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FDR's First Fireside Chat: Public Confidence and the Banking Crisis. By Amos Kiewe. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007. pp. xiii + 149. $32.95 cloth; $16.95 paper.
As I write this review, Americans are observing the effects of a global economic crisis and questioning the soundness of banks. Thus it is difficult to avoid reading elements of the present into Amos Kiewe's fine analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt's first fireside chat on the banking crisis. I doubt I am the only American who has wished for a national leader to, as Roosevelt put it on the evening of March 12, 1933, tell us "what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps will be." Throughout this brief but informative book, Kiewe skillfully illustrates how Roosevelt communicated about the crisis with clarity and accomplished the most difficult of tasks in that troubled time: inventing public confidence.
Like other books in the Texas A&M University Press Library of Presidential Rhetoric series (which has grown to over a dozen volumes), Kiewe's book takes up a single presidential text, situates it in political and historical context, analyzes it in light of that context, reports on public response, and assesses the speech's impact. The books in the series present presidential rhetoric as the product of complex rhetorical situations, competing persuasive forces, and collaborative moments of invention. For scholars seeking to understand the immediate contexts that shape presidential rhetoric, the books in this series are indispensable. Kiewe's entry, in particular, accomplishes the goals of the series with distinction.
Kiewe notes early the challenge of writing about "a very straightforward and simple speech" (xiii). Particularly when compared to Roosevelt's first inaugural address, the banking speech is notable for its lack of...