The First Hundred Days: Part I

This article is Part I of a two-part series. Part I will focus on the origins of the fabled “First Hundred Days”. Part II will use this historical context and modern comparisons to review President Trump’s First Hundred Days.

This week the news has been covering a topic that you may not have heard since taking U.S. history or government classes in high school. The term “First Hundred Days” may just remind you about something that started over eight decades ago. And if you’re thinking “that doesn’t seem that long ago” I will remind you that my 89 year-old grandpa was a toddler when the term first came into being and that it would be almost another decade before he saw bathroom indoor plumbing for the first time.

The First Hundred Days is fairly self-explanatory: the first hundred days of a first-term presidency are used to measure the accomplishments of a president when the president’s power and influence are at their historically highest levels. During this period, the newly elected Commander-In-Chief, is most capable of passing their key political agenda initiatives due to high levels of public support and the inherent expectation of action that accompanies new administrations.

President Trump’s one-hundredth day in office will be Saturday, April 29^th. While the news is currently revolving around his accomplishments, or rather lack thereof, Part I will focus on the historical origins of the First Hundred Days.

The Great Depression and the Pre-FDR Role of Government

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) first coined the term “First Hundred Days” in 1933. Besides Washington and Lincoln, FDR faced the most challenging set of circumstances in American history as he found his presidency beginning four years into the Great Depression.

The Great Depression, which officially began in 1929 but originated as early as 1918, consisted of economic turmoil that resulted in high unemployment, wide spread bank failures that lost the money of companies and individual Americans, and the Dust Bowl, which ravaged the Midwest. Leading up to the election of 1932, the Midwest had seen economic decline after the end of World War I drove world demand for crops down. By 1929 and the Great Crash of Wall Street, farmers had been burning wheat and corn for heat for years if they hadn’t lost the farm to foreclosure. After four years of Republican control at the onset of the Depression, a mandate was given to FDR and the Democrats: DO SOMETHING.

While this would be expected in a similar situation today, such as the Great Recession in 2008, the government had a very limited role in society. Before 1933, the federal government only provided a few services: a military and pensions for veterans, supporting infrastructure (on a very small scale), and enforcing food and worker safety regulations.

Relief in any form was never considered the responsibility of the federal government. Be it from natural disasters like the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, the worst for the Mississippi in history to this day, or the need to feed the millions of unemployed masses in cities throughout the country, local government and charities shouldered the burden by themselves. Americans elected the Democrats with a desire for Uncle Sam to roll up his sleeves and do something.

FDR’s First Hundred Days

As Roosevelt came into office on March 4, 1933, he had two messages for the country: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” and that the federal government would resemble his governance of New York State over the past four years. The first major act of his administration was to control the escalating banking crisis by enforcing a national banking holiday beginning March 6^th. The banks reopened on March 9^th after the passage of the Emergency Banking Act, creating federal deposit insurance that is still in use today in nearly all banks as FDIC. With the passage of this legislation and the first of Roosevelt’s famous Fireside Chats, FDR and Congress created a remarkable turnaround in public confidence in banks, resulting in the stabilizing of the banking system that would be necessary to allow any form of economic recovery.

With the banks stabilized, Roosevelt began to work on the passage of relief and employment programs that would be known as the New Deal. While Roosevelt’s main goal was to increase employment, he recognized the need to create a new support system for the poor. The Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA) addressed the immediate, urgent needs of the poor who had been supported for at least four years by local government and charities by providing $500 million for soup kitchens, blankets, employment assistance, and nursing homes.

The third program was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), which provided work to unemployed men through environmental conservation projects. Often called FDR’s pet project because it was his favorite New Deal program, the CCC initially aimed to employ 250,000 men between the ages of 18-25 for six months. With camps typically of 100-250 men stationed across America, the CCC completed conservation projects ranging from planting trees and combating forest fires to preventing soil erosion and teaching farmers how to best manage their land for higher production and less soil loss. While the CCC program was ended in 1942 due to wartime economic production needs, the CCC employed over 2.5 million workers, planted nearly 3 billion trees, constructed thousands of miles of trails, and completed soil and water conservation projects on hundreds of thousands of acres of land.

The fourth program, passed in May 1933, was the Agriculture Adjustment Act (AAA), a program created to tackle the surplus supply of crops by setting national crop production quotas to reduce surplus farm production. The AAA production quota system was ultimately successful in reducing the number of acres that farmers plowed under and put into production, which raised the price of crops for farmers and helped reduce environmental degradation by prioritizing preserving land that was prone to erosion.

The National Industry Recovery Act (NIRA), the fifth program, was passed in June of 1933 to counteract the severe economic deflation that had occurred over the previous four years. The NIRA consisted of two parts. The first, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), focused on industrial recovery through regulations and voluntary compliance to industry standards. The second established the Public Works Administration (PWA), which provided federal funds for building infrastructure for the states.

The sixth program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was established to build dams on the Tennessee River and provide hydroelectricity and increase farm to provide relief and power for rural Appalachia, one of the hardest hit areas in the nation. While the TVA was controversial for marking the first time the government competed against private industry, it was widely popular for providing electricity and jobs to Appalachia. The TVA is still providing hydroelectricity to the Tennessee Valley today.

FDR’s Legacy of Action: The Measure of Future Administrations

These six New Deal programs were drafted, debated, and passed in the First Hundred Days of the Roosevelt administration. So why should you care? It is important to understand the origin of the First Hundred Day because it shaped the modern role of government in the U.S. Ultimately, FDR’s First Hundred Days were viewed as an overall success as he was able to shepherd six major acts of legislation through Congress that provided direct relief for the poor and projects for the unemployed.

In the midst of the Great Depression, FDR left a legacy that was so consequential that we use it for measuring presidential success to this day. To close, I’ll leave you with two of my favorite quotes that articulate Roosevelt’s determination to keep fighting in the face of “the worst hard times” to improve the lives of everyday Americans and his belief of the government’s need for immediate, nationwide action:

“When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

Guest Post: The Most Fun You’ll Ever Have Being Sad

Hey Purple State Progressive readers! This is Sam bringing you our second guest post and first from a great, longtime friend of Josh and myself. If I had a nickel for every time Josh, Jacob, and I debated about Midwestern and national politics while drinking Diet Pepsi and playing Xbox I’d have a gunny sack full of nickels. And if I had a nickel for every time we discussed college football, specifically Iowa Hawkeye football, then all three of use would have tickets to the Iowa-Wisconsin game in Camp Randall (*cough* possible future post topic hint, Mr. Knobbe *cough*). But Jacob’s talents expand extensively into an area that I can’t touch myself: tv series, music, and movie analysis. Today, Jacob provides analysis for one of Netflix’s new series that’s hot off the presses. Enjoy!

There was one thought I kept revisiting, somewhere between 5:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. as I let Netflix know that, yes, I was still watching their new teen thriller 13 Reasons Why: this show has no damn business being any good.

To call the premise ‘convoluted’ is an enormous generosity: 17 year-old Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford in her literal first ever role) commits suicide, leaving behind a series of 13 cassette tapes calling out the 13 people responsible for her death. The tapes bounce around the usual High School Suspects; from jock to cheerleader to jock to yearbook photographer to jock until eventually landing in the hands of perpetually moody and perplexed Nice Boy Clay Jensen (played by most recent product of the Miles Teller/Logan Lerman/Nat Wolff factory, Dylan Minnette). The pilot sets the series a Herculean task, pacing out 13 hour-long episodes, each focusing on a different character, without losing momentum and trying to heighten the stakes at every turn. Then you have the cast: Minette has had recent turns in Don’t Breathe and Goosebumps, but you’re hard-pressed to find a recognizable name or face in the bunch. Oh, and kids! ALL YOUR SCENES ARE ABOUT LOVE OR DEATH OR ASSAULT OR BULLYING OR THE ABSOLUTE LIMITS OF YOUR OWN EMPATHY VIS A VIS THE ABILITY TO EVER TRULY KNOW ANYONE!

So the show is frequently a trainwreck. It occasionally becomes so gummed up in angst and self-loathing that every character on-screen is nearly unwatchable. There are scenes of (trigger-warned) self-harm and sexual assault that border on pornographic, and at several times during the latter half of the series I genuinely felt sick to my stomach. The series almost certainly could have been told just as well in 8 hours vs 12, as some of the middle episodes get bogged down in needless bait-switching and fantasy sequences. I promise there will be times where the dialogue will cause your eyes to hurt from rolling them.

Here’s the thing though: when it’s not busy being any of that, it’s busy being the best teen drama of the 21st century.

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PART I – JUST KISS ALREADY JESUS CHRIST

13 Reasons is bleak and dark and sickening when it wants to be. Kate Walsh and Brian d’Arcy James are phenomenal as Hannah’s grieving parents, plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the school over their daughter’s death. The show doesn’t shy away from rape or suicide or drug abuse, and I would genuinely advise against anyone sensitive to those triggers from watching several episodes (trigger warnings are provided before these ones).

For balance’s sake, then, the show needs a heck of a light side to right the scales, and the young leads in Langford and Minnette do their best work with what could’ve easily become standard Nice Guy/Cool Girl fodder. With Minnette spending so much of the series in Harry-Potter-circa-Order-of-the-Phoenix mode, reacting to every situation by brooding or demanding answers or yelling about being **miSunDeRsToOd**, watching him earnestly, haplessly flirt is such a joyful change of pace. The will-they/won’t-they dynamic never feels dragged out, and each set-back seems earned. It’s the one thing the audience absolutely has to buy for the show to work: we need Hannah to have had at least one good and pure thing. We need to know that Clay is torturing himself in pursuit of the truth because of something meaningful. We need the teeny tiny lil umbrella of love in the torrential downpour of sadness and grief.

PART II – LETTING TEENS BE DUMB

A distressing development in today’s social media atmosphere is that of the flashback post: Facebook cutely invoking your nostalgia by sharing whatever post you made on this date X number of years ago. Three years since we got married! Half a decade knowing my buddy Christian! Two years since that infamous “antonin scalia retire bitch” status that cost you your job. Here’s a fun game – scroll down to the very beginning of your timeline and read any of the posts that you thought were worth posting in 2008. Spoiler alert: they are insanely bad. This doesn’t say anything about current-day-you or past-you, of course! Just that, probably, you used to be slightly dumber than you currently are. In 13 Reasons this is reflected in all of our young cast: Hannah’s voice leads off an episode confidently and incorrectly explaining Chaos Theory. Clay misunderstands nearly all the lessons Hannah and the tapes are trying to teach him, opting instead for a campaign of eye-for-an-eye vigilantism that feels so right for a dopey lovestruck crusader.

This, I think, is why the characters felt genuine to me. I didn’t go to a school with such a stereotypical social hierarchy, there weren’t roving gangs of jocks who would pants kids in the halls. But I felt like I was watching kids who were dumb in the same way I was dumb at 16. Who were so unable to talk about how they felt like I was, who fucked up and KNEW they fucked up like I did.

PART III – AESTHETIC

Purely from an eyeball stand-point, the show is simply a blast to watch. Flashbacks are always super easy to track as the color palette shifts from warm to cool, as future-Clay winds his way in and out of the past seamlessly. There are countless visual homages to the John Hughes films of the 80s, to Say Anything (Minnette and Langford look a LOT like John Cusack and Ione Skye, respectively), to its genre counterparts in Heathers and Riverdale. The soundtrack helps hearken back to the 80s as well, featuring a GNR cover and Joy Division to further evoke the golden age of teen cinema. There are also several clever ways the cinematography reinforces the story, shots hitting a focal point, sitting, and rotating 360 degrees about the character as Hannah’s voice over talks about there being “13 sides to every story.” I outright gasped at the final shot of the pilot. It’s real pretty.

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I can’t imagine that, should you watch 13 Reasons Why, it will be a Thing you feel half-way about. It’s an enormously ambitious, thoroughly flawed monster that does not allow for casual viewing. It’s an effort to have a serious talk about teen suicide, rape culture, bullying, and empathy within the confines of a psuedo-legal thriller format. It has some of my favorite shots and sequences I’ve ever seen on television alongside some that I probably could not bring myself to watch again. These contrasting elements, though, didn’t average each other out: simultaneously I feel grateful for what the show did well and furious at it for not being better. You will feel everything and know very little. And that, I think, is worth watching for.

Neil Gorsuch and the Progressive Purists

Fourteen months ago–eleven months before Obama left the White House–Antonin Scalia passed away.  Within hours, Mitch McConnell crafted, delivered, and stuck to the GOP’s strategy to prevent President Obama from seating a (rare) third justice on the Supreme Court.  McConnell’s reasoning, that a President in his last year should not make Supreme Court appointments, held a degree of truthiness that provided an effective way to delay the appointment of Merrick Garland: Obama’s qualified, moderate choice for the Supreme Court seat.  Garland never received a hearing in the Senate, and McConnell’s gamble paid off when Donald J. Trump beat the polling odds to defeat Hillary Clinton last November.  Paired with a Republican Senate, President Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch for the seat that Garland had previously been in the running to fill.

Gorsuch, a 49 year old judge from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, is an undoubtedly qualified juror. The graduate of Harvard and Oxford proves a fairly standard, inside-the-box selection for the erratic style of President Trump, and while discussions on his ideology from the New York Times and The Washington Post believe he will be to the right of Scalia, FiveThirtyEight suggests that he may be more moderate on immigration and employment discrimination.  A number of Democrats have attempted to paint Gorsuch as a corporation-friendly tool of the wealthy, but none of these attacks stuck.  During his hearings, Gorsuch avoiding a “borking” at the hands of Democrats by furiously complimenting the questioning Democratic senators and by affably shrugging off any serious criticism of his judicial record.  Democrats should have learned that any strategies to avoid Gorsuch’s confirmation cannot focus on Gorsuch personally.  As much as I disagree with him ideologically, he is a qualified candidate, just as Garland was.

Still, the Senate needs 60 votes to confirm Gorsuch, meaning that 8 Democrats would have to cross the aisle and vote for Gorsuch for this confirmation to be filibuster-proof. Republicans can decide to eliminate the filibuster, turning this nomination into a straight majority wins vote, and in this case it would not matter what Democrats crossed the aisle to appease home constituencies.  This brings us to Joe Manchin (D-WV), the most hated Democrat in the Senate by progressives all across America.  Manchin belongs in a nearly-extinct brand of blue dog Democrats from red states, along with Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), Joe Donnelly (D-IN), and Jon Tester (D-MT), among others.  These moderate Democrats won statewide elections in red states and (apart from Tester) have already stated that they will vote for Gorsuch’s nomination–a position popular with their constituents.

Progressive purists across the country, like the group All of Us, have demanded that these blue dog Democrats be primaried in their 2018 races for re-election.  In the eyes of these progressives, voting for Gorsuch is an unacceptable betrayal to the party and what it stands for.  I understand their argument–Manchin defects frequently from the Democratic party line and Gorsuch could feasibly be on the Supreme Court for upwards of 40 years, but as long as no more than seven Democratic senators cross the aisle, then the party as a whole can still filibuster the nomination.

Publicly declaring a yes vote for Gorsuch will buy support in these red states for the blue dog senators who cross the aisle, and it should bolster their chance of re-election in states that should lean Republican.  To that point, the purists will argue that a Sanders-type progressive should primary the blue dogs and win the Democratic nomination instead, but I hesitate to gamble on candidates who are more liberal in states like West Virginia and North Dakota.  Yes, Bernie won those states versus Hillary, but that does not mean that a Bernie-style Democrat can defeat a generic Republican in those states.  Trump won West Virginia by 42 points.  Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) beat her Democratic challenger by 28 points.  At the end of the day, I would rather have a Joe Manchin that votes with Democrats 77 percent of the time than a Republican who would vote with Trump 100 percent of the time.

Progressive purists demand an absolute commitment to progressive ideals with zero tolerance for nuance or defection.  If you are not a perfect progressive, you are not worth their time.  Did you vote for any of Trump’s cabinet nominees? They will call to primary you.  Nobody is good enough–not even Bernie Sanders.  These unrealistic expectations breed arrogance, apathy, and self-righteousness.  Why should I vote for Hillary when she broke with progressive creed so many times during her career?  Criticisms of Democrats from the left are valid and need to be heard, but we need to apply nuance and understanding of the political system in order to prevent a complete evacuation of power within the Democratic party.  Progressives in New York City and San Francisco cannot vote in West Virginia Senate elections.  We self-select into the most liberal cities in America, which tend to be in the most liberal states in America.  Our votes are so concentrated in these cities that our voices are disproportionately ignored in Congress.  Inevitably, we get frustrated by Democrats who do not adhere to our beliefs perfectly.

In order to recapture Congress and eventually the Presidency, the Democratic Party must accept all of those who can win races in states where progressives live in scarce numbers.  If we want to enact a progressive agenda, we need the Joe Manchins of the world to win first, giving us the legislative ability to drive our agenda forward.  So what do we do now? I would argue that progressives should pour our efforts into combating gerrymandering and voting rights abuses.  Democrats got more votes nationally for the President and Senate than the GOP but ended up out of power in all levels of government.  Through these fights for voting equality we can elevate progressive voices in Congress.