Why Biden’s First 100 Days Are as Important as FDR’s
Did any U.S. 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. No sooner had he taken the oath of office than he began to violate it, suspending habeas corpus and arresting dissidents without trial. Meanwhile, no matter what he tried, the nation literally fell apart around him.
Yet that president, Abraham Lincoln, is today considered one of America’s greatest—the greatest in the eyes of many historians. That in turn suggests that the first hundred days metric is hardly an accurate measure of presidential success. First used by Franklin D. 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.
But 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.
A 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. (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.
“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. Milkis had in mind Biden’s many executive orders reversing Trump’s policies and his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, but he added that these actions also take place in a nation arguably “more divided now culturally, regionally, and on matters of American identity—who we are—than we have been since Lincoln and the Civil War.” In a way, Milkis said, Biden faces a more treacherous situation than Roosevelt: “There was no insurrection at the Capitol during Roosevelt’s tenure, and few people questioned whether he was the legitimate president.”
Sean Wilentz of Princeton University also pointed to Trump’s trampling of the U.S. Constitution and postwar global system. “The whole status of the executive branch is in shambles, and you need to rebuild that quickly,” he said. “Most salient is the mistrust in the Justice Department, given the events of Jan. 6 at the Capitol. No modern president has inherited this kind of situation institutionally.”
Against these high stakes, the consensus among nearly a dozen presidential experts interviewed for this article is that Biden’s first hundred days have been mostly successful, even as he has failed to bridge the partisan gap left over from the bitterly divisive Trump years. Starting on his first day in office, Biden signed at least 50 executive orders, about half of them reversing Trump policies, including his withdrawal from the Paris climate pact, immigration policies, border wall construction, and the travel ban targeting Muslims. “I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” the new president said bluntly. (In fact, in his first two weeks in office, Biden signed nearly as many executive orders as…
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