FDR declared a national bank ‘holiday’ on the day he took office as President of the United States. Individual states had been using this idea in the past months to try and stem the tide of bank runs. One of these was when Huey Long ordered his governor to declare a bank holiday in Louisiana. The holiday was declared to be in honor of the sixteenth anniversary of Woodrow Wilson’s decision to sever diplomatic relations with Germany. This was the only significant incident Long could find for that date in a almanac that he had borrowed from a friend.

(Book – The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope)