Adam Cohen: What Can Obama learn from FDR's first 100 days? (Interview)
According to an article in Monday's New York Times, Barack Obama, a week away from the presidency, is trying to learn from a predecessor who also entered the White House at a time of national crisis. Aides say that Obama has studied FDR's first 100 days, "even look[ing] at the words Roosevelt used and the tone he struck," in hopes of emulating the way FDR carried on a "conversation with the American public" and built confidence in the New Deal.
But if Obama wants to know how the New Deal was actually forged, New York Times editor Adam Cohen's book "Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America" is an indispensable primer. According to Cohen, the original New Deal, which forever transformed the role of the federal government, was not born out of the sort of patient planning for which Obama is known. In a phone interview, Salon asked Cohen, an assistant editorial page editor at the paper, to draw comparisons between Obama and Roosevelt, and between 1933 and 2009.
[QUESTION] It's one week before the inauguration. What were FDR and his "Brain Trust" doing at this point in time -- a week before March 4, 1933? And how does that compare to the Obama transition?
[ANSWER] The Obama transition is really impressing me right now compared to Roosevelt's transition. Roosevelt had a "Brain Trust" during the campaign that was working on policy ideas, and this continued after the election. There were definitely a lot of ideas floating around, but in early '33, the New Deal was still very undefined. So, we had some general sense of various things he talked about during the campaign, but some of them were in conflict: The idea of cutting spending tremendously but also trying to help the people that had been injured by the Depression. Doing something about the crisis in the farm belt, but we didn't know what. So the story of FDR's first hundred days is really the attempt to put some meat on the bones of the New Deal. The infighting, the ideological conflicts [meant that] by this time in 1933, much was up in the air.
I think we are seeing more clarity from Obama. We're seeing him talking before he takes the oath of office about stimulus and job creation in a way that shows a little bit more focus and direction....
[QUESTION] ... I keep coming across people rearguing the New Deal on right-wing Web sites. There was something the other day from Kathryn Jean Lopez on the National Review online, where she posted a chart that supposedly showed that FDR hadn't done such a good job in bringing unemployment down.
[ANSWER] This is a big right-wing talking point right now. If you watch Fox News it comes up a lot, too. It's this idea that FDR actually prolonged the Great Depression. Amity Shlaes kicked this off a couple of years ago with "The Forgotten Man", which was a revisionist take on the New Deal. That is something they're talking about now. But it's also been pretty strongly debunked. There are several Web sites debunking a lot of it. [Paul] Krugman has been writing about why it's not true. I think people now -- right-thinking people -- agree that FDR did improve conditions during the Great Depression and in fact if he had been willing to spend more, to be more New Dealish, more deficit spending, more Keynesian economics, he would have even ameliorated the problem more quickly. It was his timidity and his famous decision in '37 and '38 to try to cut down on spending, which caused another recession. Those revisionist, anti-New Deal ideas are out there, but I don't think they're correct at all....
Read entire article at Mark Schone at Salon.com
But if Obama wants to know how the New Deal was actually forged, New York Times editor Adam Cohen's book "Nothing to Fear: FDR's Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America" is an indispensable primer. According to Cohen, the original New Deal, which forever transformed the role of the federal government, was not born out of the sort of patient planning for which Obama is known. In a phone interview, Salon asked Cohen, an assistant editorial page editor at the paper, to draw comparisons between Obama and Roosevelt, and between 1933 and 2009.
[QUESTION] It's one week before the inauguration. What were FDR and his "Brain Trust" doing at this point in time -- a week before March 4, 1933? And how does that compare to the Obama transition?
[ANSWER] The Obama transition is really impressing me right now compared to Roosevelt's transition. Roosevelt had a "Brain Trust" during the campaign that was working on policy ideas, and this continued after the election. There were definitely a lot of ideas floating around, but in early '33, the New Deal was still very undefined. So, we had some general sense of various things he talked about during the campaign, but some of them were in conflict: The idea of cutting spending tremendously but also trying to help the people that had been injured by the Depression. Doing something about the crisis in the farm belt, but we didn't know what. So the story of FDR's first hundred days is really the attempt to put some meat on the bones of the New Deal. The infighting, the ideological conflicts [meant that] by this time in 1933, much was up in the air.
I think we are seeing more clarity from Obama. We're seeing him talking before he takes the oath of office about stimulus and job creation in a way that shows a little bit more focus and direction....
[QUESTION] ... I keep coming across people rearguing the New Deal on right-wing Web sites. There was something the other day from Kathryn Jean Lopez on the National Review online, where she posted a chart that supposedly showed that FDR hadn't done such a good job in bringing unemployment down.
[ANSWER] This is a big right-wing talking point right now. If you watch Fox News it comes up a lot, too. It's this idea that FDR actually prolonged the Great Depression. Amity Shlaes kicked this off a couple of years ago with "The Forgotten Man", which was a revisionist take on the New Deal. That is something they're talking about now. But it's also been pretty strongly debunked. There are several Web sites debunking a lot of it. [Paul] Krugman has been writing about why it's not true. I think people now -- right-thinking people -- agree that FDR did improve conditions during the Great Depression and in fact if he had been willing to spend more, to be more New Dealish, more deficit spending, more Keynesian economics, he would have even ameliorated the problem more quickly. It was his timidity and his famous decision in '37 and '38 to try to cut down on spending, which caused another recession. Those revisionist, anti-New Deal ideas are out there, but I don't think they're correct at all....