Gingrich and Roosevelt - 17 March 1995

A young politician, a new Congressman, a Republican who last January was bright eyed and bushy tailed and now is bleary eyed and weary sagged into a deep chair the other twilight and he said: "Tell me, how many more years left to the end of the 100 days?" The answer was April the 15th.

Now since both the question and the answer may puzzle more people than it amuses, let me start by talking about this slogan, which became a cliché 30 or more years ago, but which is revived every time a new Congress is sworn in. First though, which 100 days was the Congressman deploring? Well in the wake of the Republican landslide last November with the Republicans in the majority in both Houses for the first time in 40 years.

Mr Newt Gingrich, as you must know by now stood up on his first day as speaker and flourished a rolled document as it might have been Magna Carta. He called it a contract with America and through a spurt of preliminary rhetoric he promised, as all party rhetoric does, that the days of reckless spending and taxing and bureaucracy and gridlock – created this time by the Democrats – were over and the days of Republican wine and roses were about to dawn. The 100 days, that's what he said. Now why, why does every administration declare the day it comes in that its great policy changes, its own splendid reforms are to be enacted in the 100 days.

The thing started, well the actual original phrase came from the prefect of Paris and was spoken in June 1815 of Louis the 18th, when the King returned to the capital, he had to flee from the oncoming Napoleon: "A 100 days Sire have elapsed since the fatal moment when your Majesty was forced to quit your capital in the midst of tears." But in all the following history books about that explosive period, there was always a chapter entitled the 100 days and it referred to the far more dramatic three months and more, between Napoleon's escape from Elba, his march across Europe, his defeat at Waterloo and his abdication, which by the way was 16 days over 100.

However, the stirring phrase came to be applied to American history after Franklin Roosevelt had come to the White House, when he'd at once called a special session of Congress and, as it happened, poured through a frightened but willing Congress a riptide of legislation the like of which was never seen before or has been seen since.

I remember especially just having arrived from England and a torpid coalition government disheartened and divided under the impact of the depression and the woolly helpless rhetoric of Ramsey McDonald in decline. I remember the tonic, almost the narcotic effect of being here in the winter spring of 1932/3 and seeing with what speed and daring and imagination a floundering democracy could be revived and set on the run.

A huge public works project reaching across the entire country mobilising millions of unemployed in the building of bridges post offices, dams, hospitals and a national double laned highway system. The federal insuring of bank deposits, a national system of welfare and relief which took in the homeless and even the quarter of a million boys and girls who were nomads. A federal dam and all its attendant spillways and power stations to bring electric power and control flood waters over a region the size of England. Issuance of a new currency, re-opening of all the banks and by presidential fiat, the compulsory closing of all banks Roosevelt felt had a wobbly past and no future. A new system for loans to homeowners everywhere, a bill adjusting farm prices across the country and providing subsidies for growing some crops and not growing others, an expensive cushion we're still plagued with, and which the Republicans would like to abolish except that so many Republicans come from Midwestern and Western farming states, that will raise Caine if nothing else, if anyone dares to touch their subsidy. But all this, this special session took just 100 days.

Well Mr Newt Gingrich saw himself as Franklin Roosevelt resurrected – he said so – and he promised that his contract with America, his laundry list of urgent legislation would be rammed through a submissive house in exactly 100 days. Mr Gingrich you know is a very lively and articulate historian, a professor of history and on January the 20th, no later, he saw ahead and could decipher in the historical writing on the wall an indelible chapter entitled: The 100 Days of Newt Gingrich.

Well I ought to say that Roosevelt rammed his pile of legislation through both Houses in record time. I said the 1933 Congress was frightened absolutely of that winter, the outbreak of the second American Revolution. More than one third of the whole workforce unemployed, one family in three or four with nothing coming. Only in pre, just pre-Hitler Germany, had I seen anything like the face of depression across the whole of America. Roosevelt dared to say in his inaugural speech that he might have to take steps beyond the Constitution, which he did. The authority to dictate prices and wages forbid strikes, impose subsidies, float a currency, discipline the banks and the rest of it were all acts of national socialism presided over however by a benign dictator. And he got the authority to do it all from one of the first bills that sailed through that nervous Congress: the NRA, the National Recovery Act, which would in three years by the way, was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Mr Gingrich has proposed nothing as remotely radical as Roosevelt was allowed to get away with, he stays entirely within the democratic structure and discipline of government, which includes, he will soon be grieved to see, the necessary approval of the Senate.

It must be said that the new laws have gone hurtling through the House in a burst of activity we've not seen since 1933, but whereas both Houses were equally eager to say 'amen' to Roosevelt, only the House this time with its near fights and shining eyed newcomers was willing to say aye to their leaders radical initiatives. I won't begin to list the raft of laws that have gone through – we're only at day 74 I believe – and when the 100 days are up will be time to say: how stands the contract with America? By that time, much of it will have passed over to the Senate, which believe me is nothing like so bloodshot an institution as the House.

For one thing the merits of the new legislation apart, the Senate has a more stately pace and is proud of its more circumspect approach to new laws and particularly to panting crusaders. A good deal of the oxygen will be removed from some of the House legislation and apart from the Senate's traditional pace, the Senate has had time to reflect on the public's reception of some of the House bills, all of which have tried to obey Mr Gingrich's and indeed the Republican campaign promise to decentralise as much of the government as possible, to make massive spending cuts in federal programs that subsidise the health of the rich but also the maintenance of the poor single mothers, but then, by dispensing block grants, to leave the running of these things, of welfare and other social services to each of the 50 States.

There has been a huge outcry over the abolition of federally funded school lunches, which the Democrats have represented as a piece of typical heartless Republican thrift. All the Democrats have been able to claim since the Republicans took so much of their campaign rhetoric away from them, is that they're fundamentally more compassionate than, well, anybody.

The Republicans hasten to point out that the block grants given to each State to handle as they saw fit, would provide actually more money than the Federals spent. First, school lunches, the responsibility of being fair and compassionate with the young was up to each State. It dawned on some politicians rather late in the day that the chief peril to this new system, if the Senate passes it, will be in the dangerously wild range of standards of nutrition say, the States will be free to set.

And old famous American doctor who led the campaign in his time to establish the Federal Food and Drug Administration, he told me long ago that in his young days, indeed into his middle-age, the disparity between the standards of public health demanded by the different states before they had a Washington watchdog was frightening if not, he said, outrageous. Thus the middle western farming dairy estate of Wisconsin settled mostly by Scandinavians and Germans, had he maintained, a standard, a rule book of public health measures unsurpassed in the Western world. Whereas in a south-western state, which shall be nameless, the Public Health Commissioner was a failed doctor who on the side protected, for a fee, a wealth of illegal brothels. And it doesn't take much imagination to speculate on the sort of daily lunch that might be urged, say, on a state where one of the chief industries was the manufacture of junk foods. It remains to be seen in much of the new legislation what the effect on popular opinion will be if the Senate gratifies most of it.

So far the evidence of the polls already suggests a shocked backlash from the original euphoria that greeted the Republican landslide, and never forget that the landslide was just more than 50 per cent of the one third of the registered voters who actually voted in November, so the landslide was that of one sixth of the voters. That small peep of triumph has been amplified by both parties into the voice of the people, a misleading trick. A better sense of what most people felt all along is now available in a late poll, which shows that since Mr Gingrich proclaimed the Republican escape from Elba and started the triumphal march, President Clinton's popularity has gone up from 38 to over 50 per cent. Watch it Newt, Louis the 18th may yet return!

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