FDR's First Fireside Chat; or, Investment Banking for Dummies

Fireside Chat photograph, undated

Photo Credit: Fireside Chat, undated. From UNC Greensboro Special Collections and University Archive's Photostream

Imagine yourself as an average American on a Sunday evening in March of 1933. The Great Depression has reached its peak and for the past few days every bank in the nation has been closed. Unemployment is at record highs and shows no sign of improving. You are afraid for your own future and the future of your country. Then, the President's voice comes over the radio. Less than 15 minutes later, your fear is assuaged and you know what you must do to help the nation's economy recover from the crisis.

That will be the hook for my civic artifact speech, which will be about FDR's first Fireside Chat (which you can listen to here). The Fireside chats were a series of speeches broadcast over the radio throughout FDR's presidency directly to the American public. The first, made shortly after FDR was inaugurated as president, dealt with what was then a very urgent topic: the banking crisis.

A bank run drained cash reserves from almost every bank in the United States, forcing closures and causing the already-struggling economy to enter a tailspin. As a result the federal government declared a bank holiday to allow cash to be delivered to banks on credit against the banks' assets so that they could reopen.

In order to make sure that the banks stayed open, however, the public would have to be convinced that their money should be kept in banks. While those with a background in finance would already be convinced of this fact, most members of the public were still scared by the bank closures and would likely have made another bank run.

FDR's first Fireside Chat was an explanation, in layman's terms, of why the banks had closed, why they were reopening (and why they were not all reopening at once), and why citizens should do their best to keep their money in their bank accounts. In my speech, I will analyze why FDR's speech was so effective. The speech will likely talk about how FDR used his choice of language both to establish a connection with and to express complicated financial concepts to a general audience. I will also include information in my speech about how FDR was able to use the idea that suffering can be civic to reframe keeping money in the bank as a civic duty.

Comments

  1. Morgan MalinichSeptember 14, 2017 at 6:58 AM

    The Great Depression was a very interesting time period for our country. I feel like you have strong background knowledge in this topic! You have two very good points to talk about in your speech. I look forward to hearing your speech in the future!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Liam KennySeptember 14, 2017 at 7:06 AM

    You seem to have a lot of knowledge on this area, and even though I don't your hook made me very comfortable and interested! I look foward to your speech, I feel like it will teach me a lot.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownSeptember 14, 2017 at 7:12 AM

    I really enjoyed your hook, it kept me interested the whole way through. It seems like your are going to be very confident during your speech because you really do know what you are talking about. IT comforting that so many Americans were able to rely just on the mere voice of the president; whereas now there is an large amount of distrust.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Robin KramerSeptember 14, 2017 at 11:17 AM

    Seems like you're on the right track, Jacob. Interesting choice of artifact for analysis!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My TED Talk; or, Why Not To Change Your Topic 36 Hours Before Deliviring a Speech

As you might well surmise from the title of this blog post, the preparation process for my TED Talk took something of a turn for the unconventional partway through. This in fact stems less from what I did read in preparation for my talks as much as from what I did not read. I had prepared a talk that, due to a lack of reading of the assignment sheet and a few bad assumptions, was only tangentially related to the research that I had already conducted. Late on Tuesday evening, as I was practicing my speech, my instincts told me that my speech might not be related enough to my research to fulfill the requirements on the assignment sheet. Sure enough, it did not fit the requirements, and I wrote and practiced an entirely new speech on that day and the day after. Beyond my correction of this oversight, the reading with the greatest influence on my final talk was certainly all of that reading that informed me to make my speech a narrative. I found that framing the growth in the anti-scie...
Read more

Kairos; or, Sun Tzu the Rhetor

Image
Sun Tzu, master of military strategy, wrote in his seminal work The Art of War "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight". Of course, rhetoric is not a military art, but it is still strategic (i.e., it involves assessing one's circumstances systematically and identifying what to do to reach some goal) and so this advice still holds true. If we reinterpret this statement along rhetorical lines, we might summarize it by saying that no rhetor will be successful unless they speak (or write) their message at the optimal time. In fact, given this rephrasing, we could easily say that Sun Tzu was talking about the military equivalent of the rhetorical concept of kairos. Kairos is a Greek concept that is roughly equivalent to the English word timing. It means possessing the right confluence of current trends and events as well as audience beliefs to convince an audience of a concept. An argument without good kairos will inevitably fail, while a well-timed ...
Read more