FDR's fireside chats

by Franklin D. Roosevelt

On thirty-one occasions during his presidency, FranKlin Delano Roosevelt went on the radio to talk things over with the people of the United States. Those fireside chats, characterized by a disarming frankness and an informal and conversational tone, represent an unprecedented presidential attempt to achieve intimacy with the nation. The American people listened, gathered around their radios in living rooms and kitchens across the country, as President Roosevelt discussed virtually every major problem facing the United States at home and abroad--including both the gravest domestic struggle since the Civil War and perhaps the most serious foreign crisis in the nation's history. In the fireside chats the president touched upon all of the issues surrounding the depression and the New Deal, and upon the events, fears, and hopes that were part of the American experience of World War I. Editors Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy have gathered the fireside chats together for the first time i