Raymond Moley:  Moley was one of five original members of Roosevelt’s “brain trust” who eventually became a critic of the New Deal primarily over monetary policy and the gold standard. He was credited with creating the phrase “New Deal” which was first used in Roosevelt’s acceptance speech in the 1932 Democratic Convention. Moley was from Berea, Ohio and his father was also involved in politics. He was educated at Baldwin-Wallace College and Oberlin before getting his PhD. at Colombia. He was head of the Columbia Foundation in 1918 and 19 and recruited fellow Colombia professors to the original “brain trust”.

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Henry Morgenthau: Morgenthau was Secretary of the Treasury during most of the Roosevelt administration. He was also highly involved with foreign policy including the Morgenthau Plan for dramatically restructuring Germany after the war (this will be addressed separately). Morgenthau was born to a prominent Jewish family in New York.  His father was a real estate investor and diplomat. He operated a Christmas tree farm near the Roosevelt estate in New York, had some background in agriculture, and was originally head of the Federal Farm Bureau before moving on to the Treasury Department. Morgenthau was the primary architect of the Social Security Program but also generally opposed deficit spending.

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Francis Perkins:  She was the woman who rose highest in the ranks during the New Deal, becoming Secretary of Labor making her the first female cabinet member in US history, and who was highly influential in New Deal social legislation. Perkins was born in Boston and her parents were active Congregationalists.   Her father, Fred, was a wealthy businessman. She went to Mt. Holyoke in 1898, where she was class president and was swept up in the intense religious-pietist wave sweeping that college at that time (2 pp. 352-3). Her commitment to the idea of a welfare state was set in motion by a talk at Mt. Holyoke by the charismatic Marxist and national leader of the NLC, Florence Kelley.  She was married, in a secret ceremony, to economist and fellow social reformer Paul C. Wilson but did not take his name. The marriage provided her entry into municipal reform circles.  After being named Labor Secretary she lived in a rented house with close friend Mary Harriman Rumsey.  Rumsey was the daughter of tycoon E.H. Harriman.  The Harriman family was very influential in the New Deal although generally in the background. (2 p. 353)

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Harry Lloyd Hopkins: Hopkins became one of Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters, Secretary of Commerce, and eventually a sort of shadow Secretary of State. Hopkins was born in Iowa, the son of a harness maker who later operated a general store. Hopkins’s mother Anna Pickett Hopkins, who was a Canadian, was a gospel teacher and was president of the Methodist Home Mission Society of Iowa. Hopkins graduated from Grinnell College in Iowa in 1912 in the social sciences, moved to New York, and married the first of three wives, the Jewish heiress Ethel Gross. Hopkins plunged into the settlement-house movement, becoming a resident of the Christodora House in New York before his marriage. He then went to work for the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (AICP) and became a protégé of the general director of the AICP, John Adams Kingsbury. From 1917 to 1922, Hopkins ran the Red Cross in the South, and then returned to New York to become assistant director of the AICP. Hopkins became the director of the New York Tuberculosis Association in 1924. How did Harry Hopkins rise from being a settlement-house worker to one of the most-powerful people in the New Deal? Part of the answer was his close friendship with W. Averill Harriman and his friendship with John Hertz, partner at the firm of Lehman Brothers; and his association with the rising political leader of the powerful Rockefeller family, Nelson Rockefeller. When Hopkins became Secretary of Commerce in the New Deal, he offered the Assistant Secretary post to Nelson Rockefeller, who turned it down. (2 pp. 354-6)

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John Adams Kingsbury:  Kingsbury was born in rural Kansas to a father who became a socialist high school principal in Seattle. After graduating from the Teachers College, Columbia, in 1909, he went into professional social work. During the Reform Administration of New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchell, Kingsbury was selected Commissioner of Public Charities in New York, while Harry Hopkins was executive secretary of the Board of Child Welfare, serving on the Board with other well known social reformers as Henry Bruere, Molly Dewson, and Frances Perkins.  Kingsbury became CEO of the Milbank Fund, which financed medical and health projects, and was associated with the Rockefellers’.  Kingsbury became more openly radical, praising the alleged medical achievements of the Soviet Union and promoting single payer health insurance in the United States. Kingsbury’s agitation against the American Medical Association led to the AMA threatening a boycott of Borden’s milk (the major business of the Milbank family), which resulted in Kingsbury getting fired in 1935 after which time Hopkins hired him as a consultant to the Works Progress Administration. (2 pp. 354-6)

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Nelson Rockefeller and the Rockefeller Family:  The New Deal saw the displacement of the Morgan dynasty with the Rockefeller’s along with their “intellectual and technocratic entourage” (2 p. 356). The Rockefeller’s, who originally acquired their wealth through government contracts during the Civil War, were part of a coalition that included the Harriman’s, Kuhn-Loeb, and the Lehman Brothers. The Rockefeller family was from New York but also had property in New England and was historically associated with the Republican Party (2 p. 356).  The political legacy behind Nelson Rockefeller started with Nelson Rockefeller’s grandfather, Nelson W. Aldrich who was a Republican senator from 1881 to 1911 and was considered one of the “Big Four” who controlled the Senate during that period. Aldrich served in the Union Army, was a staunch supporter of tariffs, and was instrumental in the creation of the Federal Reserve. Nelson Rockefeller’s father was John D. Rockefeller Jr who was the fifth and final child of John D. Rockefeller Sr., the founder of Standard Oil. The Senior Rockefeller also founded the University of Chicago and was a devout Northern Baptist. John Jr. was also closely linked to Northern Protestantism and was a social activist. While at Brown University, he took twelve social science classes including a class on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.  Although Nelson Rockefeller’s political career has been characterized as a liberal Republican his entry into politics was as part of the Roosevelt administration as a New Dealer.

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In looking at these individuals and families there are some nearly consistent characteristics.  All but Morgenthau, who was Jewish, had a family background in Northern Progressive Protestantism and some were very active in this tradition as young people. They all came from New York, New England, or the Yankee areas of the upper Midwest. The vast majority either went to Ivy League schools or Progressive Christian schools like Oberlin. Most had studied “social sciences” and/or had a background in the social welfare movement and came from a tradition of activism. Their ideas and talking points have been remarkably consistent through time with speeches from this time period being virtually identical to those given today by modern progressive politicians to yet another generation ignorant enough to think they are hearing new ideas. They represented the end product of a gradual secularization process of postmillennial pietism.  A movement that started trying to destroy saloons wound up with political class “experts” or “brain trusters” pulling the levers of political power to attempt to reshape society from the top down as they saw fit.

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Bibliography

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1. The Living New Deal. [Online] 2020. https://livingnewdeal.org/what-was-the-new-deal/new-dealers/.

2. Rothbard, Murray N. The Progressive Era. Auburn Alabama : Ludwig von M