Obama’s One Hundred Days in The Footsteps of Roosevelt

Hyde Park (New York) – Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a brave optimist: as a boy, every winter he would speed along the frozen Hudson river with an iceboat, a sailboat with skates, given to him by his mother. The river was visible through the trees from the windows of his house and on the coldest mornings of the beginning of the 20th century he would go down to brave it. “The only thing we should fear is fear itself,” he would say thirty years later when he was sworn in as the thirty-second president of the United States, only this time he wasn’t thinking of the strength of the ice but of the democracy of his country.

That statement would remain his most famous, even if at the time nobody applauded him on the steps of the Capitol and few newspapers reported it. Today it’s come back into fashion: Barack Obama studied it carefully and from the moment that the economic crisis started to be compared to the Great Depression, Roosevelt became his lucky charm, the example to take hold of, the model to follow in his first Hundred Days in the White House.

Even at the beginning of October, during his electoral campaign, when fear of the financial disaster was starting to spread, he came out on a stage in Ohio and, citing Roosevelt, said “This is not the time to panic but the time to resolve problems and restore trust.”

To take up the presidency in 1933, at the start of the Great Depression, Roosevelt needed a fair bit of courage, more than is needed today: at dawn on Saturday the 4th of March, a few hours before his inauguration ceremony, he would receive the news that the governors of Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania had ordered the indefinite closure of all banks within their states, after they went bankrupt to the tune of four thousand banks. Unemployment rose above 25 percent, the stock market had crashed 75 percent since 1929, hunger and poverty were rife in both town and country and the suicide rate had tripled.

But Roosevelt appeared in front of Capitol Hill in Washington and said that there was nothing to fear: for one hundred days Congress was called into a special session and between March 5th and June 16th he brought in an unprecedented series of emergency measures which would forever change history and face of America.

He wrote his inaugural speech in just under four hours on the morning of Monday February 27, 1933, in the Hyde Park house on the Hudson where he was born and grew up. This same spot, where today his presidential library stands in the middle of the snowy woods, is where you have to come to find the roots of the most extraordinary beginning made by any president in American history, and to understand what Barack Obama will do. Here, on show, are all the documents, maps, books and objects of that race against time and fear which was FDR’s one hundred days.

“We must act and act swiftly,” has been the phrase Obama has repeated in every speech since before Christmas, but it’s one of many he has borrowed from Roosevelt. As is the slogan: “Our goal is to get people back to work.” And then he adds a saying typical of rural America: “Shovel ready,” showing his willingness to get to work.

On the night table of the first black president, throughout the autumn, was a book by the journalist Jonathan Alter called “The Defining Moment,” which tells of Roosevelt’s first three months as president and his “triumph of hope.” He liked the expression “defining moment” so much that he also used it in his victory speech in Chicago, when he said that “change has come to America.”

Obama read and re-read those 400 pages in order, first of all, to understand how FDR managed to communicate with his citizens, how to explain what was happening and to convince them to have faith once again. Roosevelt came into the homes of more than 60 million Americans thanks to the radio: on Sunday evening he would speak for half an hour, explaining and reassuring, thus were born his “fireside chats.” In the Hyde Park library you can listen to them: he had a calm voice, an intimate and informal style, he was instructive, simple and pronounced every word clearly. Even Obama has listened to these tapes again, studying every detail of his voice and most importantly, trying to find the secret of how to calm a worried nation and balance the urgency to act with the need to spread hope.

Today Obama says that in his inaugural speech he wants to explain in the most honest and truthful way possible what the current situation is and which are the best ideas to overcome the challenge. Roosevelt tried many recipes, not all of them were a success, but the effort was unbelievable: to bring the banking system under control, he put three million young people to planting trees, created parks and protected areas, refinanced a million people’s loans who were at risk of losing their homes or land, rewrote financial legislation and launched the biggest program of public works in history, financing 270 thousand projects across the whole of America. He had bridges, tunnels, roads, dams and power stations built, which gave work to two-and-a-half million people. He sent photographers to every corner of the country to show the desperation and leave a historical record of the Great Depression and the New Deal response. Then, by canceling prohibition, he gave people back their beer and a bit of joy.

Even Obama is convinced that, in such exceptional times, only the State can give the helping hand necessary to find a way out of such a deep recession, for this reason he has asked Congress to approve an 800 billion dollar plan to revive the economy. To do this, he too wants to build bridges, roads and schools, back new forms of energy, reinstate regulations on Wall Street and restore hope.

To conquer the citizens and change the mood of the country he’s thinking of using all the techniques he tried in his electoral campaign: radio, television and the internet to keep the American people constantly informed of how he’s spending the money, by giving the number of schools being renovated or the new job posts created. He wants to keep mobilization high and communicate constantly, exchanging emails with the other 11 million citizens who contacted him during his electoral campaign. Roosevelt, after his radio chats, started to receive 50,000 letters a week, ten times more than his predecessor, but then Hoover had only one secretary to reply to his correspondence, whereas he put together a team of fifty people to take care of the post. The White House was besieged with messages and telegrams, but Roosevelt didn’t let it go to his head. He understood straight away that he couldn’t just keep repeating the same message, otherwise it would lose its effect, to the extent that, in 3692 days in the White House, he held only 31 “fireside chats.”

Obama is convinced that the opposite is true, that communication is a continuous offensive and to this end he fills every possible space with his messages. Obama’s first hundred days will finish on April 30th, but he says he would prefer to be judged on his first thousand which would be closer to Kennedy’s lot.

At the end of Roosevelt’s one hundred days the Great Depression hadn’t gone away, the crisis dragged out through the decade, but in four years the unemployment rate fell by 11 points. The democratic president, who was re-elected for four terms, succeeded in stalling the disaster, maintaining order, keeping democracy on its feet and, above all, restoring hope to Americans.

On June 16th, when the hundred days of special measures were over, Roosevelt went on holiday. With his white hat on, he went out on the sloop Amberjack II, a little sail boat rented in Massachusetts, and sailed up to the charming island of Campobello in Canada, where the family had a summer house and where, in 1921, he fell ill with polio. He never returned there, that dream spot turned into a nightmare, from then on he could never walk without assistance. But that month of June he found the courage to do it, having defeated America’s fear and his own.