The ‘Hundred Days’ Humbug Blame FDR for this arbitrary standard, whose meaning has changed since 1933. By Charles Kesler
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hundred-days-humbug-1493160492
President Trump is criticized for things he has done and for things he has left undone. What is unreasonable is the additional arbitrary standard to which he, like all modern presidents, is held liable: what he has accomplished, and failed to, in his first hundred days in office.
Why is the figure of 100 days so important? As though Franklin D. Roosevelt doesn’t have enough to answer for, here is another of his legacies.
FDR spoke of “the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal” in his fireside chat of July 24, 1933—142 days after his March 4 inauguration. He was referring to “the historical special session of the Congress” he had convened, which opened March 9 and adjourned June 16. That is, the Hundred Days were legislative days, not executive days.
Today’s Congress commonly leaves Washington three days a week. If you wanted to apply Roosevelt’s implicit criterion of 100 congressional days, you’d be counting not to April 30, but into July or August—or even September or later, since Congress is in recess the whole month of August.
It’s true that in 1933 Roosevelt put the 73rd Congress through its paces. But the reason, or excuse, for the rush of legislation was an economic emergency, signaled by the steadily worsening bank panic. To get the closed banks open again was the aim of the first piece of legislation submitted, the Emergency Banking Act—introduced on March 9 at 12:37 p.m., and on its way to the president at 7:23.
Absent the bank panic, the Hundred Days would not have started with such a bang. Without a similar emergency, why should we expect a president’s (or Congress’s) first hundred days to have anything like the same urgency and focus?
Congress did enact leading elements of the New Deal during the Hundred Days. But within two years the Supreme Court had gutted the National Industrial Recovery Act. The administration never attempted to revive it. In 1936 the same fate befell the Agricultural Adjustment Act, though in less sweeping fashion. Haste makes waste. Perhaps the most famous piece of legislation associated with the New Deal, the Social Security Act of 1935, had nothing to do with the Hundred Days. CONTINUE AT SITE
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