Roosevelt’s Fireside Talk

“My dears, I wish to speak for a few minutes about banks to the people of the United States: with the relatively few who understand banking mechanisms, but particularly with the vast majority of those who use banks for checking accounts and withdrawals.” With a calm and friendly tone of voice, on March 12, 1933 the then president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, addressed the population via radio to communicate an important reform of the banking system, which had been in a severe crisis for some time. That speech read on the radio 90 years ago would have been the first in a long series of informal communications that became famous as Roosevelt’s “fireside chat”, still studied today and considered one of the best examples of political communication for the masses in the first half of the 20th century. twentieth century.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, often referred to by just the initials FDR, had just turned 51 when he was sworn in as president of the United States for the first time. A Democrat, he had been elected in 1932 by beating outgoing Republican president Herbert Hoover, who had conducted a weak and ineffective electoral campaign in stopping the growing consensus towards his opponent. Roosevelt had been governor of the state of New York during the years of the Great Depression and had distinguished himself in managing the difficult situation of the economic crisis.

Precisely as governor, FDR had shown that he had understood the importance of the radio as a means of reaching voters directly, without “the filter of the press” as a modern-day politician would say. At the time, the most popular newspapers and some of the most powerful media groups were conservative in orientation, so Roosevelt believed that radio was a good way to at least partially circumvent the problem. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, that means of communication was also starting to establish itself as a new tool not only for entertainment, but also for providing news and updates on politics.

Already as governor Roosevelt had exploited some of his formal interventions, trying to transform them into broader speeches, having in mind the population as listeners and not politicians and insiders. Once elected president, FDR decided to apply the same approach, addressing on particular occasions to the widest and most varied audience of listeners possible, from large cities to rural areas where radio signals were beginning to spread.

He didn’t waste much time doing it. He was sworn in as president on March 4, 1933, and just nine days later he organized the first informal radio address for the nation. The occasion had been given by a reform of the banking system, which Roosevelt had had to provide as soon as he took office, due to a strong instability that had led to the closure of numerous banking institutions in the previous months. They were the consequences of the Great Depression that began in 1929 and that would condition a good part of Roosevelt’s presidency, together with the Second World War.

The economic instability had led many people to withdraw their deposits, fearing that the banks would become insolvent. To prevent further panic from spreading and levies from aggravating conditions in the country’s largest and most important banks, Roosevelt decreed a four-day nationwide shutdown of the banking sector. The suspension provided time for Congress to pass theEmergency Banking Acta series of reforms to introduce greater guarantees for account holders and reduce any risks associated with their deposits.

At 10 pm on March 12, 1933, FDR began his own speech on the radio, explaining in simple words the meaning of the recently approved reform. To some 60 million listeners, he said: “Your government has no intention of seeing the history of recent years repeat itself. We do not want and will not have another epidemic of bank failures. He then explained what the next steps would be and the strategies designed to reopen the system safely.

According to historians, on that occasion Roosevelt was very convincing in conveying the government’s intentions and the new guarantees for savers, who returned to depositing their savings in their respective banks. On that occasion the tradition of “fireside chats” was born, even though probably no one was fully aware of it yet. The idiom began to establish itself a couple of months later, when it began to be used by CBS, one of the leading radio broadcasters in the country. It was a definition which effectively restored the informal setting of those speeches.

During his four terms as president of the United States (the two-term limit was introduced in 1947), Roosevelt held thirty “fireside chats,” a relatively small number considering that his presidency lasted a total of 4,110 days. The fact that he held these speeches became so well known that even today there are those who are convinced that FDR gave one every week, but in reality the appointments were much more scattered and concentrated especially during the Second World War.

Roosevelt delivered his radio speeches from Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House in Washington, DC. He arrived about a quarter of an hour before the broadcast began, greeted the journalists invited to listen to him live and waited to be introduced with a very simple announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Shortly after, FDR took the floor starting with “My dears” or “American friends” to immediately give the idea of ​​the informal and friendly tone he wanted to use, however bound by the institution he represented.

To collaborators who participated in the drafting of speeches, Roosevelt recommended using short sentences and simple words, so that they were understandable to all. In most cases, about 80 percent of the words used in “fireside talk” reentered among the thousand most used words in the US English language. In the days leading up to the broadcast, around ten drafts were written to refine the text, simplify the more difficult passages and, where possible, cut something.

Roosevelt almost always read at his desk, not so close to the fireplace that initially didn’t even exist in the Diplomatic Reception Room (it was built later). He kept his mark by running his finger over the pages, paying attention to his intonation and not to speak too fast. Once listening again he noticed that when he spoke some words he made a whistle due to the excessive space between two lower incisors. He did prepare a small mobile prosthesis, which he stuck between his teeth when he had to read speeches.

On December 9, 1941, Roosevelt held one of the most “fireside chats.” difficult, just two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor by an Imperial Japanese Navy fleet that ushered the United States into World War II. He went over the steps that had led first to the war in Europe and then to the expansion of the conflict, explaining what had determined that situation, then he said: «We are now in this war. We all are and to the end. Every single man, every single woman and every single child is involved in the greatest enterprise in our American history. We have to share the good news and the bad news, the defeats and the victories: the contingencies of war».

At the end of February 1942, a new one was held speech, inviting the population in the previous days to obtain a map of the world. He said to his collaborators who helped him prepare the text that he would like to talk about distant places and unknown to many people, but which would have been decisive during the war. There was a marked increase in sales of maps and atlases, while numerous observers hailed Roosevelt’s speech as one of the best of his career.

The following year, on July 28, 1943 comment the fall of Benito Mussolini: «I think there was the first break in the Axis. The criminal and corrupt fascist regime in Italy is falling apart. […] Our plans to eliminate Mussolini and his gang have been largely successful. But we still have to eliminate Hitler and his gang, and Tōjō and his gang. None of us pretends it’s simple.”

FDR spoke his own ultima “chat at the fireplace” on June 12, 1944, less than a week after the Normandy landings, one of the most important war initiatives to open a second front in Europe. A few months later he won elections for his fourth term as president, even though he was already very ill. He died on April 12, 1945 and was replaced by his deputy, Harry S. Truman.

Roosevelt was certainly not the only one to understand the importance of the radio, but he was undoubtedly among the most able to exploit that emerging means of communication to reach the population directly. European totalitarian regimes would have used the radio a lot to make propaganda and broadcast the speeches of their dictators, but inevitably with a more distant and often formal communicative approach. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, delivered important speeches that helped to motivate the population, especially in the difficult times of the Nazi bombing, approaching at least in part the approach followed by FDR albeit with a greater inclination to bring out his own personal leadership.

Fireside chats helped not only to keep US morale high during World War II, but were also an important asset for Roosevelt in maintaining and garnering new support. The president used the speeches to reject the criticisms that were often leveled at him from the pages of conservative newspapers, to illustrate the merits of the new laws from the point of view of his administration and to deny rumors.

The most critical ones signaled the risks of such direct communication without intermediaries, in a debate that would recur cyclically with the advent of new means of communication, from television to the Internet. From a purely communicative point of view, Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” were one of the first and most important experiments around the radio, which intertwined with one of the densest and most important historical moments of the entire twentieth century.