As we approach President Biden’s 100th day in office at the end of this month, some observers are flattering him with comparisons to two legendary Democratic presidents of the 20th century — Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Those names reportedly came up when historian Jon Meacham convened a group of his colleagues at the White House in early March for a private session with Biden. And since then, the aptness of comparing this new president to such transformative figures of the past has become a matter of some debate in Washington and beyond.
The sheer scale of Biden’s spending and change agenda finds its analog only in the early achievements of FDR and LBJ. But which of those administrations offers the better insight into what is happening now, or what happens next?
Roosevelt, in just his first hundred days in 1933, reversed the tide of U.S. public policy after a dozen years of Republican presidents known for their aggressively pro-business views and their defense of such social restrictions as Prohibition.
Many of the most enduring changes FDR wrought did not come until later. The flurry of reforms and programs launched in his earliest months restructured the banking system and put millions to work. It also restored faith in government action and expanded the role of the federal government in the economy and in citizens’ everyday lives.
Years later, when a visitor to Washington asked to be shown the monument to FDR, he would be told simply to look around at the official government buildings visible in all directions.
The icon’s mantle
Is Biden reaching for the mantle of FDR, or having it thrust upon him?
The new president has already signed into law a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package, the American Rescue Plan, which includes an array of health programs, but also a far-reaching assault on child poverty that exceeds anything since the 1960s.
Moreover, Biden has proposed an even larger $2 trillion infrastructure package — the American Jobs Plan — that would not only rebuild roads and bridges, but build half a million charging stations for electric vehicles, while investing vertiginous sums of money in research and development to modernize manufacturing and retrain workers and to expand home health care, improve broadband and the electrical grid.
“Even if you adjust for inflation and use constant dollars, there is far more money in what Biden is doing than in the programs Roosevelt put in place in his first hundred days,” says journalist and historian Jonathan Alter, author of the book The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
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These mammoth bills do more than move mountains of money. They are also attempting to re-engineer key aspects of the system. FDR altered the workings of capital and labor in ways that are still very much with us today. Biden may be trying to do some of the same, but the new president’s work has just begun — and his changes have yet to face the test of time.
“It’s difficult for me to conceive that they will be transformational to the degree that the New Deal’s undertakings proved to be,” Stanford historian David M. Kennedy wrote in an email earlier this month.
Kennedy, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for his book Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945, cites “just a handful of examples,” including Social Security, banking and labor reforms, housing policies and the Securities and Exchange Commission, which, taken together “materially changed the terms of life for every generation since.”
Kennedy also cited two “domains where transformational change is needed.” Climate is one, and inequality is the other. “If the Biden efforts effect change there, then comparison with the New Deal may well be appropriate.”
