In his foreword, Michael Kazin examines the achievements and limits of the New Deal and the reasons that FDR remains, for many Americans, the exemplar of a good president. Levine illuminate the period from 1933 to 1938 by setting each of the Fireside Chats in context and reprinting a moving selection of the letters that poured into Washington from an extraordinary variety of ordinary Americans. He concluded by encouraging Americans to “tell me your troubles.” Roosevelt’s invitation was unprecedented, and the enormous public response it elicited signaled the advent of a new relationship between Americans and their president. During this address, Roosevelt used the intimacy of radio to share his hopes and plans directly with the people. Roosevelt’s famous Fireside Chats, which came on the heels of his decision, two days after his inauguration, to close all American banks. “My friends, I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” So began the first of Franklin D. Levine, The Fireside Conversations: America Responds to FDR During the Great Depression. Here’s his Fireside Chat on that year’s Drought Conditions, and I’ll leave you to try to imagine what it was like hearing it for the first time, 84 years ago. On September 6, 1936, President Roosevelt addressed the nation about his visits to drought-stricken areas, about the government’s plans for relief, and what he hoped for the future. Livestock died in the hundreds of thousands, countless acres of crops were ruined, and the parched land wouldn’t be fertile again for years. The eventual human death toll was over 5,000. But the drought extended into the South and went further west than other droughts had. Temperatures in the mid-west stayed above 100 degrees fahrenheit for the longest period in recorded history. This brought economic disaster to some of the most-productive farmland in North America.Ī severe heat wave in 1936 made things worse. If things weren’t bad enough for the United States in the early 1930s, drought and high winds turned large swaths of the American mid-west into a “dust bowl.” Crops dried out, the soil became depleted and almost worthless. I’ve also relied on the work of Frank Sparrow, the Director of the FDR Presidential Library, and special help from my Buzzkill Bestie on Twitter - show presents FDR’s 1936 Fireside Chat about drought conditions in the US during the early- and mid-1930s.

The link is available in the blog post for this episode at The Fireside Chat Committee at the Buzzkill Institute includes a number of experts on 20th Century US history. That show explains the subtleties and complications in this story. Most people probably were, but if you listen to our original show on this, you’ll hear our explanation of the vast diversity of American opinion about them at the time. The complications of the history of the Depression and FDR’s responses to it have been ironed out by subsequent generations, mainly because it’s easy and reassuring to see things in a comforting light, especially when we tend to look at history as bye-gone days when things were “simpler.”Īmong other things, the American public in the 1930s and 1940s was not universally calmed by the Fireside Chats. You’ve referred to: FDR’s “truthfulness,” his “factual approach,” and his “self-control.”īut as an historian, I want to stress again that the history, production, and reception of FDR’s Fireside Chats has been overly-romanticized and grossly simplified in the popular mind and media. Again and again, I’ve been struck by the exact wording that some of you have used in your messages to me asking for more Fireside Chat shows. As I said last week, the contrast between FDR’s Fireside Chats and what’s coming out of the White House gets more and more stark every week. So, continuing to air FDR’s Fireside Chats is a good idea. I think it’s very fair and accurate to say that President Trump’s press conferences on the Covid-19 virus crisis this week have been even more strange, more chaotic, and more unsettling than the previous ones. I’ve done this because there’s so much that people and students need to know about the last few centuries, that I didn’t feel that I should tread on the last two decades.īut the more historians I interviewed about relevant topics in history, the more I’ve dug into highly disturbing aspects of fairly recent American history, and the more that you listeners have asked me to do things like play the audio from FDR’s Fireside Chats during the current crisis, the more I’ve had to re-think what this podcast could and should do. And the history courses I have taught always stopped at the end of the 20th century. I never wanted this podcast to be about contemporary politics, much less contemporary American politics.

Fireside chats dust bowl