By Robert Golomb
Editor’s Note: This is syndicated columnist Robert Golomb’s latest column as published in the news and media outlet, The Published Reporter
GREAT NECK, NY – Historians will be analyzing, celebrating or both, the 80th anniversary of one of the most important presidential oratories ever delivered to the citizens of our great nation. The date was December 29th, 1940, and millions of Americans listened to their radios as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave a speech titled, “The Arsenal of Democracy’’. The speech that night was one of approximately 20 addresses – known famously as “fireside chats”– that Roosevelt, since becoming the nation’s 32nd president in 1933, periodically gave on radio broadcasts to the nation’s 132 million citizens, who were then facing the dismal economic realities of the financial catastrophe known as the “Great Depression”.
In his previous “Fireside Chats” Roosevelt spoke about the fears and the hardships suffered by a majority of Americans due to this financial disaster, and he outlined the details of his ambitious “New Deal” programs, which he vowed, would lead America out of its economic nightmare and into a secure and prosperous financial future. The most famous of Roosevelt’s depression – focused “Fireside Chats” was delivered on March 4, 1933 and bore the corresponding title of its celebrated declaration, “The Only Thing to Fear is Fear Itself’’.
