Blast from the Past: FDR's 'Hundred Days' Honeymoon - 1933
by Meteor Blades
Sun Mar 02, 2008
Hope and change. We've heard that seemingly inseparable combination rather
often the past 13 months from a man who would be president. Seventy-five
years ago this coming Tuesday, the man who had just become president
inaugurated a period of hope and change at a time when the nation was
desperate for both, and talk of revolution, dictator****p and the end of
democracy was rife on the street and among what today might be called
public
intellectuals. The speech initiating that period, delivered by a man who
could neither stand nor walk without assistance, is now remembered mostly
for a rhetorically powerful turn of phrase: "So first of all, let me
assert
my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -
nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts
to
convert retreat into advance."
In truth, there was a great deal to fear, and that inspirational phrase
didn't
make a good deal of sense.
Nonetheless, so began the longest presidency in American history, one
which
transformed the executive branch both in what it actually undertakes and
in
what citizens expect of it. The presidency as we understand it began with
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His inaugural address that March 4
three-quarters
of a century ago was the preface to the legendary "Hundred Days," a
rapid-fire flurry of presidentially directed "New Deal" legislation and
executive orders. As William Leuchtenburg wrote in The FDR Years: On
Roosevelt and His Legacy, Congress "did not so much debate the bills it
passed ... as salute them as they went sailing by." A political honeymoon.
Whether you count from the inaugural or, as historians do, from March 9,
the
Hundred Days, like the Hundred Years' War, didn't actually add up to a
hundred, but they have nonetheless been the measure - usually in negative
terms - for what succeeding administrations have accomplished. A study has
even gone so far as to determine how effective presidents before Roosevelt
were in their first 100 days. None came close. During the emergency
session
of Congress FDR called 15 major laws were passed and signed, all by June
16.
That legislation - some of it conservative, most of it moderate, none of
it
radical, all of it experimental - derived from no over-arching plan, and
certainly not from any liberal ideology that Roosevelt presented during
the
campaign and brought with him into the White House. Rather than a package
of
legislation, as implied by the Hundred Days label, what Roosevelt and his
"Brain Trust" of academics and economic theorists produced was a
mish-mash,
exactly what would be expected of experimentation in the face of a
daunting
crisis. "The notion that the New Deal had a preconceived theoretical
position is ridiculous," said Frances Perkins, who would become FDR's,
Secretary of Labor from 1933-45, the first woman ever to serve in the
Cabinet.
The experiments worked not just for what they actually achieved - which
was
a mixed bag - but also for how their very coming into being changed the
nation's somber mood. As Roosevelt said at his inaugural: "This nation
asks
for action, and action now"; "We must act, we must act quickly"; People
want
"direct, vigorous action." As Jonathan Alter wrote in The Defining Moment:
FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, "In the argot of a later age,
Roosevelt was relentlessly on message." He spurred hope in the face of
despair by force of personality.
More: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/2/22106/45080/207/467631
Business Plot Against FDR
The Business Plot, the Plot Against FDR, or the White House Putsch, was a
political conspiracy involving several wealthy businessmen to overthrow
the
presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933.
Details of the matter came to light when retired Marine Corps Major
General
Smedley Butler testified before a Congressional committee that a group of
men had attempted to recruit him to serve as the leader of a plot and to
assume and wield power once the coup was successful. Butler testified
before
the McCormack-Dickstein Committee in 1934.[1] In his testimony, Butler
claimed that a group of several men had approached him as part of a plot
to
overthrow Roosevelt in a military coup. One of the alleged plotters,
Gerald
MacGuire, vehemently denied any such plot. In their final re****t, the
Congressional committee sup****ted Butler's allegations on the existence of
the plot,[2] but no prosecutions or further investigations followed, and
the
matter was mostly forgotten.
Major General Butler claimed that the American Liberty League was the
primary means of funding the plot. The main backers were the Du Pont
family,
as well as leaders of U.S. Steel, General Motors, Standard Oil, Chase
National Bank, and Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The BBC do***entary
"The Whitehouse Coup" alleges that Prescott Bush, father and grandfather
to
the 41st and 43rd US Presidents respectively, was also connected.[3]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
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