page_title: Fireside chats
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Fireside chats / Reception
caption_attribution_description: English: Franklin D. Roosevelt, from his Fireside Chat on February 23, 1942. "The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost. Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much."
context_page_description: The fireside chats were a series of evening radio addresses given by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt between 1933 and 1944. Roosevelt spoke with familiarity to millions of Americans about the promulgation of the Emergency Banking Act in response to the banking crisis, the recession, New Deal initiatives, and the course of World War II. On radio, he was able to quell rumors and explain his policies. His tone and demeanor communicated self-assurance during times of despair and uncertainty. Roosevelt was regarded as an effective communicator on radio, and the fireside chats kept him in high public regard throughout his presidency. Their introduction was later described as a "revolutionary experiment with a nascent media platform."
  The series of chats was among the first 50 recordings made part of the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress, which noted it as "an influential series of radio broadcasts in which Roosevelt utilized the media to present his programs and ideas directly to the public and thereby redefined the relationship between President Roosevelt and the American people in 1933."
context_section_description: Roosevelt's radio audiences averaged 18 percent during peacetime, and 58 percent during the war. The fireside chats attracted more listeners than the most popular radio shows, which were heard by 30–35 percent of the radio audience. Roosevelt's fireside chat of December 29, 1940 was heard by 59 percent of radio listeners. His address of May 27, 1941, was heard by 70 percent of the radio audience.
  An estimated 62,100,000 people heard Roosevelt's fireside chat December 9, 1941—two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor—attaining a Hooper rating of 79, the record high for a Presidential address. Approximately 61,365,000 adults tuned on February 23, 1942, for FDR's next fireside chat, in which he outlined the principal purposes of the war. In advance of the address Roosevelt asked citizens to have a world map in front of them as they listened to him speak. "I'm going to speak about strange places that many of them never heard of—places that are now the battleground for civilization," he told his speechwriters. "I want to explain to the people something about geography—what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be. … If they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin." Sales of new maps and atlases were unprecedented, while many people retrieved old commercial maps from storage and pinned them up on their walls. The New York Times called the speech "one of the greatest of Roosevelt's career".
  Novelist Saul Bellow recalled hearing a fireside chat while walking in Chicago one summer evening. "The blight hadn't yet carried off the elms, and under them drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President's words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it."
  This level of intimacy with politics made people feel as if they too were part of the administration's decision-making process and many soon felt that they knew Roosevelt personally. Most importantly, they grew to trust him. The conventional press grew to love Roosevelt because they too had gained unprecedented access to the goings-on of government.
caption: War Production Board poster quoting FDR's fireside chat of February 23, 1942
exif: {}