Hopkins attended Western Reserve Academy by working in the Cleveland Rolling Mills to pay his way through and graduated in 1892.

Hopkins laid out new industrial plant developments and promoted construction of the Cleveland Short Line Railroad in 1905.

Hopkins then entered local politics by becoming chairman of the Republican county committee and a member of the election board.

Voters decided to try to extricate municipal government from partisan politics by adopting the city manager plan.

He pushed for the development of parks, improved welfare institutions, wider boulevards, more playgrounds, air pollution control, and the construction of both the Van Sweringen brothers' Terminal Tower and Cleveland Stadium.

He won support of Cleveland's large ethnic population, receiving praise in Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish and other foreign-language papers (there were roughly a half-dozen in big circulation at the time).

In 1925, Hopkins proposed a bold new initiative; the construction of a large airport, ten miles southwest of downtown.

When Hopkins urged the purchase of piece of land from Brook Park, sounding off ideas of planes flying from Cleveland to Paris and London with thousands of people on board (later a reality with Cleveland-London flight service being introduced in 1999 and Cleveland to Paris in 2008), Witt ridiculed the idea.