One month later 90 per cent of the deposits in the national banks had been made available to the depositors. On March sixth every national bank was closed. You and I know of the banking crisis and of the great danger to the savings of our people. Then came the part of the problem that concerned the credit of the individual citizens themselves. It is the base of the whole recovery plan. That foundation of the Federal credit stands there broad and sure. We have built a granite foundation in a period of confusion. So you will see that we have kept our credit good. But it is not inconsistent because a large portion of the emergency money has been paid out in the form of sound loans which will be repaid to the Treasury over a period of years and to cover the rest of the emergency money we have imposed taxes to pay the interest and the installments on that part of the debt. It may seem inconsistent for a government to cut down its regular expenses and at the same time to borrow and to spend billions for an emergency. The immediate task was to bring our regular expenses within our revenues. For years the Government had not lived within its income. Such leadership, however, had its beginning in preserving and strengthening the credit of the United States Government, because without that no leadership was a possibility. Long before Inauguration Day I became convinced that individual effort and local effort and even disjointed Federal effort had failed and of necessity would fail and, therefore, that a rounded leadership by the Federal Government had become a necessity both of theory and of fact. I think it will interest you if I set forth the fundamentals of this planning for national recovery and this I am very certain will make it abundantly clear to you that all of the proposals and all of the legislation since the fourth day of March have not been just a collection of haphazard schemes but rather the orderly component parts of a connected and logical whole. Secondly, I wanted a few weeks in which to set up the new administrative organization and to see the first fruits of our careful planning. Woolley, The American Presidency Project.Īfter the adjournment of the historical special session of the Congress five weeks ago I purposely refrained from addressing you for two very good reasons.įirst, I think that we all wanted the opportunity of a little quiet thought to examine and assimilate in a mental picture the crowding events of the hundred days which had been devoted to the starting of the wheels of the New Deal. Source: “Fireside Chat (Recovery Program),” July 24, 1933. Although adherence to the codes was technically voluntary, the law also included provisions authorizing the president to impose codes where industries failed to draft them voluntarily. A special feature of the NIRA was Section 7(a), which guaranteed the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively. While the codes varied from industry to industry, all of them were to include a minimum hourly wage, a maximum number of hours worked per week, and a ban on child labor. #Fireside chat definition code#Each industry would form a committee made up of business owners, labor leaders, and government employees that would then be charged with drafting the code for that industry. It called for the creation of codes of “fair competition” to eliminate price-cutting and overproduction. This bill aimed at eliminating “unfair trading practices” through a partnership among government, business, and labor. Most of this “Fireside Chat,” however, is dedicated to the centerpiece of Roosevelt’s program for industrial recovery, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). He then moved on to explain the Agricultural Adjustment Act (which he refers to here as the “Farm Act”), which sought to force agricultural prices higher by getting farmers – in return for government subsidies – to grow less of certain commodities. He discussed his successful handling of the bank crisis, as well as the $3 billion committed to public works projects. In late July, after an exceptionally busy special session of Congress, Roosevelt took to the airwaves to speak to the American people about the policies that had just been enacted.
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