April 29, 2025.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt popularized the idea that the first 100 days of a presidency established an administration's direction.

As soon as he took office on March 4, 1933,

he called Congress into special session to meet on March 9th

to address the emergency of the Great Depression.

Congress responded to the crisis by quickly passing 15 major bills

and 77 other measures, first to stabilize the economy and then to rebuild it.

On July 24, 1933, FDR looked back at the crowding events of the 100 days,

which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal.

In a fireside chat broadcast over the radio, FDR explained that his administration had

stabilized the nation's banks and raised taxes to pay for millions in borrowing.

That federal money was feeding starving people, as well as employing 300,000 young men to work in the

Civilian Conservation Corps, planting trees to prevent soil erosion, building levees and

dams for flood control, and maintaining forest roads and trails.

It was also funding a public works program for highways and inland navigation, as well as state-based municipal improvements.

The government had also raised farm income and wages by regulating agriculture and abolishing child labor.

FDR was speaking on July 24th to encourage Americans to get behind a program of shorter hours and higher wages to create purchasing power that would restart the economy.

It goes back to the basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even

hope to bring about, he said. If I am asked whether the American people will pull themselves

out of this depression, I answer, they will if they want to. Today is the hundredth day of

President Donald Trump's second term in office. He marked it by delivering

what amounted to a rally outside Detroit, Michigan, in which he claimed his had been the most

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