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The Great Depression starts really the day World War I ends, not just because of the Treaty of Versailles but because the farm economy goes into the toilet. So you had a natural crisis, you had an economic crisis, and you had a great crisis of confidence. At the same time that this Fireside Chat will occur, the Midwest will have a horrific dust bowl. The day he takes the oath of office, the vast majority of farms in Mississippi were on the auction block. What they do agree on is that it's the greatest depression in American history. Now, historians disagree on how pervasive the Great Depression was. When FDR comes into office he is elected in November 1932, and he will not take office until March so there's a five-month dead time or political vacuum, if you will, where FDR's trying to get a handle on how best to deal with the great crisis in the country. The purpose of this is to show the American people that the Roosevelts care, that the economy is fundamentally sound and that what is just as important as solid government policy is their confidence in themselves and in the government to get through this, because America is the only society in the history of the world from the beginning of time-the history of the world-not to have a violent revolution and an overthrow of the government when their economy tanked. There's a great national crusade to destroy enforced idleness which is an enemy of the human spirit generated by this Depression." FDR believed that confidence and action were essential to confronting the Depression individually, collectively, and politically. He says, "Our responsibility is to all the people in this country. I think it's easier, really, to talk about when you look at this document, to look at the overarching goals that FDR had for the New Deal and what the problems were that he confronted when he came into office. You know, historians often talk about the first New Deal and the second New Deal as if there were clear benchmarks, that there were clear, like, highways down the middle that divided the two. It's a Fireside Chat given April 28, 1935, in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, one of the 27 fireside chats that FDR gave and it's on the Works Relief Program, when he's really trying to force the Congress to address the issues that didn't get attention in the first two years of his inauguration.
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