Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Abergen.

This day, June 16th, 1933, a special session of Congress adjourned.

It had begun three months earlier and all told Congress passed and President

Roosevelt signed into law 15 major pieces of legislation aimed at combating the effects of the Great Depression.

This is of course what came to be known as the New Deal, so I'm joined to talk about the passage of the new deal by as always Nicole

Hemmer of Columbia. Hello Nicky.

Hey Jody. So I will confess that one of the reasons I wanted to do this

topic is we saw that you know this date is considered the passage of the New Deal.

And I will say, like, the New Deal is something I'm aware of,

you know, monumental legislation and a monumental series of acts.

I had never really thought of it as something that, like, had to go through the legislative process and maybe was you know argued and

bargained over and so forth like for some reason it just is this thing that existed

and I hadn't ever really thought about the process by which it came to be.

Yeah, I think we often think of it as, you know, the New Deal era or this sort of amorphous

platform that FDR had. But this period, this first hundred days, which becomes part of the way

that we measure presidencies, was remarkable for the raft of real legislation that it passed. And should know that this is this is really just the first new deal

There's a second new deal that comes a couple of years later that really gives us some of that landmark legislation as well but all of that had to be worked out.

And the idea that you could pass 15 major pieces of legislation

and work out the text of them and get them passed through Congress

in 100 days is something that is unfathomable now.

Yeah, and there are some really fascinating elements to that process.

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