![]() “You’d be hard-pressed to find a president since Roosevelt who’s had a more important first hundred days,” said Sidney Milkis, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia. (FDR coined the term in July 1933, when he gave a radio address reflecting on “the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.”) What the two share in common is the urgent need to show the American people and the world that, amid turmoil accompanied by widespread disillusionment with Washington, government can still work at the most fundamental level. Roosevelt three score and eight years after Lincoln’s death-when FDR rushed through emergency legislation in record time to defeat the Great Depression-many historians today disdain it as largely a media contrivance designed to conjure headlines.īut neither can we dismiss the hundred days standard entirely, especially now, with Joe Biden replacing Donald Trump at a time of multiple crises: a pandemic that has cost more than half a million American lives, a rolling cataclysm of natural disasters exacerbated by climate change, an economy still bleeding millions of jobs, and a foreign policy that remains inchoate and aimless as America’s global leadership is in doubt.Ī number of prominent historians and political scientists who study the presidency suggest that this period is different: that Biden’s first hundred days have mattered a great deal, perhaps as much as Roosevelt’s did in fighting the Depression. That in turn suggests that the first hundred days metric is hardly an accurate measure of presidential success. Yet that president, Abraham Lincoln, is today considered one of America’s greatest- the greatest in the eyes of many historians. Meanwhile, no matter what he tried, the nation literally fell apart around him. No sooner had he taken the oath of office than he began to violate it, suspending habeas corpus and arresting dissidents without trial. president ever have a more ominous first hundred days? Fearing assassination, he slunk into Washington under the cover of night, in disguise, and registered without public notice at a hotel near the White House.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |