A Presidential Speech That Moved America

 by Martin Udogie

As the Roosevelt’s presidential address below shows, the best speeches (and writings) are always simple, practical and logical. But they are typically not easy to write or to deliver. It takes a certain skill.

Maya Angelou is a renowned Black American author and poet. She wrote and recited a poem, “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s first Inauguration in 1993. She once said that “easy reading, is damn hard writing.”

Meaning that for any written material that is easy to read and understand, the author would have gone to great length to simplify the message. Again, this takes a certain skill.

President Roosevelt’s Speech: March 1933.

In early 1930s, America was in the grip of a banking crisis. Banks were experiencing terrible runs, as panicked Americans were pulling out their savings in droves on the back of the Great Depression. In no time, bank after bank started to either fail or simply shut their doors to customers.

And then Franklin Delano Roosevelt aka FDR was elected President. His first significant act, a day after his Inauguration, on March 6th, was to issue an unprecedented Proclamation closing all banks in the country. Every single bank was to shut down completely from March 6th to the 13th, 1933.

At ten o’clock on the evening of Sunday, March 12, Roosevelt gave the first of his fireside chats over the radio. “My friends, “ he began in his easy patrician voice, “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, why it has been done, and what the next steps are going to be.”

In simple and clear language, he explained to the sixty million people listening in countless homes across the nation, “When you deposit money in a bank, the bank does not put the money in a safe deposit vault. It invests the money, puts it to work.”

“I know you are worried…..” he told them, “I can assure you, my friends, it is safer to keep your money in a reopened bank than under the mattress.”

The next day, the comedian Will Rogers wrote to the New York Times, “Our President took such a dry subject as banking….[and] he made everyone understand it, even bankers.”

Remember that this was in 1933! Knowledge of banking was not as sophisticated as we have it today.

As the banks prepared to open on Monday, March 13, no one could be sure what would happen. The general expectation was that Americans will besiege the banks to pull out more deposits.

True to expectation, that morning, long lines of depositors formed outside the reopened banks. But instead of taking their money out, they were putting it back.

By the end of the first week, a total of $1 billion in cash – half of everything that had been pulled out in the previous six weeks – had been redeposited in banks.

Roosevelt masterful speech created one of the most dramatic transformative shifts in public sentiment.

With a single speech, the mood of the nation changed overnight.

*Adapted from the book, LORDS OF FINANCE by Liaquat Ahamed.

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Martin Udogie, Trainer, Public Speaker and publisher, is a Programme Host for the Radio Nigeria Network. He wrote from Nigeria.