Hundred Yard Dash

 

Hoover and Roosevelt try to pretend they're not in the same car as they ride to FDR's 1933 inauguration.

1932 was a fantastic year for movies. It was, however, a pretty rotten year for just about everyone else. By the time the presidential election rolled around in November, the American people, desperate for a change, would probably have gladly voted for Johnny Weissmuller, Hollywood's new minted Tarzan, rather than Herbert Hoover. Instead, though, they had Franklin Roosevelt as a choice and he won handily. By the time he took office in March, 1933, expectations were high.

Roosevelt realized something needed to be done and done quickly. In his first one hundred days in office, he took a series of actions meant to stabilize and then boost the American economy. Some worked, some didn't. Nevertheless, those one hundred days are now perceived as the cornerstones of what became known as the New Deal and the debate about whether that was a good thing or not has never stopped. The one hundred days has also since become a benchmark for other presidents, a period where they feel they have to define their presidency in a similar way.

In FDR: The First Hundred Days, Anthony Badger goes through the major events of that "defining moment," and brings together the various arguments for and against each one. The book has many virtues. Badger takes the time to explain why conservatives hated this program, why liberals thought it didn't go far enough, and why farmers were against it. Then he tries to pull away some of the mythology and clarify what really happened, such as whether Roosevelt was really anti-business (no, he says), whether he was power mad (again, no), whether his actions helped or hurt (yes...and no). It's a calm, clear, point by point approach that should be a good opener for anyone looking to investigate this period. A timeline listing important steps during the one hundred days is very helpful.

Virtues, though, while very nice, are rarely fun and I found this book incredibly boring. It was only about 175 pages, but I felt like I was hauling myself through mud as I read. The best sign in a book is when you wish it won't end, but with this one I actually went out of my way to find extra time to read just so I could finish more quickly and get on to something else.

(Keep reading to find out why I was bored...)

 

Fun in 1932--Gable and Harlow in Red Dust; Not so Fun in 1932--unemployment and poverty.

I'll first lay part of the blame for this with myself. I've stated many, many times before that I have regretfully not studied economics and therefore struggle when reading anything about monetary policy. I've also begun to suspect that maybe it wouldn't have helped even if I had taken that macro econ class in college. Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand this kind of thing. Whichever, I admit that whenever I'm confronted with lots of discussion of the dangers of the gold standard, tariffs, and devaluing the dollar, I'm lost, and I can't make my own decisions about what is right and what is not. It's not that Badger fills the book with pages of stats, it's just that anything on the topic eludes me.

That said, he also doesn't do anything to bring it to life. I had said that Nick Taylor's American-Made read a bit like a social studies book, but I didn't necessarily mean that as an insult (hey, I write social studies books!); I just meant that it was an overview, and didn't really have much style. But it was a friendly book nonetheless and you at least got the feeling like he was talking to the readers in a way that he hoped they would enjoy. This book reads like the college textbook that you wished you didn't have to read. If American-Made was a happy, open-hearted Golden Retriever, The First One Hundred Days is a chunk of sidewalk--useful, but a poor companion. It's not that Badger is trying to be completely dry--I don't think--it's just that the whole thing is just this, this, this, this and that, that, that, that. Call me weak, but I don't see why history can't be a story. There is very little personally about the main players--a brief about Henry Wallace was probably the liveliest section of the book (though Wallace does get the word "insatiable" applied to him twice in a one page stretch). There's nothing about how the programs really affected individuals, or any way to relate the legislation to the people it was supposed to help. The intro about the state of the country as the Depression set in was so familiar that I swear I had read it all before; seriously, haven't I read that sentence about "mules that had been painstakingly drilled to walk between the rows of cotton were now made to trample down those rows" several times before? And this sentence, "At that time, the only contact most Americans had with the federal government was the post office" has been in just about every book I've read about the 1930s (including the one I just started this afternoon). I'm absolutely not accusing the author of plagiarism, just that it seems like too many Depression historians go to the same cliche box.

And the point-counterpoint of trying to synthesize all the arguments confused me after a while (hey, I said above that I may not be bright enough for this). Sometimes I would find myself reading an argument against something and find myself trying to figure out whether it was one of the various camps perspective, what actually happned, or Badger's own opinion. I suspect this happened because I wasn't interested enough to really focus on what I was reading, my mind wandering instead ("Great Scott!! I'm only on page 137? Will this damn thing ever end?!!).

I would rarely tell people NOT to read a book--I would only do that if a book was obviously inaccurate or insulting in some way. This book does not have those problems, so I would not tell anyone to avoid it, and anyway, who am I to dismiss the work of a Cambridge professor? But I'm not planning to send out ecstatic emails saying, "I just found a great book!"

Better luck next time, let's hope.