FDR 1934, A Fireside Chat That Still Resonates.
By 1934 our country was pulling out of the depths of the Great Depression. During FDR’s first hundred days, from March to June 1933, with a huge Democratic party majority in the 73rd Congress, a parade of legislative enactments emerged. From the Emergency Banking Act to the National Industrial Recovery Act (later invalidated by the Supreme Court), such a response to economic emergency was unprecedented, and caused much concern among many, including the conservatives who mostly occupied the Republican party.
The arguments against federal “intervention” then were philosophically the same as what we hear today from the likes of Eric Cantor (R-VA), Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), and all of the GOP presidential primary contestants: allow the free markets to operate unfettered by government regulation in good times, and without government assistance in bad times.
FDR faced the same kind of resistance that President Obama faces today. Roosevelt, an upper cruster with ancestors who arrived on the Mayflower, and having a cousin named Theodore Roosevelt, became known among the scions of industry as a “traitor to his class,” a socialist, or fascist, or communist. His relentless program of relief, recovery, and reform frightened those who were accustomed to near absolute privilege. This is a primary theme in American – and world – history. It is class warfare, in its diplomatic stage. President Obama, and the country, now experiences a recapitulation of that continual struggle.
In mid-1934, FDR gave one of his “Fireside Chats,” to summarize the achievements of the first session of the 73rd Congress. In it, he discussed the numerous programs designed to continue the progress begun in the first hundred days, including the passage of the Securities Exchange Act. Below is a portion of that chat. It’s both eloquent and, these days, familiar in his descriptions of the criticisms he’d received from opponents:
Later in the year I hope to talk with you more fully about these plans. A few timid people, who fear progress, will try to give you new and strange names for what we are doing. Sometimes they will call it “Fascism”, sometimes “Communism”, sometimes “Regimentation”, sometimes “Socialism”. But, in so doing, they are trying to make very complex and theoretical something that is really very simple and very practical.
I believe in practical explanations and in practical policies. I believe that what we are doing today is a necessary fulfillment of what Americans have always been doing — a fulfillment of old and tested American ideals.
Let me give you a simple illustration:
While I am away from Washington this summer, a long needed renovation of and addition to our White House office building is to be started. The architects have planned a few new rooms built into the present all too small one-story structure. We are going to include in this addition and in this renovation modern electric wiring and modern plumbing and modern means of keeping the offices cool in the hot Washington summers. But the structural lines of the old Executive Office Building will remain. The artistic lines of the White House buildings were the creation of master builders when our Republic was young. The simplicity and the strength of the structure remain in the face of every modern test. But within this magnificent pattern, the necessities of modern government business require constant reorganization and rebuilding.
If I were to listen to the arguments of some prophets of calamity who are talking these days, I should hesitate to make these alterations. I should fear that while I am away for a few weeks the architects might build some strange new Gothic tower or a factory building or perhaps a replica of the Kremlin or of the Potsdam Palace. But I have no such fears. The architects and builders are men of common sense and of artistic American tastes. They know that the principles of harmony and of necessity itself require that the building of the new structure shall blend with the essential lines of the old. It is this combination of the old and the new that marks orderly peaceful progress — not only in building buildings but in building government itself.
Our new structure is a part of and a fulfillment of the old.
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For the full text of this Fireside chat.
