Unlikely Heroes: Franklin Roosevelt, His Four Lieutenants, and the World They Made

Leebaert (Magic and Mayhem) follows four protagonists from President Franklin Roosevelt’s inner circle during the Depression. These four are Federal Emergency Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, the able and visionary Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, and the agricultural scientist Henry Wallace. Leebaert discusses the tumultuous personality of Ickes, the sickly but determined Hopkins, the experienced social activist Perkins, and the scientific imagination of Wallace. Readers discover the various backgrounds that contributed to this New Deal team, including Perkins’s fight for child labor reform and Hopkins’s work with the New York Tuberculosis Association. The book also details the depression, divorce, financial woes, and alcoholism that struck some within this productive, yet very human cohort. The crippling effects of the Depression, ranging from malnourishment in New York City to the plight of drought-stricken Oklahoma farmers, is well presented, along with descriptions of issues such as child labor, dangerous factory conditions, widespread malnourishment, and violent raids on immigrant communities.