Since 1938 was a Mid-Term election year, President Roosevelt embarked on a 28 day tour of the U.S., bringing his message of the accomplishments of his second term and a few words about The New Deal and the Recovery taking place in the country. The NRA had undergone a challenge in the Supreme Court and many of the programs initiated during FDR's first term were in jeopardy. So in an effort to bolster support and to campaign for incumbents, FDR did a series of whistle-stop appearances.

This one, on July 7, 1938 was from an appearance in Covington, Kentucky and was broadcast nationwide to a capacity audience.

Here is the complete address.

With the campaign season just warming up, I will be spotlighting historic campaign addresses from previous Presidential elections, featuring ALL parties, but starting t his series off with a bang.

FDR addresses a crowd estimated at over 60,000 in Pittsburgh on October 1, 1936 - the last full month of campaigning.

He talks about the accomplishments of his administration during the first four years, looks ahead to the next and talks about the current state of the economy, the state of employment and the state of poverty in America.

And in answer to his critics regarding a balanced budget, he offers this:

FDR: "To balance our budget in 1933 or 1934 or 1935 would have been a crime against the American people. To do so we should either have had to make a capital levy that would have been confiscatory, or we should have had to set our face against human suffering with callous indifference. When Americans suffered, we refused to pass by on the other side. Humanity came first.

No one lightly lays a burden on the income of a Nation. But this vicious tightening circle of our declining national income simply had to be broken. The bankers and the industrialists of the Nation cried aloud that private business was powerless to break it. They turned, as they had a right to turn, to the Government. We accepted the final responsibility of Government, after all else had failed, to spend money when no one else had money left to spend.

I adopted, therefore, the other alternative. I cast aside a do nothing or a wait-and-see policy.

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(1971 - the brief respite between the World's Longest Party and Our Great National Nervous Breakdown)

Hard to imagine that 1971 was a sort of resting point in our rather skewed history. At the time of course, it didn't seem that way - in 1971 Campuses were still hotbeds of disturbance, Vietnam was still grinding on, cities were falling apart. But we were optimistic all was going to be okay with the world and prosperity was just around the corner.

Sadly, no.

This documentary, part of the NBC Radio series "Second Sunday", aired in April 1971 was concerned about our place in the world. A reassessment of who we were as a society - the old "who am I, what am I doing and where am I going" mantra that was so popular during those years.

And questions are posed to a number of people - Ralph Nader, newly elected Governor Jimmy Carter, Senator Howard Baker, Gunnar Myrdal, Jean-Francois Revel, John Gardner (founder of Common Cause) and Dr. Milton Eisenhower who offers this interesting observation:

Dr. Milton Eisenhower: “We do seem to have a new kind of violence in this country, we have some people who are actively advocating revolution, which I think is relatively new in America.”

Question: Where do think this will lead? Do you think this is a self-defeating thing?

Eisenhower: “ First let me say that there are nihilists, there are revolutionaries; most of them young. Many of them, in our colleges and universities. But it’s terribly important that the American people understand that they constitute a very small minority. They make a lot of noise and I may say the mass media give them a great exposure to the American people, but they can’t be more than one, two or three percent of the total. Yes, this is something new.”

Question: “How do you answer the argument that we engage in violence in Vietnam, so violence is warranted here in America. And those who argue that the system is so rotten and has such basic defects that the system itself is not worth preserving and hence you need revolution in this country to purify the government.”

Eisenhower: “Well I think that’s a terribly specious argument. If we lived in a dictatorship, and the dictatorship had proclaimed and carried on the war, and therefore citizens could do little if anything about it, one could well argue that in these circumstances revolution, internal revolution would be the corrective measure to take. But once the people themselves have taken possession of the basic social power, which is the situation in our free democratic society, and we exercise this power through a representative form of government, then the only way, the only reasonable way to get action is to work through these political procedures. All other methods are illegitimate and are self-defeating. Margaret Chase-Smith made a speech in the Senate that was worth the attention of the American people, in which she said that, if the left-wing extremists, who are causing a good share of the trouble don’t look out, they are going to drive America to the right. The danger in America is not going too far to the left – the danger in America is going too far to the right.”

That last quote is particularly telling considering where the country would wind up in the next decade.

Of course, at the time no one suspected a thing . . . .

(Almost that time again)

As you know, one of my biggest guilty pleasures is listening to old live concerts - really old ones. A few weeks ago I posted an excerpt of a New York Philharmonic concert from 1960 featuring Fritz Reiner. This time it's the famous Besancon Festival in France featuring L'Orchestre de la Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire (Paris Conservatory) conducted by Andre Cluytens from September 1949 performing Dukas La Peri. Summer is festival season in Europe and there are a ton of them going on . They are mostly all broadcast, as is the tradition going back to the beginning of radio. Luckily, for poverty-stricken culture vultures like myself it's a matter of finding the stream or podcast and downloading it. If you're addicted to time travelling, it's a matter of digging into your archive and pulling out what some radio station tossed in the trash.

Either way, it makes for a non-stress afternoon - especially when the regular Sunday diet consists of televised talking heads.

"Poverty grew sharply between 1979 and 1982. But a study by the Census Bureau claims that official estimates may exaggerate the number of Americans who are poor."

Listening to spin in a historic context can be baffling at times. Buried in the middle of an ABC Radio "World News This Week" broadcast from February 1984 was this report about poverty levels in the U.S. between 1979 and 1982. To hear a spokesman from the Census Bureau come out, matter-of-factly and say the number of people living below the poverty line during that time wasn't exactly true, since many of those people were receiving foodstamps and Medicare and were therefore deemed no longer "at the poverty line" seems rather bizarre to me.

This is the kind of painful spin we've been getting used to over the years. A report like this lends further evidence the Reagan Years were pretty much a sham. The casual disregard for real figures in place of fancied up ones. Mythic feel-good proclamations have done nothing but stave off what has become the inevitable.

To think our current economic situation will be cured by a snap of fingers or wishful thought disguises the fact that our current situation is the result of bad decisions and distracting spin from decades earlier.

Maybe it's not a chicken, but perhaps the Ostrich has come home to roost.

(Nice shiny miracles from that City On A Hill)