It will take time - and plenty of time - to work out our remedies administratively even after legislation is passed. Individual or local or state effort alone cannot protect us in 1937 any better than ten years ago. National laws are needed to complete that program. Today we are only part-way through that program - and recovery is speeding up to a point where the dangers of 1929 are again becoming possible, not this week or month perhaps, but within a year or two. We then began a program of remedying those abuses and inequalities - to give balance and stability to our economic system - to make it bomb-proof against the causes of 1929. We also became convinced that the only way to avoid a repetition of those dark days was to have a government with power to prevent and to cure the abuses and the inequalities which had thrown that system out of joint. In 1933 you and I knew that we must never let our economic system get completely out of joint again - that we could not afford to take the risk of another great depression. In effect, four Justices ruled that the right under a private contract to exact a pound of flesh was more sacred than the main objectives of the Constitution to establish an enduring Nation. The change of one vote would have thrown all the affairs of this great Nation back into hopeless chaos. Today's recovery proves how right that policy was.īut when, almost two years later, it came before the Supreme Court its constitutionality was upheld only by a five-to-four vote. Soon after, with the authority of the Congress, we asked the Nation to turn over all of its privately held gold, dollar for dollar, to the Government of the United States. We were then in the midst of the great banking crisis. I am reminded of that evening in March, four years ago, when I made my first radio report to you. Tonight, sitting at my desk in the White House, I make my first radio report to the people in my second term of office. For the many messages which have come to me after that speech, and which it is physically impossible to answer individually, I take this means of saying "thank you." In an era when presidents had previously communicated with their citizens almost exclusively through spokespeople and journalists, it was an unprecedented step.Last Thursday I described in detail certain economic problems which everyone admits now face the Nation. Farmers, business owners, men, women, rich, poor-most of them expressed the feeling that the president had entered their home and spoken directly to them. The success of Roosevelt’s chats was evident not only in his victory in three elections, but also in the millions of letters that flooded the White House. After World War II began, he used them to explain his administration’s wartime policies to the American people. Over the course of his historic 12-year presidency, Roosevelt used the chats to build popular support for his groundbreaking New Deal policies, in the face of stiff opposition from big business and other groups. He used simple vocabulary and relied on folksy anecdotes or analogies to explain the often complex issues facing the country. In fact, Roosevelt took great care to make sure each address was accessible and understandable to ordinary Americans, regardless of their level of education. Journalist Robert Trout coined the phrase “fireside chat” to describe Roosevelt’s radio addresses, invoking an image of the president sitting by a fire in a living room, speaking earnestly to the American people about his hopes and dreams for the nation. They reached an astonishing number of American households, 90 percent of which owned a radio at the time. Roosevelt went on to deliver 30 more of these broadcasts between March 1933 and June 1944. The nation was worried, and Roosevelt’s address was designed to ease fears and to inspire confidence in his leadership. was at the lowest point of the Great Depression, with between 25 and 33 percent of the workforce unemployed. The banks would be reopening the next day, Roosevelt said, and he thanked the public for their “fortitude and good temper” during the “banking holiday.”Īt the time, the U.S. Roosevelt began that first address simply: “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” He went on to explain his recent decision to close the nation’s banks in order to stop a surge in mass withdrawals by panicked investors worried about possible bank failures. Roosevelt gives his first national radio address-or “fireside chat”-broadcast directly from the White House. On March 12, 1933, eight days after his inauguration, President Franklin D.
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