FDR: The First Hundred Days
By Anthony J. Badger
$15.64, 224 pages
Hill and Wang: June 2008
When Roosevelt took power on March 4, 1933, many influential Americans doubted the capacity of a democratic government to act decisively enough to save the country. Machine guns guarded government buildings. The newspapers and his audience responded most enthusiastically to Roosevelt's promises in the Inaugural to assume wartime powers if necessary. That sense of emergency certainly made Congress willing to give FDR unprecedented power.
It may have taken me the better part of a year to get around to reading and reviewing FDR: The First Hundred Days, but trust me: It was worth the wait. And the timing actually worked out well, given the perspective of living smack dab in the midst of yet another spanking new presidency with a seemingly insurmountable economic crisis and sweeping solutions for change. The places where the two presidencies and agendas overlap and differ are unexpected and illuminating, and historian Anthony Badger's explorations of what worked and what didn't in Franklin Roosevelt's first few months are vital pieces of a puzzle that Americans should consider when weighing the possible effects of President Barack Obama's early proposed programs.
Keep in mind that nowhere does Badger make any allusion to the current economic climate or the current president. This is a pure (excellent) nearly day-by-day account of FDR's first few months. But any reader picking up the book now is clearly going to try to draw lessons and solutions from its pages, given the similarity of the times. And the first, most obvious, difference is ... FDR had no FDR.
What this means in practical terms is several-fold. For one thing, he had no "100 days" mythology to live up to. This man was the subject of creating the first "100 days" brand, so expectations for that very artificial time period were non-existent. Yes, the country recognized that things needed to be done -- and needed to be done fast -- but there was no model on which to fashion a rescue of this magnitude. In one sense, this was freeing. Unlike Obama, for whom FDR's example looms as both a reference point and a measuring up, FDR could wing it--because of this, he was also granted much more executive power from the get-go than has the current president.
On the other hand, well ... there was no model. And there seemed to be every reason to doubt whether the government could fix what was broken. The federal government was anemic and used almost entirely for war and currency regulation; states were at the apex of their power, and even the most sanguine observers doubted there was either the political will or, more importantly, the institutional capability of undertaking the huge economic task of jump-starting a national economy.
Before 1933 the federal government had been largely irrelevant to ordinary Americans, except in times of war. During the Hundred Days the federal government took responsibility for the plight of farmers, workers, and the unemployed. The changes started in the Hundred Days served to cement the loyalty of lower-income Americans to the Democratic Party. Ordinary Americans came to trust the federal government. In the Hundred Days the federal government would take responsibility for managing the economy and would appear to do that with spectacular success after 1945. By 1963, 75 percent of Americans believed that the federal government would "do the right thing."
Viewed this way, it's easy to see why the right today fears so much the success of Obama's more ambitious programs. FDR's legacy of "doing the right thing" by the common man, of course, is what Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan began chipping away at decades later, and what brought us the age of current individual greed. What the right fears today is a repeat performance of a popular Democratic president putting his party in ascendancy for a generation or so by solving the nation's problems through collective sacrifice and action. Ironically, as Badger points out, FDR initially was not willing to run a deficit and at first was insisting on a balanced budget, which led to the odd conundrum (from this historical distance) of a president wielding virtually war-time powers to keep a lid on spending and government at a minimum:
He did seek, and won, in the Economy Act, executive powers to slash government spending, which would never have been granted in normal circumstances. The emergency was initially therefore to be used to reduce, not expand, the functions of government.
The political world in which FDR operated, it must be remembered, in many ways was a topsy-turvy reverse of the one we dwell in now. Republicans were the conservationists and progressives; the new, popular Democratic president was initially resisting the creation of the FDIC, stubborn about the absolute necessity of balancing the budget, and committed to keeping the business community satisfied and on his side. In these first days, it was most definitely not Roosevelt who was throwing around anti-corporate rhetoric:
The attitude of southern and western businessmen, and indeed farmers, helps explain why some historians see an anti-business campaign animating the New Deal during the Hundred Days. There is little evidence of a campaign against businessmen or against capitalism. There is plenty of evidence, from all parts of the country, of hostility toward financiers and captains of industry.
Ironically, many of those who later clamored for Roosevelt's head were the first beseechers for federal intervention ... when it was their profit and loss on the line, as Badger notes: "In time, Texas would be a hotbed of business anti-New Deal sentiment, but Texans' oil, cotton, and cattle were in desperate straits in 1933, and Washington seemed to provide the only solutions on offer."
Reassuring to know some things don't change, from century to century. First in line for bailouts, then the loudest decriers of regulation later: the wealthy.
FDR's masterful political skills shine through Badger's account, from the first day the president took office. Threading the needle through the job patronage system, making sweeping and immediate legislative changes, the new president had to wrestle some coveted powers away from the Congress and into his realm:
It was a measure of Roosevelt's immense prestige in that first week of the New Deal that the House of Representatives passed the Economy Bill the next day. It was a bitter pill for Congress to swallow. No matter how unpopular government jobholders were with taxpayers, jobs were the lifeblood of the patronage system on which a congressman's future depended. They knew they would hear from the powerful veterans' lobby. Nevertheless, a quick vote forestalled the mobilization of the veterans' lobby, and the broad grant of executive power shifted the responsibility and opprobrium for specific cuts from Congress to the president.
This is brilliant carrot and stick maneuvering in a near-panic-stricken environment: quick legislative action to forestall organization against the measure, but also a willingness expressed by the president to take the heat from powerful constituencies when they belatedly arrived on the scene. He was willing to leave the Congress in the clear in exchange for giving him what he wanted, and back in the day ... it worked.
Further evidence of his political genius can be found in the provisions of one of the other major pieces of legislation that was rolled out in those first weeks:
The National Industrial Recovery Act contained something for almost everybody--which is why such a stark reversal of traditional government policy could secure majority support in Congress. Code exemption from the antitrust acts pleased businessmen; codes of fair competition promised large firms protection against the chiseler and small firms protection against predatory big business; codes and government licensing offered possibilities to advocates of planning; guarantees of collective bargaining presented opportunities to organized labor. The codes satisfied those who favored industry-government cooperation, but those who were skeptical of that cooperation could at least be satisfied with the promise of economic expansion engineered by public works expenditure.
As Badger tells it, one of the more brilliant master strokes of this measure was that because expediency was emphasized, every constituency got something -- even when the provision was in direct conflict with another stated in the act. There was so much confusion and so many profusions, that the legislation basically turned into something a chief executive could only dream about today: a multiple-choice massive bill that was so confusing the president would be required to pick and choose what to enact and what to leave by the wayside. So of course, everyone was pleased with the motley patchwork; everyone's pet project got included. But later down the line, only certain proposals, chosen by FDR, would be enacted.
The sense of emergency and unprecedented domestic crisis also lent itself to some amazingly nimble innovation--like having farmers, in effect, "self-moderate" their fellow farmers' compliance with mandated crop quotas. Because there was no agency at any level large enough to police some of the provisions that were going into effect, the nascent federal bureaucracy was forced to rely on the locals to police themselves, which had the additional happy result of keeping the burgeoning alphabet feds as small as humanly possible. As Badger says, "The same pattern of using county agents and local farmer committees was followed in all the production-control programs. As a result, the bureaucracy at AAA never rose beyond three thousand."
And what hierarchy was forced into shape was largely (and logically) patterned on the mobilization efforts that had been active on the scene during World War I, less than 15 years before. Collection and distribution efforts, and chain of command issues were adapted from that previous national emergency, and many of the "new" DC'ers were really not new to the scene at all, having served in some domestic bureaucratic positions during the previous military crisis. Additionally, in a portion of the book that echoes Naomi Klein's arguments in The Shock Doctrine about the power of the right-wing think tanks in the latter half of the 20th century, Badger observes:
It was possible to pass such a revolutionary bill [the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority] because the issues had been thoroughly aired for more than a decade and because the government had already constructed the facilities at Muscle Shoals and the Wilson Dam. The Depression did make a difference. The ferment of ideas stimulated by the need to tackle the economic crisis created a climate in which such a sweeping plan could be accepted. The Depression had also weakened and stretched state governments to such an extent that they were prepared to allow Congress to run roughshod over existing state boundaries and responsibilities. But perhaps more than any other measure in the Hundred Days, the TVA owed its existence to the interest and prestige of two men--George Norris and Franklin Roosevelt.
The legacy of the TVA is precisely what Republicans today most fear about any of Obama's ambitious projects succeeding at such a level. As Badger points out, the ability of the region in the modern era to claw its way up from the most extreme depths of poverty not only further solidified Democratic votes there, it also shaped the worldview of the area's future leaders: "While this [modern] industrial South was far removed from the utopian dreams of Arthur Morgan and Franklin Roosevelt, the TVA acted as an inspiration for a new generation of younger southern liberal politicians, who saw the TVA as the model for how the federal government could rescue the South from poverty."
Grover Norquist and his tax-cut fetishists know exactly what could happen if Obama succeeds on even a fraction of the scale as Roosevelt, and it's telling that in our day, Obama, unlike his predecessor, has faced a whole barrage of commentators across town at CPAC openly rooting for his failure. In FDR's era, such sentiments in the first hundred days would have been considered not just unseemly, but outright treasonous (although later on, as New Deal history buffs know, there was indeed such publicly expressed hope). Perhaps it's a luxury of our time, and a testimony to the trust of the strength of our underlying democracy, that Obama is faced with such open loathing so early on; perhaps FDR's example of success is the very reason contemporary conservatives feel comfortable expressing such prayers for failure. Democratic presidents have a history of strength under pressure, as Badger book shows.
FDR: The First Hundred Days is, from beginning to end, a joy to read. It's clear, concise and nicely constructed. Given the different storylines of complex measures to follow--from agriculture to urban labor bills, from explaining the philosophy behind the TVA to the mechanics of the formation of the Civilian Convservation Corps--Badger's done a remarkable job of distilling information down to the essential. He's also a more than competent writer. His quick character sketches of the players who flocked to Washington is just the right amount of quirky details and adequate traditional biography to make the luminaries come alive, with all their different agendas, inspirations, hopes and ambitions. This is focused history, a pleasure to read and illuminating to ponder, perfectly targeted for an audience such as that at Daily Kos: educated activist laypeople who are passionate about pragmatic politics.