When Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president of the United States and took office in March 1933, he led an extraordinary three months-plus program of new legislation to turn Depression-plagued America around in his administration’s First 100 Days.
When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office on March 4, 1933, during the darkest and most desperate depths of the Great Depression, he revived a phrase that had been born on February 26, 1815, when Napoleon returned to France from his exile on the island of Elba. For the next hundred days, he led a stunning military campaign to regain his conquest and his throne. Napoleon singlehandedly rebuilt an army of 250,000 and very nearly succeeded in retaking his lost empire. Of course, it all ended badly for him a hundred days later at the Battle of Waterloo, on June 18, 1815, yet “The Hundred Days” became a phrase that has continued to echo down through history. FDR picked it up 118 years later and put it on himself.
