First Fireside Chat, The Banking Crisis, March 1933

Roosevelt’s first “fireside chat,” delivered just days after being sworn in as president, was one of his finest.  The entire banking system had collapsed prior to the speech. His task was to reassure Americans that their deposits were safe.  More important, he had to assure them that the government knew what it was doing in reorganizing and certifying the soundness of banks that were to reopen in days, so that the panic of the days before the shutdown of the banks would not be repeated.  Calling the closure a “bank holiday” was a delightful rhetorical slight of hand.  But the entire speech, and Roosevelt’s warm delivery (addressing “My Friends”) engendered a sense of confidence in his listeners that Hoover had been unable to engineer. The day the banks reopened, deposits exceeded withdrawals in all the major cities in the country.