I like Julian Zelizer's division of FDR's objectives into three parts: immediate economic relief, infrastructure investment, and social engineering (that's a paraphrase, but I think an honest one.) But I'm not sure Badger's analysis entirely supports Zelizer's argument.

Zelizer writes: "It is clear that government spending during WWII was responsible for lifting us out of the Depression, not the New Deal. During the 1930s, FDR was not willing or able to go far enough in growing government." Both of those points are true as far as they go. But what they don't say is that, at least in Badger's reading (and I confess, in my own) government spending actually did a good job of lifting the U.S. economy, if not out of the Depression, then at least out of the immediate crisis. For one thing, part of that economic relief was in direct aid to states: both states like New York that already had "outdoor relief" programs (i.e. programs to aid people who didn't reside in state institutions) and states, like Pennsylvania, that left such relief up to private charities. As Mauritz Hallgrenm the editorial writer of the Baltimore Sun, observed in The Nation in his study of "Mass Misery in Philadelphia," by 1933 starvation was around the corner for millions of Americans. And the New Deal's programs largely averted that potential humanitarian catastrophe. (That most developed European countries already had social insurance programs by the 1930s shouldn't distract from the fact that the U.S. didn't, though it may account for this aspect of the New Deal's success being under-weighted in latter-day assessments). Badger also makes a case for the view that the stimulus of New Deal government spending did actually lift the U.S. economy as well. Here the data are more mixed, but it is at least arguable that it was FDR's misguided insistence on balancing the federal budget after 1936 that sent the recovery into a stall that only wartime spending would reverse.

On infrastructure, I would agree with Zelizer that the 100 Days offer many valuable lessons for Obama--not just on what you can accomplish (the TVA, hundreds of miles of highway and parkland, hydropower, etc.) but also of the real, immediate, and long-lasting political benefits that accrue to a political party or a government prepared to use the necessity of Keynsian deficit spending to pay for social goods whose benefit is obvious and whose appeal is broad. Nor need such infrastructure spending always be a solemn endeavor--personally I recall with great pleasure my visits to the Memphis Zoo, which like Robert Moses's parks and countless public buildings across to country was built by WPA workers and paid for by the public debt.

FDR was never terribly coherent as a social engineer. Brandesian ideas about breaking up concentrations of economic power jostled against the 1930s enthusiasm for planning, and for harnessing, rather than deconstructing, corporate power. Slum clearance projects meant to improve the lot of the urban poor often ended up displacing them, and agricultural subsidies helped wealthy cotton planters and abandoned sharecroppers. So let us hope that Obama is both clearer in his social imaginings and less hostage to established interests (such as southern planters and their representatives in congress) than FDR. (Or than Hillary Clinton proved to be when she tried to use Bill's first 100 Days to fix healthcare.) But along these lines I wonder if any of my fellow book clubbers would care to comment on what might be called the wrong lessons--or lessons not to learn--from the 100 days?