America between 1932 and 1945, the era of the Great Depression and World War II, was crowded with voices and images interpreting the crises and attempting and to shape policies and attitudes. The rhetoric of those years in America is the subject of this book, which samples some, but far from all, of the significant speakers, images, and issues of the period.

As with any era in American history, the ʺNew Dealʺ is hard to define with precision—in time or in ideology. Some historians use ʺNew Dealʺ to designate the intense period of domestic reform legislation of the first...

As Doris Kearns Goodwin has reminded us, the FDR years were no ordinary time. Even though she was referring specifically to the latter years of Rooseveltʹs presidency, this description aptly characterizes the rest of his executive tenure as well. The nation was in the most severe fiscal crisis of its history when FDR took office, for example, and once Americans had begun to enjoy some economic recovery by the mid-1930s, they then found themselves faced with devastating dust bowls, floods, and other natural disasters. Spirits were so low during the second half of the 1930s that the United Statesʹ birth...

Five days after Franklin Delano Rooseveltʹs inauguration as the thirty-second president of the United States, theLos Angeles Timesran, at the top center of its front page, a pointedly approving political cartoon.¹ Under the italicized caption, ʺThe New Doctor!ʺ cartoonist Gale depicted FDR as a strong-jawed, thick-armed, no-nonsense physician. The patient, a shirtless and surprised-looking Uncle Sam, had presumably been yanked out of both bed and shirt and was lying on his chest on a hard table, where ʺF. D. Roosevelt, M.D.ʺ was administering some serious chiropractic medicine. Roosevelt was pictured with his right knee across Uncle Samʹs shoulders,...

On 5 March 1995, at Texas A&M University, political scientist George C. Edwards III threw down the gauntlet to his assembled audience, a group comprised principally of a small but elite group of presidential rhetoric scholars. Edwardsʹs target, though, was an entire field of inquiry, and he took aim at an acknowledged Achilles heel of rhetorical studies—that of effect or influence. He began: ʺUnsupported assumptions can be dangerous…. If they are seriously in error, they may direct scholars into unproductive lines of inquiry. If assumptions are discovered to be completely without justification, the legitimacy of a research enterprise may...

Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana was irate. It was May 1948, and the large man from Indiana thundered on the floor of the Senate against wasteful government spending. ʺI hold in my hand,ʺ he announced to his colleagues, brandishing several photographs, ʺexamples of what would seem to have been a waste of possibly as much as $750,000 of the money of the taxpayers of the United States.ʺ He explained that the images were fifteen or twenty photographs taken by the U.S. Department of Agricultureʹs (USDA) Farm Security Administration (FSA), now on file at the Library of Congress. Capehart dredged up...

In the preface to her autobiography, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, ʺThere is nothing particularly interesting about one’s life story unless people can say as they read it, ʹWhy, this is like what I have been through. Perhaps, after all, there is a way to work it out.ʹ Perhaps the most important thing that has come out of my life is the discovery that if you prepare yourself at every point as well as you can, with whatever means you may have, however meager they may seem, you will be able to grasp opportunity for broader experience when it appear…. Life was...

Frances Perkins, secretary of labor from 1933 to 1945, was the first woman to hold a cabinet-level post and served longer than any other secretary before her or since, save one.¹ She came to the position as a social reformer, not the usual route for appointment as a cabinet secretary. Her career in public service began with her work for the Consumersʹ League in New York in the early 1900s and concluded with her contributions to the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University in the early 1960s.

Two rhetorical episodes during Perkinsʹs tenure as labor secretary help...

On 5 February 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt boldly asked Congress to help him drastically increase the number of judges and justices that would sit on the federal courts.¹ For decades, a politically conservative Supreme Court had been striking down federal and state experiments that altered the role of government in the redistribution of wealth, safety regulation, labor reform, and public health.² Roosevelt, convinced that the Court had become an antidemocratic and antiquated judicial forum, vehemently denounced such decisions. He was particularly disturbed that such jurisprudence reflected the dominance of the ʺFour Horsemenʺ—Justices Willis Van Devanter, James Clark McReynolds,...

In a statement that provided ʺa fitting description of [his] labors for coal miners and their union,ʺ¹ John Llewellyn Lewis described his use of public address during his term as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA):

I have never faltered or failed to present the cause or plead the case of the mine workers of this country. I have pleaded your case from the pulpit and the public platform; in joint conferences with the operators of this country; before the bar of state legislatures; in the councils of the Presidentʹs cabinet; and in the public press of...

Radio reigned. Many modes of communication characterized America in the 1930s: newspapers, magazines, films, correspondence, conferences, political and ceremonial discourse, courtroom and religious speaking, and lingering traces of direct democracy in action—whether face-to-face in rural Grange halls or in New England town hall meetings. But radio increasingly wasthesignificant medium—and one whereby listeners participated in ways that differed from their earlier communicative participation. When people no longer needed to venture forth to the outside world to hear discourse about issues of import, those individuals who did not leave their homes to interact face-to-face with others increasingly became...

The original artwork for Louisianaʹs capitol, built during Huey P. Longʹs governorship, included a sculpted depiction of the stateʹs history. Louis XIV, Hernando de Soto, Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson, even, mysteriously, Solomon and Julius Caesar were each portrayed once. Huey P. Long, who claimed to have designed the building, who called it ʺmy building,ʺ was depicted in the history and elsewhere four times. The original elevator doors were especially curious. Portrayed on them were all of Louisianaʹs governors through Long, but no space was provided for Longʹs successors, not even for his handpicked successor, Oscar K. Allen. One reporter, in describing...

American legends of the Second World War have an air of inevitability about them. Evidence of the Nazisʹ pogroms and the wholesale slaughter of Jews, discounted when the news was first relayed, are now accepted with grim certitude, induced horrifically by the accounts survivors and their liberators brought with them from Nazi concentration camps and sustained through collected testimony, memorials, and museums. Such memories make it customary to regard the entry of the United States into World War II as morally necessary and therefore destined to happen.

Popular memories of the ʺGood War,ʺ however, obscure the complex and varied views...