In a letter dated this day in 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote
to the International Mark Twain Society to acknowledge that he took his
famous "New Deal" from the following passage in Chapter 13 ("Freemen") of
Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court:


here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its
population

I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and
ninety-four
of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the
other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all
the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four
dupes needed was a new deal.