FDR's First Fireside Chat: Public Confidence and the Banking Crisis (review)

As I write this review, Americans are observing the effects of a global economic crisis and questioning the soundness of banks. Thus it is difficult to avoid reading elements of the present into Amos Kiewe's fine analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first fireside chat on the banking crisis. I doubt I am the only American who has wished for a national leader to, as Roosevelt put it on the evening of March 12, 1933, tell us "what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps will be." Throughout this brief but informative book, Kiewe skillfully illustrates how Roosevelt communicated about the crisis with clarity and accomplished the most difficult of tasks in that troubled time: inventing public confidence.

Like other books in the Texas A&M University Press Library of Presidential Rhetoric series (which has grown to over a dozen volumes), Kiewe's book takes up a single presidential text, situates it in political and historical context, analyzes it in light of that context, reports on public response, and assesses the speech's impact. The books in the series present presidential rhetoric as the product of complex rhetorical situations, competing persuasive forces, and collaborative moments of invention. For scholars seeking to understand the immediate contexts that shape presidential rhetoric, the books in this series are indispensable. Kiewe's entry, in particular, accomplishes the goals of the series with distinction.

Kiewe notes early the challenge of writing about "a very straightforward and simple speech" (xiii). Particularly when compared to Roosevelt's first inaugural address, the banking speech is notable for its lack of stylistic ornamentation. Yet it is in its very simplicity that Kiewe locates the speech's rhetorical power. Kiewe argues that the speech must be understood as a lynchpin of Roosevelt's economic plan. That is, the speech did not simply report on the crisis, it offered as economic policy the cultivation of public confidence. Roosevelt understood that the economic health of banks depended upon a performative response that indicated renewed confidence in the system. He needed Americans to remove their money from underneath their literal and metaphorical mattresses and redeposit it into their local banks.

Kiewe builds the context for the speech using a range of secondary and primary sources, including archival material from both the Roosevelt and the Herbert Hoover presidential libraries. In consecutive chapters, he explores Roosevelt's relationship to the medium of radio, Roosevelt's famous (and, to Hoover, infuriating) public silence during the interregnum, and the political and economic dynamics of the banking crisis itself. The three chapters that discuss the banking crisis lay important groundwork for Kiewe's later analysis of the speech. Noting the deep involvement of Hoover administration Treasury Department holdovers in the crafting of Roosevelt's plan, Kiewe argues that the new president carefully controlled the situation to maximize his own rhetorical impact. Ignoring Hoover's pleas to make public statements in support of the outgoing administration's efforts, Roosevelt focused instead on establishing himself as a leader distinct from his predecessor. As Kiewe puts it, Roosevelt sought to present his "entry into the White House as refreshing and projecting leadership skills the country needed to solve the crisis Hoover left behind" (58).

Kiewe asserts that the banking crisis was at its heart a rhetorical crisis, one Roosevelt could—and did—solve by empowering the American people to have confidence in the banking system. Roosevelt did so in three ways. First, he spoke clearly and directly, framing his remarks as informational and using simple language to teach his audience how banks worked. In addition, the president fostered a sense of intimacy between himself and his radio audience, liberally using the pronouns "I" and "you" to make listeners feel he was speaking personally to them in their living rooms. Finally and most crucially, Roosevelt structured his argument enthymematically so...