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By laying out a structure at the beginning of the talk, FDR helped his audience absorb and understand the information he was sharing. He put his talks in context of previous chats to connect it to a larger strategy. LEADERSHIP LESSON -> Schedule your mass communications to be short and just infrequent enough so you leave your audience, and you, eagerly awaiting the next one.Ģ - Start with Structure - FDR opened some of his biggest chats by explaining what he was going to cover in the chat and why it was important. Every time I talk over the air it means four or five days of long, overtime work in the preparation of what I say." FDR summed up his timing this way: " The one thing I dread is that my talks should be so frequent as to lose their effectiveness. The vast majority of them were 30 minutes or less and none went over 45 minutes. Perhaps, most importantly, he kept the chats short. He often timed them to be right around milestone events when interest would be highest - like major events in the war and the opening and closing of congressional sessions. He sometimes started each chat by saying how long it had been since the last one. He spaced his 30 chats 4.6 months apart, on average, and never had more than four in any one year. Their vision also inspired the next generation of American artists.Ī Dust Bowl of Dog Soup: Picturing the Great Depression features 50 photographs and prints from SCMA’s permanent collection.1 - Timing is Everything - FDR wanted his Fireside Chats to be big, not-to-miss, events so he timed them appropriately. These government-funded artists documented and, more importantly, shaped how people saw and felt about the Depression, bringing them out of the isolation of their own plights and opening their eyes to the suffering of others. These images brought home the harsh reality of the “other America,” while depictions of life in urban settings revealed the troubles next door. Hoffman’s etchings and photographs such as Arthur Rothstein’s famous image of a farmer walking from his house in a dust storm enabled people to imagine sand between their teeth and coal dust in their eyes.
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These artists helped to convince the American people - and Congress-of the urgent need to bring about the recovery of the heartland.Īrtist Irwin D. His straight talk promised hope and comfort to an ailing nation and highlighted what the government was doing to remedy the country’s ills.Īmong the innovative social programs that were launched at this time were the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (RA/FSA) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which hired photographers and artists to make the travails of rural Americans visible. Roosevelt’s conversational and intimate fireside radio chats brought him into people’s homes. The challenge was to find support for investments into programs and services directed primarily to the recovery of rural America, which most city folk had not experienced firsthand. In 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt needed to generate enthusiasm for his New Deal.