March 12, 1933—Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to establish himself as the dominant player in
American politics for more than a decade with a landmark radio address that
explained the reasoning behind his plan to stabilize the nation’s banking
system.
Like the politician who influenced him the most, his
fifth cousin, the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, F.D.R. was a masterful communicator who knew how to sway the
modern media. T.R. started the Presidential practices of "floating trial balloons"
and meeting regularly with reporters (the hyperkinetic chief executive did so, at several times,
while he was shaving); FDR used an outgrowth of these interactions, the press
conference, to introduce the concepts of “background” and “off the record.” But
F.D.R. seized on another booming technology of the Twenties to become what the Radio Hall of Fame has called “the first great American radio voice.”
A CBS station manager, Harry Butcher, noticing that FDR
would be speaking from the White House Diplomatic Reception Room furnished with a fireplace,
came up with the phrase “fireside chat,” and the President’s press office immediately
seized on the homespun term. Through 1944, FDR would deliver more than 30 of
these, becoming, in effect, a kind of audio uncle to the average American
family.
In a period that, as much as any other in our
history, might be described as one of unrelenting crisis—pulling the nation
through the Great Depression and the struggle against Fascism—FDR’s voice went
against the grain. In these conversational addresses, he spoke more than 50 words per minute slower than the
average person. Particularly in that first fireside chat, when events had
seemed to be hurtling out of control because of a run on banks in the
Depression, he set the nation at rest. His words
assured Americans that, following a “bank holiday,” in which the nation’s
financial institutions were closed to allow the Federal Reserve to create de
facto 100 percent deposit insurance in the reopened banks, “No sound bank is a
dollar worse off than it was when it closed its doors last Monday.” But it was
his tone which confirmed that calm
was being restored and there would be no more runs on banks.
Second, he was countering all the forces
arrayed against him. Many newspaper owners were Republicans who were
unalterably opposed to the massive experiment with government and the economy
that the New Deal represented. FDR could, at his untelevised news conferences,
enlist reporters—labor stiffs, if you will—against their bosses. But fireside
chats allowed him to go directly over the news barons’ heads and to make news
himself, without the intercession of even his own press office.
Third, FDR used simple language that anyone could understand
and a device that virtually every one possessed. He might have been an Ivy
League-educated patrician, but his words never conveyed distance from his audience.
He included himself and his audience with the words “we” and “us,” and he used
analogies and metaphors common to all. (Several years later, when he sought to
circumvent isolationist sentiment to aid Great Britain against the riding Nazi
tide, he likened Lend Lease to providing a garden hose to a neighbor whose
house was on fire.) By speaking on the radio—a device that 90% of Americans
owned at this time—he created an alternative to the newspaper.
Unlike predecessor Herbert Hoover, FDR was
thoroughly comfortable with radio. He had been using it for the last four
years, as governor of New York, to rally support for his programs. He was demonstrating that radio could be used
not merely as a persuasive, but also an informative voice in American
democracy. (During WWII, he would urge listeners to go to their globes or atlases so they could follow along as he explained where their sons would be going into harm's way.) Americans confirmed his belief in the efficacy of radio by sending letters pouring into the White House afterward, thanking him for his talks
Three years ago, Ken Mueller, a former curator at
the Museum of Television and Radio (now the Paley Center for the Media), called
FDR “the first Social Media rock star.” The President might not have been around
for Facebook, Twitter and the like, but he sensed how new forms of
communication could help him.
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