What can Obama learn from FDR's first 100 days?

The author of "Nothing to Fear" talks about the striking parallels -- and differences -- between the president-elect and another who took office at a time of economic meltdown.

By Mark Schone

Read more: Books, Politics, News, Interviews, Mark Schone, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Economy, Authors, Books Interviews, Economic stimulus, Barack Obama

Jan. 13, 2009 | 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.

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?

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.

What are the differences between 1933 and 2009 in terms of how much worse things had gotten between election and inauguration? In 1933, the gap was five weeks longer because FDR wasn't inaugurated until March 4. In the book, there seem to be some eerie parallels, like some of the worst financial problems being centered in Michigan, with banks failing there, and autoworkers being affected. How much more of a crisis was March 4, 1933, than November 1932?

Some of this is hard to measure because the Great Depression was so bad that there is bad, bad and bad, bad, bad. But the big thing that did change between the election and the inauguration was the bank failures. And that was a big deal. There were runs on banks but also, state by state, banks began to fail and banks began to declare bank holidays to the point at which, the night before the inauguration, the last two states declared bank holidays and literally all the banks in the country were closed. So it was really that banking crisis that was the big differential between November and March against the backdrop of very high unemployment and industrial slowdown and all that. That's why when FDR takes office, the first thing he deals with is that Emergency Banking Act. Because that was the crisis of the moment.

How conscious were you of historic parallels while you were writing and researching the book? I imagine you conceived of this project long ago, at a time when it was probably clear that the housing bubble might burst but long before something like the collapse of Lehman Brothers made the economic calamity really apparent.

I decided to write the book in the middle of the Bush administration. And that's right, there was no sense yet of the economic crisis, no sense yet that there would be the election of someone like Barack Obama, who in many ways is modeling himself on FDR. The impetus for the book was that in the middle of the Bush administration, a war had been declared on the New Deal. There were conferences on rolling back the New Deal. President Bush began his second term with an attempt to privatize Social Security. I felt that if you wanted to look for a distant mirror in history for what was happening at that moment, the New Deal was really what we were fighting over in the middle of the Bush administration. So I wanted to go back and look at, What was the New Deal, where did it come from, what was the reason for it? But of course, the more I was working on it, the more modern events began to catch up with it.

Next page: Can we get more of that New Deal now?