The People and the President: America's Conversation with FDR by Lawrence W. Levine and Cornelia R. Levine
Long before there were politicians armed with focus-groups, there was Franklin Roosevelt armed with his "mail briefs." In a time when most presidents relied either on the Congress or the newspapers to assess the mood of the nation, Roosevelt recognized the potential of the latest technology - radio, to reach out to the average American. He also encouraged the American people to reach out right back at him. They responded with a passion. As a result, the White House mail grew from 800 letters a day under Hoover to 8,000 a day under Roosevelt. He couldn't read them all, but he hired enough staff to filter through them and give him a daily synopsis of their content. He used to brag that his mail briefs put him closer to the pulse of America than anyone else in the nation, and judging by the sampling of letters collected by Lawrence and Cornelia Levine in The People and the President, America's Conversation with FDR, he was right.
The Levine's, faced with a vast amount of correspondence, wisely decided to focus on letters written in response to Roosevelt's "Fireside Chats", radio addresses he gave at moments of crisis when he felt the American people needed to be in the loop of his decisions, and when he needed to garner their support. There were thirty-one radio addresses that came to be known as Fireside Chats, beginning with an address that explained the bank closings of 1933, and ending with one in January 1945 that called on the American people to continue to give their all, and not let down their guard, as World War II wound to its close. The Levines have organized their book around the chats, sometimes grouping several together in a chapter if their content is sufficiently related. They open each chapter with a well-written and lucid synopsis of the speeches and their historical background, and follow this with samples of the letters FDR received in response. The letter writers come from all walks of life, but were mostly laborers, farmers, businessmen, and clerical workers - the average man. Some are from housewives, some from immigrants, and some from the barely literate. Those were the days before everyone had a lobbyist (overall only 2% of Roosevelt's mail came from organizations), so there are no AARP, Public Citizen, or disease-of-the-day advocacy group inspired letters. These are all letters written from the heart.
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