (June 2013).

One of the major themes that emerges from these books is the importance of personal relationships and bipartisan cooperation in the face of national crisis. The quiet hero of Lynne Olson’s Citizens of London is Gil Winant, the former Republican governor of New Hampshire, whom FDR first appointed to head the new Social Security Board and then sent to London during the war as the United States ambassador. And Susan Dunn, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, highlights the close wartime cooperation between FDR and Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate Roosevelt defeated in 1940. But undoubtedly the most important relationships forged during the war were between Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, the leaders of the three most powerful Allied nations. And instrumental in forming those relationships was Harry Hopkins.

Harry Hopkins was born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1890, graduated from Grinnell College, and became one of the most prominent and energetic social workers in the nation. When FDR took office in 1933, he put Hopkins in charge of Federal relief efforts, first as head of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) and then as head of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). He became a close friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who shared his passion for social work, and was briefly considered as a possible successor to FDR in the White House. As World War II loomed, Hopkins did, in  fact, end up living in the White House—not as President, but as an unelected “deputy President” who served as Roosevelt’s closest wartime advisor.

Hopkins was one of the chief architects of the Lend Lease program, which sent materiel to America’s struggling allies, Britain and the Soviet Union, and made the United States “the arsenal of democracy.” Hopkins was also Roosevelt’s first personal envoy to both Churchill and Stalin, and played a central role in holding the alliance together, often smoothing over differences between the three leaders with a deft personal touch—“the Hopkins touch,” which provides the title for David Roll’s laudatory new biography.

Roll clearly admires Hopkins, and portrays him as charming, witty, penetrating, and ambitious only to serve.  He painstakingly reconstructs important diplomatic episodes—the meetings at Casablanca and Teheran, for example—highlighting the influence of Hopkins in the often tense negotiations between the three strong-willed Allied leaders. He downplays Hopkins’ reputation as a womanizer, and dismisses allegations that Hopkins was actively spying for the Soviets. For Roll, Hopkins’ close relationship with the Soviets was motivated only by his laser-like focus on defeating Hitler. Hopkins emerges from the biography as the personal pivot upon which the alliance moved, and a man of almost superhuman energy—all the more remarkable considering that his fragile health was failing all through the war years.

When Hopkins died in 1946—less than a year after Roosevelt’s death and the end of the war—Churchill told the New York Times: “We shall not see his like again.”

Roll’s Hopkins-centric retelling of events of World War II is thoroughly researched and well written, if single-minded in its efforts to find Hopkins’ fingerprints on the success of the wartime alliance. In the current age of recurring fiscal crisis and endless partisan gridlock, it’s inspiring to remember a time when someone with just the right touch could bring people together to get things done.  

Reading Journal: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Nicholas Carr. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Most of us who use the Internet recognize the phenomenon: we click around, check email, check Facebook, find ourselves unable to focus on a task. At best, we find ourselves “multitasking.” At worst, we’re simply unable to concentrate on any task at all. The Internet is a “technology of distraction,” overloading our brains with stimuli.

Drawing on research on “neuroplasticity,” Nicholas Carr argues that this technology actually alters the human brain, creating new circuitry adapted to the rapid-fire, stimulus-rich environment of the Internet. Studies of how people read on the Internet, for example, show that people tend to skim, scanning the page for the salient points. Deep, reflective reading is sacrificed for a rapid and efficient gathering of relevant information. Carr worries that, as our brains are rewired for this kind of shallow reading on the Internet, we will lose the capacity for deep reading and reflection.

He cites other studies that link reflective, slow mental processing with the development of empathy, and he worries that, as we gain speed and efficiency online, we lose some of the qualities that make us human. In interacting so much with machines, we become more like machines ourselves.

Near the end of the book, Carr draws on Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media to observe that “our tools end up ‘numbing’ whatever part of the body they ‘amplify.’” He explains:

When we extend some part of ourselves artificially, we also distance ourselves from the amplified part and its natural functions. When the power loom was invented, weavers could manufacture far more cloth during the course of a workday than they’d been able to make by hand, but they sacrificed some of their manual dexterity, not to mention some of their “feel” for the fabric (210).

The same is true, he argues, of intellectual technologies, such as clocks or maps or the Internet. Clocks changed the perception of time of those who use them, and maps changed the perception of space and place. Carr cites a study of London cabbies, who are required to memorize the names and locations of all of the streets in London. The research shows that a London cab driver’s hippocampus—a central clearinghouse for memory processing in the brain—is unusually large, because of the amount of detailed local knowledge it contains. As most humans became dependent upon maps, such detailed knowledge dried up, and the configuration of the brain changed. The hippocampus became smaller.

Technology, Carr argues, “alienates” us from our environments and from ourselves, allowing us to “outsource” some of our cognitive functions. Quoting a study on the use of “user-friendly” software, for example, Carr argues that sophisticated apps allow us to “‘externalize’ problem solving and other cognitive chores,…[reducing] our brain’s ability ‘to build stable knowledge structures’…that can later ‘be applied to new situations’” (216).  As we in Northfield consider putting iPads into the hands of students beginning in fourth grade, we should ask ourselves if we’re actually strengthening transferable problem-solving skills, or simply providing students with an expensive mental prosthesis.

Carr cautions that, as we become more dependent upon computers and the Internet, we should be mindful of what we stand to lose as well as of what we stand to gain. “We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self,” he warns (212).

Carr’s book is wide-ranging and engagingly written, and highly recommended for readers who want to get away from their computer screens and reflect on what the Internet is doing to their brains.

Reblogged from my Learning Curve blog.

"A Legacy"

This poem, "A Legacy," was written for and first read at the Rice County Votes No! Community Kick-off event on Monday, June 18. The event was organized to bring together local opponents of the proposed amendment to the Minnesota marriage amendment. The amendment was voted down on November 6, 2012.

A Legacy

To my sons

I’ve thought long and hard

about what I can leave you.

After all, my greatest treasures

are things I don’t possess:

the bur oak and the pasqueflower,

and the prairie grass rising

from fire each spring;

the bluebird

dissolving into flight;

the clouds

and the snow-pleated

winter fields;

and the river that runs through

the middle of this town,

that unites us more than it divides us.

On the night before I traveled to Athens,

I watched the sun

setting behind Manitou Heights

and believed that not even the Acropolis

could be so full of wonders.

I have loved this place like no other,

this place which has given us you.

You came from more than

one woman and one man—

You came from these people,

from these fast-changing skies,

these deep winters,

the rise of the land that seemed,

when I first came here from the east,

like a deep breath being held.

You came into a world

that was changed by your presence.

You have made the hardest times

lighter with the weight of your dreams.

You have lived in possibilities

I could never have imagined.

You have believed there can be

more love, more voices

singing the song of their inmost heart.

You have already given me the future.

So I stand here tonight

in faithfulness to that future,

and in faithfulness to the vows I made

when your mother and I came together

as two hearts, and love

was the highest law we followed.

I stand here tonight to say no

to any lesser law

that claims we are married

only because our bodies are different

and not by the grace of everything we share. 

Copyright © 2012 by Rob Hardy

Making Movies

Here's a teaser for my most recent feature story on Northfield.org, about two 2012 Carleton College graduates who are getting ready to spend the next year making a feature-length film. They need your help to make the film. You can become a backer of their project through Kickstarter.

Kaitlin Randolph was writing stories before she started kindergarten in northern Wisconsin. Sam Dunnewold started making films as a seventh grader at Northfield Middle School. Sam was also a member of the last class of Northfield eighth graders to go through their entire middle school career in the building which is now the Weitz Center for Creativity.

Both Kaitlin and Sam ended up at Carleton College, where they majored in Cinema and Media Studies (CAMS). Now the two young filmmakers are preparing to graduate from college and embark on the next stage of their careers: making their first feature-length film.

With several other partners, they’ve created a production company, Lucid Films LLC, and have created a Kickstarter account with the goal of raising at least $5,000 before June 24, 2012.

But the process began in the summer of 2010, when Kaitlin began brainstorming ideas for a screenplay about “two depressed twentysomethings” who literally share each other’s dreams, but who eventually “find reality catching up with them.” The story gradually took shape over the following fall and winter terms at Carleton, and in early 2011 she brought Sam on board. In the fall, they decided that the film, Lucidity, would be their project for the year after their graduation from Carleton.

Read the rest of the story on Northfield.org.

Hilda and Martha

This is an excerpt from my essay “Twenty-Two Thousand Days” (Sonora Review Winter 1999), about my great-aunt’s line-a-day diaries, which my sister inherited and shared with me after our great-aunt’s death. My great-aunt died at the age of 99 in 1991, and was survived for a few years by her partner Martha. The two women had been together for fifty years.

 In the third volume of my great-aunt’s line-a-day diaries, covering the years 1940-1944, I discovered several small scraps of paper on which my great-aunt copied out excerpts from her diaries. One scrap of paper reads:

Jan. 19

            M + I up late—Breakfast

and quiet interlude—lunch

to Gallery to see Van Gogh

pictures. Hat—Emily—MJC

+ I to smorgasbord at

Hotel Rochester.

On the back of the paper, in Martha’s handwriting, comes the reply:

If I recall we saw Frances

Baker there, too, and I

didn’t have money to

put in the Dutch

collection vase—or whatever

it was. Also my new hat

blew off on Univ. Ave. Right?

For these two women, who lived together for fifty years, my great-aunt's diaries provided a single lens for the recollection of a shared life.

She and Martha had been together for twenty-five years when I was born. I was born to their companionship; it was natural and unquestioned. My letters were always addressed to both of them, and in my great-aunt’s replies, Martha was always present—my great-aunt’s other self. On February 2, 1976, my great-aunt wrote to me:

Ground Hog Day 1976 and what a day it turns out to be! Yesterday we had a thaw. Today we awakened to a blizzard. We had errands planned for today, but instead we are holed in, and thankful that there is food in the larder. Also we are thankful for firewood. If the wind dies down a bit, we’ll have a hearth fire.

Martha has been out to the bird feeder with sunflower seeds. The sparrows throw the seeds around,—then come the squirrels to clean up the ground. When spring comes there are a lot of shucks to clean up.

I had though to go out and cut boughs from the forsythia bush today—but it isn’t working out that way. I don’t have the equipment for getting through snow banks.

The “we” of my great-aunt’s letters, her usual pronoun, seemed to split kaleidoscopically into “Martha” and “I.”

What do I know about their intimate relationship? I have sixty years of her daily notations, and all I can say for certain is that she and Martha loved each other. That is all, and everything. This seems to me to be a beautiful model for a life—a life shared openly and lovingly, with its secret intimacy always reserved. 

I think of those scraps of paper—Martha’s hat blowing across University Avenure—and all the intimate associations these diaries evoked, all the richness of shared experience. A diary is a small workshop for the creation of the self. But if anything, my great-aunt’s diaries, full of their shared experience, were aimed not at the creation of the “I,” but at the creation of the “we.” The “we” of her letters, the “we” that slid back and forth between two women for fifty years, on scraps of paper, in conversation, in the silence between words.

Rose and Evangeline

Rose Elizabeth Cleveland

In 2007, I published an essay in the New England Review about Rose Elizabeth Cleveland, the sister of President Grover Cleveland, who served as her bachelor brother’s First Lady until his White House marriage. I’ve been thinking about Rose Cleveland again recently as Minnesota prepares to vote on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Rose Cleveland, who was a scholar, essayist, poet, and novelist, never married, but she ended her life in a committed relationship with another woman: the widow of Bishop Henry Whipple of Faribault.

Rose Cleveland and Evangeline Simpson seem to have met in Florida in the  winter of 1889-1890, and later exchanged a series of passionate love letters, which are preserved in the Minnesota Historical Society.

“My Eve looks into my eyes with brief bright glances,” Rose wrote to Evangeline, “with long rapturous embraces,—when her sweet life beneath and her warm enfolding arms appease my hunger, and quiet my soul and carry my body to the summit of joy, the end of search, the goal of love.”

The exchange of love letters came to an end in 1896, when the thirty-six year old Evangeline Simpson married the seventy-four year old Bishop Whipple. But this was not the end of the story. The bishop died in 1901, and a few years later, Evangeline and Rose were together again.  They settled down together in Bagni di Lucca, Tuscany, where they worked in a military hospital during World War I, where Evangeline wrote a book about Tuscany, and where they are buried together in the same crypt in the Protestant cemetery.

The story of Evangeline and Rose remained hidden for half a century after Evangeline’s death.  Finally, in the late 1970s, an anonymous note arrived at the offices of the American Library Association’s Task Force on Gay Liberation.  The note, which was passed along to historian Jonathan Katz, explained that in the collections of the Minnesota Historical Society there was a binder of love letters that “revealed a lesbian relationship” between Rose Elizabeth Cleveland and Evangeline Whipple. The letters were not listed in the card catalogue.  According to researcher Judith Schwarz, the Minnesota Historical Society “listed the Whipple-Scandrett Papers as comprising only nine boxes.  The love letters were in an unlisted, unmarked tenth manuscript box.” 

In response to Katz’s inquiry, the historical society reviewed its policies and decided to list the letters in its catalogue.  In 1989, Katz published a feature article on Rose and Evangeline in the national LGBT news magazine, The Advocate.

In the summer of 2003, the 74^th General Convention of the Episcopal Church met in Minnesota.  In the convention’s exhibit hall, there was a display about Minnesota’s first Episcopal bishop, Henry B. Whipple.  The exhibit, according to press materials, “included probably the first openly-public mention of a same-sex relationship from another century: that of Bishop Whipple’s widow, Evangeline, and Rose Cleveland, the sister of U.S. President Grover Cleveland.” The main order of business at the convention that year was the confirmation of Rev. V. Gene Robinson, of New Hampshire, as the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church. 

“The humanity of each of us,” Rose Cleveland wrote, “is like some Aeolian harp constructed by the Master Musician and laid down tenderly by Him upon the sea-shore where winds from every quarter play continuously.  An enlightened Christianity would leave it, free and sensitive, upon the shore—would open it to all the winds that hurry to and fro, that it may give out to heaven and earth its full completed harmony.”

Also posted on Northfield Patch.

Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices

Noah Feldman, Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices. New York: Twelve, 2010. Hardcover. 433 pages. $30.

When FDR took office in 1933, the United States was in the midst of the Great Depression. Unemployment peaked that year at an astonishing 25%, but the financial markets which had been at the epicenter of the crisis were still unreformed and unregulated. FDR took office with an ambitious plan to repair the American economy that became known as the first New Deal, but as he attempted to implement his plans through sweeping legislation like the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), he was consistently blocked by a conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court.

The Court in 1933 was dominated by justices who consistently interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment, in particular, as guaranteeing “liberty of contract,” a concept which the Court used to protect the interests of big business. The Court consistently found unconstitutional Progressive measures like minimum wage laws and restrictions on the length of the work week. In frustration, FDR conceived a plan to increase the membership of the court—nowhere was it written that the Supreme Court must have nine members—and create a new liberal majority that would support the New Deal.

The “court packing” plan failed, but during FDR’s long tenure as President he was able to reshape the Court in a way that had profound effects on American jurisprudence and American society. The direct influence of FDR’s appointees culminated in the landmark 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, but their legacy lives on in the influential constitutional theories that the greatest of his appointees developed during their time on the Court.

Feldman’s fantastic book focuses on the four greatest of FDR’s Supreme Court Justices: Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and William O. Douglas. Each rose from humble origins to assume an important place in FDR’s inner circle and a seat on the Supreme Court. Each was dazzlingly brilliant and fiercely ambitious. Together, in the words of Frankfurter’s former law clerk Alexander Bickel, they were like “scorpions in a bottle.” Feldman shows how, out of their individual backgrounds and personalities and their collective conflicts, FDR’s Justices made history.

Hugo Black, for example, had in the late 1920s won a Senate seat from Alabama largely on the strength of his membership in the Ku Klux Klan. He later repudiated his membership in the Klan, and went on to become the moral force behind the Brown decision and the Court’s advocacy of the rights of racial minorities. Black’s effort to redeem his personal honor from the taint of racism can be seen as a driving force behind his actions on the Court.

During his record thirty-six years on the Court, Black developed the now highly influential constitutional theory known as “originalism,” which looks to the original meaning of the Constitution, and the Framers’ original intent, as the basis for judicial decision-making. Feldman points out that “the deep wellspring of Black’s originalism was the distinctly Protestant method of biblical interpretation that he had used for two decades as a Sunday school teacher in Birmingham.” Feldman explains: “There is an overlap between the Protestant idea that the Bible can be interpreted by any individual without the mediating authority of the Church and the originalist idea that the meaning of the Constitution may be ascertained without reference to binding precedent” (145).

Black developed originalism as a means of remedying what he considered the overreaching of an earlier conservative court, which had smuggled the concept of “liberty of contract” into the Constitution, even though the concept was unsupported by the text itself. For Black, at least in the beginning, originalism was a liberal constitutional theory which stood behind his efforts to insure equal justice to minorities. But later in his career, Black’s consistent originalism led him to oppose decisions of the Warren Court based on the “right to privacy,” which he argued was (like “liberty of contract”) a concept that appeared nowhere in the text of the Constitution.* Black, once the most liberal Justice on the Court, became increasingly perceived as conservative as the Warren Court embraced the “legal realism” (or “judicial activism”) of Black’s one-time ally William O. Douglas. A consistent application of originalism produced results that were liberal in the context of the 1940s and 1950s, and conservative in the changed circumstances of the 1960s and beyond. On the present Court, of course, originalism is the Constitutional creed of the conservative standard-bearer Justice Antonin Scalia. Douglas, on the other hand, was consistently liberal because his philosophy of judicial activism led him to see the Supreme Court as an engine for social change.

Black was a Sunday school teacher with no theological training, a self-taught historian, a Justice with no previous experience as a judge. He thought originalism opened up an understanding of the Constitution to anyone with a copy of the text. Ironically, as Feldman points out, the doctrine of originalism has given rise to the highly specialized field of constitutional history, as historians ferret out the original contexts, intents, and meanings of Constitutional concepts.

While Black was working out originalism as his guiding constitutional philosophy, his colleague Felix Frankfurter was guided by “judicial restraint,” another concept which has become associated with judicial conservatism. Feldman brings out the irony of Frankfurter, once a lawyer for the ACLU and a driving force behind the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, upholding the constitutionality of the World War II Japanese internment camps and eventually being seen as one of the Court’s conservatives.

One of the great pleasures and virtues of Feldman’s book is that he can explain, in clear and compelling terms, the often specialized Constitutional issues at stake while maintaining the drama and excitement of a good story with memorable characters. There are times when the story of Justice Robert Jackson, the proponent of judicial pragmatism, has the feel of a Greek tragedy: a stunning rise to power and prominence from humble beginnings; a damaging clash with Black that doomed Jackson’s shot at becoming Chief Justice; an international spotlight as chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, where the pressures of cross-examining Hermann Goering made him come spectacularly unhinged; a hospital bed signing of the unanimous opinion in Brown, a decision about which he had deep reservations. Jackson died believing he’d been a failure, but his tradition of judicial pragmatism has been enormously influential on the Supreme Court, particularly in the swing votes of Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy.

Feldman tells his interwoven stories with brilliance and flair, demonstrating that history is best understood as a confluence of massive societal forces and individual personalities, and that there is still value in studying the lives of great men whose influence has become woven into the fabric of American life.

* The landmark “right to privacy” case Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), in which Black issued a dissenting opinion, actually drew on opinions of Justice James Clark McReynolds, one of the “Four Horsemen” on the Supreme Court who consistently struck down New Deal legislation prior to 1937.

Disclaimer: I received a free review copy of this book from the publisher as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.