How many fireside chats were there

The Agricultural Adjustment Administration AAA was created to ease the desperate plight of the farmer during the Depression by establishing a program of production limits and federal subsidies. The NIRA established codes of fair practice for individual industries in order to promote industrial growth. Its purposes were twofold: first, to stabilize business with codes of "fair" competitive practice and, second, to generate more purchasing power by providing jobs, defining labor standards, and raising wages.

The NRA also reflected trade union hopes for protection of basic hour and wage standards and liberal hopes for comprehensive planning.

General Hugh S. Johnson headed the NRA and eventually proposed a "blanket code" pledging employers generally to observe the same labor standards. By mid-July he launched a crusade to whip up popular support for the NRA and its symbol of compliance, the "Blue Eagle," with the motto "We do our part. While developing programs to help America emerge from the Great Depression, Roosevelt also needed to calm the fears and restore the confidence of Americans and to gain their support for the programs of the New Deal, including the NRA.

One of the ways FDR chose to accomplish this was through the radio, the most direct means of access to the American people. During the s almost every home had a radio, and families typically spent several hours a day gathered together, listening to their favorite programs. Roosevelt called his radio talks about issues of public concern "Fireside Chats.

Roosevelt continued to use fireside chats throughout his presidency to address the fears and concerns of the American people as well as to inform them of the positions and actions taken by the U. Although this radio message, given on July 24, , addressed some of the problems and issues of the Great Depression, it also focused on what industry, employers, and workers could do to bring about economic recovery.

By the end of the decade, ninety percent of Americans said they would sooner give up movies than radio. The primacy of radio as a source of entertainment and news gave President Roosevelt an opportunity no U.

Presidents before him had always had to rely on newspaper reporters and editors to convey their words to the public, leaving their original message open to editorial slant or misquoting.

Live radio, by contrast, left no room for misquotation. Listen to the beginning of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Fireside Chat explaining the banking crisis. During his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt used periodic Fireside Chats to tell the public what government was doing about the Great Depression and later, the second World War. During the years of the New Deal, President Roosevelt addressed the nation on-air about twice a year, announcing each chat a week or two in advance to ensure a wide listenership.

He defended government programs, answered his critics, expressed encouragement through difficult national times, and requested cooperation with his policies. The sense of connection with the president was immediate.

Listen to President Franklin D. President Roosevelt was not the first Chief Executive to make use of the radio, though he was certainly its most gifted presidential practitioner. President Herbert Hoover had campaigned on radio and given regular radio addresses, but his microphone presence sounded much more formal than conversational.

Like most politicians of his time, President Hoover had treated radio broadcasting as a chance to give an official speech. President Roosevelt, by contrast, let his voice rise and fall naturally as he spoke on air.

Even though each of his talks were fact-checked and re-written six or more times by a team of secretaries, speechwriters, and press specialists, his delivery still made them sound fresh. He had a gift for clear diction and simple analogies. Seventy percent of words used in the Fireside Chats were among the five hundred most commonly-occurring terms in the English language.

He also spoke slower than most radio announcers of the time, using an average of sixty-five fewer words per minute. Roosevelt had a gift for connecting with the American public with his voice. On March 12, , he took one more important step, delivering a relatively informal address on the banking crisis that would be broadcast over the radio. During the s, well before the advent of television, some 90 percent of American households owned a radio.

Seeing the potential of mass media to communicate directly and intimately with the public, Roosevelt would give around 30 total radio addresses from March to June Roosevelt was not actually sitting beside a fireplace when he delivered the speeches, but behind a microphone-covered desk in the White House. Roosevelt took care to use the simplest possible language, concrete examples and analogies in the fireside chats, so as to be clearly understood by the largest number of Americans.

Finally, the president appealed to God or Providence at the end of almost every speech, urging the American people to face the difficult tasks ahead with patience, understanding and faith. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. When Franklin D. The stock market had fallen a staggering 75 percent from levels, and one in every four The s in the United States began with an historic low: more than 15 million Americans—fully one-quarter of all wage-earning workers—were unemployed.

President Herbert Hoover did not do much to alleviate the crisis: Patience and self-reliance, he argued, were all Americans Roosevelt that aimed to restore prosperity to Americans. When Roosevelt took office in , he acted swiftly to stabilize the economy and provide jobs and relief The Great Depression was the worst economic downturn in the history of the industrialized world, lasting from to It began after the stock market crash of October , which sent Wall Street into a panic and wiped out millions of investors.