Figure 1.--President Roosevelt's Fireside Chats were legendary. They provided the personal touch that made him such a formidable politician. Radio allowed the President to speak directly to the people rather than through Conservative-dominated newspapers. This 1935 "Esquire" cartoon was a wonderful characiture of the phenomenon. Behind FDR I think is Noel Coward perhaps perplexed with the President's radio popularity. Of course Eleanor is there. Also note the grandkids, upset because they are missing their favorite radio programs. The caption read, "Aw gee, Gran'pop you're running over into Ed Wynn's program." The cartoonoist was quite well known in the 1930s, but I do not know his name.

The Great Depression of the 1930s was the worst economic slump ever to affect the United States. A new era of the American presidency was initated on Sunday evening, March 12, 1933. Most Americans sat down after dinner in their living rooms to listen to the newly inagurated president. Most were worried. The Depression was rapidly paralizing the country and the Government seemed unable to take effective action. With all this gloom, a calm, reassuring voice came through the radio exuding confidence in the future. President Roosevelt explained in understandable terms just how the Depression had come about and what he planned to do to get the country out of the Depression. The radio seems almost made for President Roosevelt. It offered the ability to speak directly to the whole country with out the complications of visual images. The fireside chats were a revolution in communication and in many ways profoundly change the office. The presideny was a much more formal office before FDR. The fireside chats seem very casual and informal. They were of course swrewdly calculated. Primarily previous presidents communicated with the public through the press. Many important newspapers, however, in the 1930s were oriented toward the Republicans. Homey, "down-to-earth" language was carefully adopted so that the major issues of the day could be explained to the proverbial "common man". FDR had a wonderful feel for the power of words and phrasing. Terms like "lend lease" and the "arsnal of democracy" were used in the fireside chats to help win public acceptance of the administration's policies. Most of the fireside chats were dilivered from the White House, but a few were made at Hyde Park as well. They were carefully times. May were on Sunday knowing that the whole family would be home. Almost always they were in the evening, timed to catch the family after they had dinner and were gathering around the radio in the living room to listen to the evening programs. To many it was almost as if they were inviting the President into their living room for a personal chat. No other president had ever attempted talked to the average voter in this way. And none had the voice that the president possessed.

The Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s was the worst economic slump ever to affect the United States. It was not just a national economic crisis, but one which spread to virtually every country. The greatest calamity to befall Americans in the 20th century was the Great Depression--a worse calamity than even two world wars. The Depression began with the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929. Soon business were going under and Americans were losing their jobs. All Americans were affected. Eventually about one-third of all wage earners were unemployed and many who kept their jobs saw their earmings fall. President Hoover who had engineered a humanitarian miracle in Europe during World War was unable to break away from the mindset that the Government should not intervene in the economy. President Roosevelt was elected by a landslide in 1932. He brought emergy and new ideas to Washington and the Federal Government initiated programs that would have been rejected out of hand only a few years ago. Roosevelt was willing to use the Government to solve economic and social problems besetting Americans. The people loved him, electing him to an unprecedented third and fourt term. The propertied class or "economic royalists" as he called them, hated him. Roosevelt's program was called the New Deal and the many programs initaited help change the face of the United States: Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), protection for union organizers, and many others. The conservative-dominated Federal Courts struck down WPA, but many New Deal programs endure to this day. The great novel to emerge from the Depression was John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath which addressed to problems of rural Americans and the dust bowl. Urban Americans of course also suffered. While the New Deal brought relief to many desperate Americans, the Depression lingered until orders for war material from Europe began to flood into America in the late 1930s. The rest of the world was also affected by the Depression. Britain and France also struggled with the economic down turn. The response in Germany and Japan was totlalitarianism, militarism, and finally war.

The New Deal

Roosevelt's program was called the New Deal and the many programs initaited help change the face of the United States: Social Security, the Tennessee Valley Authority, rural electrification, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), protection for union organizers, and many others. The conservative-dominated Federal Courts struck down WPA, but many New Deal programs endure to this day. The new president undertook immediate actions to initiate his New Deal. To halt depositor panics, he closed the banks temporarily. Then he worked with a special session of Congress during the first "100 days" to pass recovery legislation which set up alphabet agencies such as (Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) to support farm prices and the (Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to employ young men. Other agencies assisted business and labor, insured bank deposits, regulated the stock market, subsidized home and farm mortgage payments, and aided the unemployed. These measures revived confidence in the economy. Banks reopened and direct relief saved millions from starvation. But the New Deal measures also involved government directly in areas of social and economic life as never before and resulted in greatly increased spending and unbalanced budgets which led to criticisms of Roosevelt's programs. However, the nation-at-large supported Roosevelt, electing additional Democrats to state legislatures and governorships in the mid-term elections. Another flurry of New Deal legislation followed in 1935 including the establishment of the Works Projects Administration (WPA) which provided jobs not only for laborers but also artists, writers, musicians, and authors, and the Social Security Act which provided unemployment compensation and a program of old-age and survivors' benefits. Roosevelt managed to achieve needed social legislation in a still very conservative country. His genius was in pursuing "nobel objectives within the tactics of the feasible". [Freidel]

Franklin Roosevelt

Franklin Roosevelt was the most formidable politican in American history and his fire side chats were a part of his magic. The 30th president is generally considered to be the most important American statesman of the 20th century. He led America through the two most serious crises of the century, the Great Depression and World War II. He inspired confidence and despite his patrician origins came to be loved by the least favored Americans. Thus when other countries turned to totalitarianism and dictatorship, American democractic society grew stronger. His policies helped to give voice of the American worker through trade unions. The resulting prosperity of the American worker created the basis for the success of the American economy in the second half of the 20th Century. He was born into a wealthy family with an elderly father. He had a charmed childhood at his father's Hyde Park, New York estate. He was a cousin of President Theodore Roosevelt, whose niece he married in 1905.

The First Fireside Chat

A new era of the American presidency was initated on Sunday evening, March 12, 1933. Most Americans sat down after dinner in their living rooms to listen to the newly inagurated president. Most were worried. The Depression was rapidly paralizing the country and the Government seemed unable to take effective action. Many Americans had lost money in the stovk market, but by 1933 many more Americans were becoming desperate. Many had been evicted from farms and homes. As many as a third of Americans had lost their jobs and many more were concerned about their jobs. Banks had been closed. Many Amereicans stood to loose their life time savings. With all this gloom, a calm, reassuring voice came through the radio exuding confidence in the future. President Roosevelt explained in understandable terms just how the Depression had come about and what he planned to do to get the country out of the Depression.

Radio

The first American commercial radio broadcast took place on November 6, 1920, in Pittsburg Pennsylvania. The station was KDKA. A Westinghouse employee climbed into a wooden shack on the roof of a company plant and spoke into a converted telephine mouth piece. The first words were, "We shall now broadcast the election returns." He went on to provide details on the election of Warren Harding as president. It did not take long for radio to become a major industry. By 1925 about 10 percent of Americans had radios and by 1933, despite the Depression, 63 percent of Americans had acquired a radio.

Family Listening

President Rooselvelts Fireside Chats were carefully timed to be broadcast after th family had finished dinner and sat down in their livingroom to listen to their favorite radio programs. The radios t the time were often large pieces of furnitur and in many homes dominated the living room, with the comfortable chairs and sofas being arranged around it. Most parents, especially those affected by the Depression were anxious to hear what the President had to say. Often the children wre not as pleased as the Fire Sidechat would interupt theor favorite program and they ofte had only ab hour or so after inner befor it was there bedtime.

Conservative Press

Franklin Roosevelt became president just when radio had arrived in a big way in American life. For him this was a very foritutious development. The New Deal was making very substantial changes in American life, affecting the monied class in countless ways. Roosevelt very quickly after the First 100 Days became the target of relentless press attacks. He got along very well with reporters, but their newspapers were in the hands of very conservative owners which played an activd role in determining the paper's editorial policy. As a result, Roosevelt to sell the New Deal needed a direct line to voters and that line was the Fireside Chat.

The Voice

The radio seems almost made for President Roosevelt. It offered the ability to speak directly to the whole country with out the complications of visual images. These were always complicated by his handicap. Roosevelt and his advisrs were unsure how the public would react to a severely handicapped president, so it was largely kept hidden from them. He used it masterfully in much the same way that President Kennedy used television. The President's voice was not new to the American people. People in New York had heard him as governor and he had made many speeches over the radio even before the 1932 presidential campaign. Most Ameicans had listened to the the President's Inaugural Address on March 4, with the stirring call to battle to attack the Depression, "All we have to fear is fear itself," he decalred with the message that the Depression was not, as some had begun to think, insolvable. The Inagural Address was a formal ovation, almost a stern lecture. The Presiden'ts sonorous voice was used very differently in these fireside chats. They were delivered in a calm, conversational tone.

Approach

The fireside chats were a revolution in communication and in many ways profoundly change the office. The presideny was a much more formal office before FDR. Radio was still relatively new, but his predecessors had begun to use it. Presuident Hoover made a few radio speeches, all very formal. The fireside chats seem very casual and informal. They were of course swrewdly calculated. Primarily previous presidents communicated with the public through the press. Many important newspapers, however, in the 1930s were oriented toward the Republicans. The fireside chats gave the President the ability to speak directly to the public without having his words filtered by Republican editors. In addition, homey, "down-to-earth" language was carefully adopted so that the major issues of the day could be explained to the proverbial "common man". The term chats conveys the nature of the effort, to have what sounded like a personal conversation with he public. They were always clear and concise. They were never wordy and even with the necessary simplification never ever condescending. FDR had a wonderful feel for the power of words and phrasing. Terms like "lend lease" and the "arsenal of democracy" were used in the Fireside Chats to help win public acceptance of the administration's policies.

The Setting and Timing

Most of the fireside chats were dilivered from the White House, but a few were made at Hyde Park as well. They were carefully times. May were on Sunday knowing that the whole family would be home. Almost always they were in the evening, timed to catch the family after they had dinner and were gathering around the radio in the living room to listen to the evening programs. To many it was almost as if they were inviting the President into their living room for a personal chat. No other president had ever attempted talked to the average voter in this way. And none had the voice that the president possessed. It was not just that FDR was a superb orator, but he actually believed that he was being invited into livingrooms accross the country. Labor Secreaty Frances Perkins watched the President deliver some of his foreside chats. She described how he almost seem to see his listeners sitting in a comfortable cahir in the living room and an imaginary fireside: "His face would smile and light up as though he were actually sitting on the front porch or in the parlor with them. People felt this, and it bound them to him in affection."

The First Fireside Chat (March 1933)

In his first fireside chat, the new president gave the country a primer in the arcane world of banking. "...when you deposit money is a bank the bank does not put the money into a safe-deposit vault. It invests your money in many different forms of credit-bonds, mortgages. In other words, the bank puts your money to work to keep the wheels turning around..." Then he delivered some very good news. He announced that the banks would reopen the next day, and that banks could choose to participate would have most of their deposits guaranteed by the federal government. Most banks chose tom participate because warry investors began looking for the Federal Depositors Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This was one of many acronyms that would become a hallmarkm of the New Deal. It of course did not resolve the economic crisis, but it did mean that people could feel that their savings were secure. A continued run on the banks would have made the Depression even worse than it already was.

Other Fireside Chats

President Roosevelt would give over 30 fireside chats during his presidency. It was in these Fireside chats that he guided the Ameican people throught the New Deal. America was and continues to be a very conservative country. Manyb were warry of socaila experimentation. The President carefully explained the mix of innovation, pragmatism, improvisation, experimentation, and yes even a mild dose of soicialism (the term was of course never used by the President) that we now know as the New Deal. By the end of tghe decade, events in Europe and Asia shifted the focus of the fireside chats from ecoinomics to foreign affairs. The subject became first neutrality and preparadness as the America Firsters fought to isolate America. After Pearl Harbor the fireside chats would shift to the fighting as America set out to do nothing less than save the Western World from the new barbarism of the Axis powers.

Arsenal of Democracy (December 1940)

Another especually important fireside chat was the December first chat on national defence in which FDR expalined that neutral America must be the "arsenal of democracy". Certainly a contradiction, but all that was possible at the time given the power of the isolatioinists. President Roosevelt first used the term "Arsenal of Denocracy" on December 29, 1940 in one of his Fireside Chats, radio broadcasts, to the American people. He expalined the importance of supplying the people of Europe, at the time primarily Britain with the "implements of war". He said that the United States "must be the great arsenal of democracy". The very day he spoke, a Luftwaffe raid on London severly damaged famous buildings and churches in the city center and engulfed St. Paul's Cathedral in flames. Hitler feared America more than any other country, but was convinced that Britain could be defeated before America could be mobilized or American industry could be effevtiverly harnassed for the war effort. Neither the NAZIs or the Japanese had any idea just how effectibely American production could be converted to war production. Air Marshall Goering sneared. "The Americans only know how to make razor blades." Four years later with the Luftwaffe in tatters, Goering said he knew that the War was lost when American P-51 Mustangs appeared over Berlin escoring waves of bombers. The record of American war production is staggering and in large measure determined the outcome of the War.

The Map Speech (February 23, 1942)

Remarkable exercise in democracy occurred only a two months after Pearl Harbor. President Rooselvelt's Fire Side Chats are primarily associated with the Depression and promoting the New Deal. They did not, however, end with the outbreak of the War. One of the most famous occurred shortly after Pearl Harbor. The timing was remarkable. It did not occur after a great American victory or offensive. It occurred at a bleak time of the War. The Allies were in the defensive everywhere. The Pacfic Fleet had been smashed at Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were achieving victory after victory in the Pacific. Singaporre had fallen and Batan was about to fall leading to the infamous Japanese Batan Death March. In the North Atlantic, U-boats were sinking Allied shipping. The Afrika Korps was on the move in North Africa. The German Wehrmacht was deep in the Soviet Union and preparing another huge offensive. Everywere the Allies were on the defensive and facing advancing Axis forces. The Axis powers did their best to hide negative war information from their peoples. Axis populations hearing nothing, but news of great victories were confused when they began to notice that the battles being fought were getting closer and closer. President Roosevelt took a different approach. He began what has become to be known as 'The Map Speech' by informing the listeners, '... your government has unmistakble confidence in your ability to hear the worst without flinching or losing heart'. What followed was not only unprecedented, but no president has since laid out in greater detail a program of such complexity and perhaps most importingly with such honesty and absolute faith in the American people. That faith would be reciprocated. President Roosevelt asked American families to have a map to help follow what he was about to tell them, 'to follow with me the references I shall make to the world encircling battlefields of this war." In living rooms all over America, maps were spread out in front of the radio. The President took a rapt audiece through the battlelines and explained the Axis objectives. He noted centers of critical natural resources. At the end of the sppech, millions of Americans knew just where they and their country stood.

Other Appearances

FDR of course did not only give fireside chats. He gave hundreds of stirring formal speeches where he castigated the Reopublican Congressional leadership ("Martin, Barton, and Fish) and the "economic royalists" opposing the New Deal. One of his favorite venues was the Democratic Party's Jefferson Day Dinner. It was here that he delivered his Fala speech. The state of the union speech was another important venue for the president. It was here that he made his famous Four Freedoms speech. The President was also a master at handling the press. He gave almost 1,000 press conferences. No other president has even approachhed this number. The pressidential press conference has never been the same after FDR. The normal approach was for reporters to submit written questions to the President's press secretary and they would be leasurily answered when and if president and his staff saw fit. This was because most presidents were not prepared to speak knowlegeably about many issues, Theodore Roosevelt, was an exception, and ceratinly not as frankly as FDR.

Adolf Hitler

FDR was not the only great orator in the 1930s who mastered the radio. Hitler had conducted the first modern political campaign in Germany. Using the radio and flying from one city to the other, he developed the image of a modern, dynamic leader. Both men took office at about the same time and died within days of each other. They were however complete opposites and their way of addressing their people was strikingly different. The contrast between President Roosevelt's calm, reasoned Fireside Chats and Hitler's shrill, hate-filled tirades before packed auditoriums is notable. The President's voice was calm, reassuring, and deliberate. Most Americans thought that he was speaking to them from his own living room. There was no staged marching music, no waving of banners, no raised voices, and no adulatory aplause and party salutes. After taking power, the NAZIs made inexpensive radios available to the Germans so that they could listen to Hitler and other NAZIs spew out hatred and national bigotry. In the end, it was FDR and his use of mass media to promote democracy and reasoned political debate that emerged victorious.

Online Archives

Readers can access the President's farside chats online.

Sources

Freidel, Frank. Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Little Brown: Boston, 1973), 574p.

Created: April 14, 2003
Last updated: 6:35 PM 11/2/2010