The First Hundred Days

I have been thinking and reading a great deal about both the idea of a president's "first 100 days" and also about how President Obama has fared in his early tenure as president. This is in large part because I will be participating on a roundtable on Obama's First Hundred Days next week after I arrive at the University of Keele, where I will be a fellow at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies for the month of May.

Alan Brinkley has an article at The New Republic in which he argues that Obama, in this mythical timespan, "has been less frenetic than Franklin Roosevelt's, but in some ways more productive." The comparison with FDR is both obvious and inevitable because of the fact that the very concept originates with FDR and because of the circumstantial analogy between today's financial crisis and that DR confronted when he took office.

I do not want to pre-empt my own presentation from next week, but in shorthand my view is: Too early to tell; first hundred days is a journalistic rather than a historical construct when it comes to analyzing most any president but FDR; There might be better comparisons to make than with FDR.

Denying New Deal Denialists

Eric Rauchway takes on New Deal denialists in a post republished at History News Network. He drives a metaphor that he draws from Ronald Reagan into the ground, but otherwise, his arguments dovetails nicely with something I wrote last month in which I concluded that whatever its shortcomigs, the New Deal was quite remarkable, and that if we still place stock in the three R's of Relief, Reform, and Recovery, the New Deal was damned successful at the first, quite successful at the second, and middling (but not a failure) at the third.

Obama's Shot at Greatness

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt faced monumental challenges and rose to them. James Buchanan, Herbert Hoover, and George W. Bush faced comnparable challenges and failed in the face of them. Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson only partially succeeded in mastering the demands of their eras. Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton always lamented never having that moment to meet. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan (as well as Clinton and maybe Truman) probably fall between these categories, as both were popular presidents in modestly challenging times who probably succeeded more than they failed but who had notable shortcomings and never faced the singular events of depression, war, or a 9/11-type calamity. Context provides opportunity and challenges, and how a president responds to that opportunity and those challenges goes a long way in determining that president's place in history.

President Obama faces the circumstances for greatness but the question remains whether he masters the moment, or the moment masters him. Supporters like me believe he is the man for these troubling times. The clock is ticking on his hundred days, a constructed but symbolically resonant creation that presidents since FDR have faced with varying degrees of success. Obama's challenge will be to maximize his mandate, to use the current goodwill he has garnered as a springboard, and to use not only the next hundred days but beyond to impose his will on events rather than allow events to overrun him.

Debating FDR and the New Deal

It is natural that Americans are looking to history to try to make some sense of the current economic {pick one: crisis, malaise, recession, impending depression, clusterfuck} and in that context the logical place to look is the New Deal. And naturally any look at the New Deal is going to get us going on all sorts of politicized tangents. Two recent articles, one in The New York Times the other in The Boston Globe give a sense of some of this discussion.

I am teaching my US 1929-1945: Depression and War class this semester, and I think it is no coincidence that it is packed this time around, with more students than seats or tabletops. The last time I taught this class, two years ago, it had fewer than 15 students. Last semester when I taught the first of my three-course modern US trilogy, covering the period from 1877-1929, a dozen students showed up for the final exam. Suddenly, though, students are clamoring to take this class, and it seems the reason is obvious. They want to try to make some sense of the world around them, and this class its on the two major issues of our time: economic crisis on the home front and American wars abroad.

I find most of the FDR/New deal arguments largely uninteresting. Conservatives and Republicans have taken a reasonable, indeed factually indisputable argument -- the New Deal did not end the Great Depression -- and turned it into an unreasonable, wrong one, namely that the New Deal failed. If we start out from the basic principle that there really is something to the idea of the "Three R's" of the New Deal: relief, reform, recovery, we understand that FDR's programs certainly addressed two of these with some remarkable successes even if the recovery phase never really kicked in. I have never heard an even vaguely viable argument about how the wonders of a market that had quite clearly failed, and had seen the economy hit its nadir during the Hoover administration, was going to magically come up with the millions of jobs that various New Deal relief programs provided. Nor has anyone arguing New Deal failure adequately explained FDR's successful re-elections, especially the 1936 landslide. The New Deal was an imperfect response to a nearly unfathomable catastrophe. Those who point out that the Second World War, and not the New Deal, ended the Great Depression have a point, though they also probably ought to acknowledge that had FDR had his druthers we would have been far more engaged not only in that conflict, but in its run-up, and that the economic benefits thus derived would have come far sooner.

The quest for a usable past is understandable. But the desire to use a cartoonish version of that past to brandish ideology today both abuses and diminishes the past in ways that will inevitably do harm both to history and to the future.

FDR Watch

This promises to be a gift from the history Gods: dcat friend and mentor Alonzo Hamby is working on an FDR biography, and over at POTUS he will be writing "a series of occasional columns on the issues an FDR biographer faces." His first such piece looks at lingering questions about the state of FDR's health during his presidency.