1/24/2024 0 Comments Fireside chats dust bowl![]() ![]() The first thing you're struck by when listening to these recordings - other than their sometimes-staticky quality - is the timbre of Roosevelt's patrician voice, so unfamiliar to us. In our time of financial crisis, when everyone from the President to the world's richest person is telling us we're near the abyss, it's worth hearing what a previous president said when Americans actually were in the abyss. Imagine how far from Main Street Wall Street must have seemed then. Millions still depended on farms for subsistence, much less a livelihood. ![]() Only one-third of Americans were high school graduates. Unemployment was 25 percent in 1933 and didn't drop to single digits until the U.S. population of 130 million was poor, uneducated and without hope. FDR won popular support for radical programs and executive power grabs by comforting and uplifting his listeners. ![]() Roosevelt seized on the power of a new technology - radio - to explain the complex financial situation to frightened, helpless Americans. Seventy-five years ago, the nation was gripped by a Great Depression. What might FDR say in a fireside chat during the financial crisis of 2008? The opening words of that talk had been “My friends.” His closing words were, “Together we cannot fail.FDR delivers one of his famed fireside chats from the White House. “Confidence and courage are the essentials of success in carrying out our plan,” he said in that first fireside chant. But all are operating against the background, and toward the standard of connection, set by the 32nd president, Franklin Roosevelt, starting in 1933. Some of these presentations have been more effective, some less. Nearly every president has followed Roosevelt’s example of the basic three part structure of a leader’s speech at time of tragedy or crisis: First, expressing empathy for the pain and fear of the moment second, expressing confidence about success and recovery in the long run and third, offering a specific plan, for the necessary next steps. In 1977 the newly inaugurated 39th president Jimmy Carter gave a fireside chat about the nation’s energy crisis, a speech that, as it happens, I helped write. What I find most remarkable in the tone that followed was a president talking up to a whole national audience, confident that even obscure details of finance could be grasped if clearly explained, rather than talking down, to polarize and oversimplify.Ĭonsciously or unconsciously, nearly every presidential communication since that time has had FDR’s model in mind. Discussing, explaining, describing, talking-those were his goals, not blaming or declaiming or pronouncing. Roosevelt’s next most important words came in the next sentence, when he said “I want to talk for a few minutes” with his friends across the country about the mechanics of modern banking. But none of them had dared imagine the intimacy of this tone-of trying to create a national family or neighborhood gathering, on a Sunday evening, to grapple with a shared problem. A few previous presidents had dared broadcast over the radio-Harding, Coolidge, Hoover. They were addressing the public as a group-not families, or individuals, in their kitchens or living rooms: My friends. But American presidents had been accustomed to formal rhetoric, from a rostrum, to a crowd, stentorian or shouted in the days before amplification. Of course political leaders had used those words for centuries. The most important words in Franklin Roosevelt’s initial fireside chat, during the depths of Depression and banking crisis in 1933, were the two very first words after he was introduced. This is what I thought about FDR’s language, and how it connects to the spirit of our moment in political time: It’s fascinating to watch, as a historical artifact you can see the C-SPAN footage here.) (Why me? In 1977-which was 44 years after FDR’s first fireside chat, and 44 years ago, as of now-the newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter gave his first fireside chat, which I helped write. You can see a clip from that documentary here.Īs part of the UNUM series of contemporary response to historical footage, Burns’s team asked me to respond to the FDR segment. Roosevelt’s radio addresses known as “fireside chats.” It was drawn from Burns’s earlier documentary Empire of the Air, which was narrated by Jason Robards. One more of these segments covers the revolution in political communication wrought by Franklin D. Some of the modern commenters are Yamiche Alcindor, Jane Mayer, Megan Twohey, Kara Swisher, and Will Sommer. His latest segment involves “ Communication” in all its aspects, and it combines historical footage with current commentary. The renowned filmmaker Ken Burns has a new project called UNUM, about the sources of connection rather than separation in American life. Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. ![]()
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