Problem
Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on March 4, 1933. On that day the country was in dire straits with considerable frustration over the inability of the government to resolve the economic problems of the Great Depression. Since the 1929 Stock Market Crash the economy had largely been in a free fall resulting in thousands of bank failures and millions of unemployed workers. Bread lines and soup kitchens were now the norms in thousands of communities large and small across the nation. By 1933 people were beginning to wonder out loud if the American capitalist economy had permanently failed.
Into this situation stepped Franklin Roosevelt, a big winner in the 1932 election but also a man about whom the general public knew little. He had been a two-term Governor of New York but people knew little about what he might do now that he was President of the United States. Like most politicians then and now he had promised much but the outlines of his plans were still quite vague.
It was in this environment that thousands stood in cold, damp weather to listen to Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office and give his inaugural address. Millions more huddled around family radios to listen, hoping that this man could give them some reason for optimism.
Most people, reflecting back on the speech, focus on one famous sentence, ". . . the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance."
While this is an important section of the speech it by no means stands as the only message. Roosevelt's speech was both important and complex. He outlined a broad strategy to attack the fundamental challenges of the Depression, mixing hope with calls to action. Many listeners were inspired by the hopeful rhetoric while others interpreted his call to action as a dangerous assertion of executive authority intended to stretch the powers of the government beyond ordinary and acceptable limits.
Your problem is to:
A. Listen to and read the speech and provide an assessment of the speech with specific attention to the two themes (hope and a call to action) discussed above.
B. Identify what you determine to be the hopeful messages in the address, citing specific examples from the speech.
C. At the same time, you will need to identify and cite those portions of the speech that gave rise to concerns about what might be called "executive overreach", areas where Roosevelt called for 'extraordinary' actions to deal with the crisis at hand.