With President Trump about to reach his 100th day in office (either April 29 or 30, depending on how you count), Washington and the news media are having a collective conniption fit. This arbitrary date on the calendar is supposed to somehow magically reveal everything that’s right and wrong with a new administration.
The first 100 days myth started during the remarkable whirlwind that was the start of President Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. But using that unique time as the benchmark for measuring all succeeding administrations is severely flawed. Here’s why.
America has never faced an economic crisis as grave as 1933. The worst one of our lifetime, the financial meltdown that triggered the Great Recession of 2008-2010, was a walk in the park by comparison.
In 1933, one of every four Americans was unemployed. Families were losing farms to foreclosure on a wholesale basis. Banks were failing with such head-spinning speed, folks who travelled to Washington to witness Roosevelt’s inauguration didn’t know if the checks they wrote in that pre-credit card age to pay for their trip home would be good.
With hard times suddenly staring millions of people in the face, there was very little public assistance. Help was only available from private charities, who were strained to the breaking point, or the generosity of one’s relatives.
While all this was happening, a little man with a funny moustache had come to power in Germany days earlier. A bald brute was bellowing threats from balconies in Rome, and a mental basket case was unleashing misery on millions of people in the Soviet Union. Americans rightly wondered if their country would become tyranny’s next victim.
Roosevelt had swept to victory in a landslide in November 1932, winning 42 of 48 states and carrying large Democratic House and Senate majorities on his coattails. He promised action, the people responded, and when his term began on March 4, 1933, he didn’t waste time getting down to business.
What followed was the unbelievably swift passage of major legislation that forever changed the federal government’s role in American life. A series of new agencies identified by their initials (TVA, CCC, AAA, NIRA, FERA, and more) were created. Collectively, the package was known as the New Deal. It fulfilled Roosevelt’s campaign promise from the year before: “I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.”
More pieces of landmark legislation followed in the coming years. But never again were so many sweeping proposals passed in such a frantic burst of legislative activity, and in such a short time.
Which makes it hardly fair to judge all succeeding rookie administrations against it. Yet every president from Dwight Eisenhower on had to endure the ridiculous comparison. (Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford got a pass, having come into office due to their predecessor’s death, assassination and resignation, respectively.)
Kennedy tried to head off the whole business at the very outset of his presidency by saying in his inaugural address, “All this [the New Frontier’s agenda] will not be finished in the first hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this administration, nor perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.”
Roosevelt himself coined the “first hundred days” in a July 24, 1933 radio address. Ironically, he meant the 73rd Congress’ 100-day session (March 9 to June 17), not his own first 100 days on the job. But reporters felt there was a ring to the phrase and an absurd custom was born.
Until the U.S. economy experiences another financial Chernobyl, comparing any new president’s first 100 days to Franklin Roosevelt’s is grossly unfair. The practice is now nothing but a platform for the news media and party that’s out of power to complain about the new team in the White House.
In 2017, stacking the president who produced the New Deal against the president who practices The Art of the Deal just doesn’t hold up.
J. Mark Powell (@JMarkPowell) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former broadcast journalist and government communicator. His weekly offbeat look at our forgotten past, “Holy Cow! History,” can be read at jmarkpowell.com.
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