UnitVoiceofCourageMicrosoftWord文档.docVIP

Unit Two: History and Personality Text A Voice of Courage By Jonathan Alter ? ?A few days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn into office, he sat in the White House working on a radio speech about the countrys banking crisis, scheduled for delivery on Sunday, March 12, 1933. It was the depths of the Depression, with a quarter of Americans out of work, homeless and destitute. Glancing out the window, FDR saw a workman taking down the inaugural scaffolding on the White House grounds. ? I decided Id try to make a speech that this workman could understand, he told Louis Howe, his chief aide. ??The American economic system was in a state of shock. On Saturday, March 4, a few hours before FDRs swearing-in, the governors of New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania signed orders closing banks in those states. The New York Stock Exchange had suspended trading, and the Chicago Board of Trade bolted its doors for the first time since its founding in 1848. The terrifying runs that began the year before on more than 5,000 failing banks had stripped rural areas of capital and now threatened to overwhelm American cities. This was the bottom. If you had your money in a bank that went bust, you were wiped out. With no idea whether banks would reopen, millions of people hid their few remaining assets under their mattresses, where no one could steal them without a fight. Roosevelts inaugural address at the Capitol had begun to restore hope, with his standout line, The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Yet the greatest applause came when he said that if his reform program was not adopted, I shall ask Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis: broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency. Then FDR used a new medium in a new way to change millions. The first Presidential radio broadcast was introduced by Robert Trout of CBS, who read from a folksy script approved by FDR: The President wants to come into your home and sit at your fireside