The Fireside Conversations

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The Fireside Conversations Literary Review
The Great Depression was a time of great turmoil in the United States. Many Americans were without a job and did not have enough resources to take care of their families. The people of the United States were worried that they might never get out of this depression; that was until Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to be President. The people stood behind him and truly believed that he could get them out of this depression.
In the book The Fireside Conversations: America Responds to FDR during the Great Depression, there is a collection of letters that the people of the United States wrote to Roosevelt while he was in office. This collection of letters allows us to
“approach FDR and the New Deal through the eyes of contemporaries who viewed what was transpiring in Washington from outside the centers of power, but who felt its effects at first hand and who responded to their President with gratitude, criticism, and advice” (pg. 4).
Roosevelt was said to be “delighted because the letters indicated an ‘increasing and wholesome reawakening of public interest in the affairs of government” (pg. 5). He felt this was important because the people of the United States deserved to have a say in what they would like to happen in their own country (Levine and Levine, 4, 5).
Roosevelt would use the radio to inform the people of the United States of what was happening in their country. The people of the United States liked listening to him over the radio; the mayor of Richland Center, Wisconsin, said, “An old friend said to me this morning ‘I almost wept during the President’s talk last night, it seemed he was sitting by my side talking in plain simple words to me” (pg.3). His talks on the radio ...

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...ountry during this time. A weakness of this book is that some of the letters sounded like they were repeating other letters, therefore, the book could have been shortened and just put in the letters that were saying different views. Such as a couple that were for his plan and a couple from people who were against his plan. Also it would have been beneficial if the book was able to get more viewpoints from the group that was against FDR and his plan to give more insight as to why they were against him. Overall, this was a great book and provided a lot of information about how people felt and what their lives were like during The Great Depression.
Resources

Works Cited

Levine, Lawrence W., and Cornelia R Levine. The Fireside Conversations: America Responds to FDR during the Great Depression. Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2002. Print.

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