FDR's first one hundred days

Salon has an interesting interview with Adam Cohen, who recently published Nothing to Fear, an account of FDR's battle against The Great Depression and the unsung heroes of the administration.

When you were looking at FDR's first 100 days, what surprised you about them?

A couple of things. One is I had this sense that it was a program, a plan, that was carefully implemented. And the degree to which it was improvised was striking. How we end up with the federal welfare program that we ended up with. Literally, Harry Hopkins, who was a state welfare administrator in New York state, has a really ambitious plan that involves a lot of federal spending, federal standards. He can't get into the White House to sell it to FDR. He calls up [Secretary of Labor] Frances Perkins. She meets with him quickly before dinner under the staircase at the women's club where she's temporarily living. She says, "This is a great plan. I'm going to sell FDR on it." And she does, and that's how we get the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. That kind of spontaneity was really striking.

And the other thing was the lack of ideological agreement. There actually were conservatives in the mix who were fighting all this stuff and it was not foreordained at the beginning of the hundred days that there would be public works. FDR's budget director, Lewis Douglas, opposed them, and even FDR [initially] opposed public works. It was really a conversation and a battle to get a lot of these things.

One more thing, which is one of the main points of my book, is the degree to which -- although FDR was a brilliant communicator and a brilliant politician and an inspiring leader -- so much of the substance of the hundred days, the policies that emerged, came from his inner circle, from the people around him and people like Harry Hopkins, Frances Perkins, Henry Wallace, who I think have not been given the historical credit that they're due.

You talk about it as a sort of team of rivals, of adversaries, but it sounded more like a group of liberals -- Wallace, Perkins, Hopkins -- versus [budget director] Lewis Douglas, with [presidential advisor] Ray Moley as a referee. So that there was an ideological momentum of sorts in the administration, with Douglas trying to check it.

Yeah, although, it's interesting that Douglas really was the star of the early days. After they got the Emergency Banking Act through, which they had to do to get the banks open, the first thing FDR does is the Economy Act, which is Douglas' plan to cut the federal budget by 25 percent. And Douglas is the golden child of that moment. FDR adores him; he's telling people he thinks Douglas should succeed him as president when he's done. And it really took some doing for the liberals to end up on top. They were not at the beginning, and I don't think it was inevitable that they would rise and Douglas would fall. But that's how it worked out.

You write about the House Republican leader urging a yes vote on the Emergency Banking Act, Roosevelt's first piece of legislation, without reading the bill. And you also talk about that act essentially being finalized, written and passed and signed, in the space of about 24 hours. I cannot imagine the current Congress on either side of the aisle behaving in that manner. The Democrats are already balking at Obama's stimulus ideas.

I mean, yes and no. We saw not an identical but an analogous rush with the Patriot Act, which, when that was passed originally, after Sept. 11, a lot of folks had not read it. So I think that we're not immune from that now. I do think, though, there's going to be more obstruction from the Republican side of the aisle now than FDR saw. During FDR's first hundred days, the Republicans were almost as willing as the Democrats to say, "We're going to trust this new president to lead us, and we're just going to support him in almost everything he does." But part of that is that times are not yet as terrible. We're just getting the new unemployment numbers, which are bad, very bad, but they're not 25 percent. And our banking system has not collapsed. We're not entering the third year of a Depression. So I think that if things were worse, there might be more of that feeling of "Defer to the president." But right now I think Obama is going to see a fair amount of opposition in Congress.

Lately, I've been trying to find parallels with Republicans in 1932 and those making screeching noises about the Obama stimulus package. Couldn't find many; now I know why. Though I also learned that Hoover took pot shots at the New Deal throughout FDR's first term. I'm not sure I expect that from G. W. Bush.