The first 100 days aren’t enough to cement a legacy.
from the shackles of the gold standard, legalized beer , stood up public works and relief agencies, rescued rural America with farm subsidies, launched a massive regional development effort by creating the Tennessee Valley Authority, and much more. Though it would ultimately take the industrial frenzy of World War II to restore full prosperity to the United States, the economy did begin to heal and the sense of impending calamity faded.
More sinisterly, the code-making process in many key sectors was dominated by the largest corporations and their trade groups, who used it as a federally sanctioned opportunity to ignore antitrust laws to the detriment of smaller competitors. Few of the code authorities ultimately had representatives from labor or consumers.
Without these accomplishments, the New Deal would have been an impressive effort of economic firefighting and expansion of federal power, with some lasting legacies like banking deposit insurance and securities regulations.them, Roosevelt laid down the bricks of a truly transformative legacy.
In some ways, you could say the first 100 days provided an appetizer for Roosevelt’s agenda, while the second 100 turned out to be the main course. “The first 100 days were sort of a down payment on what Roosevelt the New Dealer was going to try to do,” University of California, Davis historian Eric Rauchway, author of the new book, told me.