In the annals of the United States government, the first hundred days of Roosevelt's New Deal hold an unbroken record for governmental activism in peacetime. No contemporary observer could be left in any doubt that the new administration meant business, but not business as usual. Bold experimentation was the order of the day. The president asked for a lot and Congress gave it to him with extraordinary dispatch.

In his opening moves, Roosevelt kept faith with his campaign pledge to redefine the role of government in economic life. Many of his early actions were driven by the imperative to provide relief for distress, both to individuals and to institutions. Directly or indirectly, few citizens were left untouched. The unemployed were made eligible for direct federal assistance, and the strains on state governments – beleaguered by this burden – were eased. Indebted house-holders and farmers were aided by governmental financial backstopping to arrest foreclosures. Guarantees to railroads both helped to keep the transport system alive and defended those who would have been seriously damaged by default on railway obligations, particularly the insurance companies and their policyholders. Bank depositors were shortly to become the beneficiaries of a governmental program to insure their deposits. The very structure of the nation's financial institutions was also transformed through legislation requiring the divorce of investment banking from commercial banking.

Though many of the early initiatives were hastily improvised, a number of them had been foreshadowed during the campaign.