![]() ![]() In 1917 alone, deadly race riots erupted in East St. This included thousands of lynchings and the founding and rise in power of the revived Ku Klux Klan. The frequency and intensity of racial violence against African Americans increased during World War I. ![]() Although better, things were still hard in the North. As well as the promise of good paying jobs, African Americans left the South to escape Jim Crow segregation. ![]() Black Americans moving from the agricultural South to Northern industrial cities filled the growing demands for labor. Unemployment dropped, and money flowed into the pockets of many Americans. To meet the demand, American industries expanded their production. This sped up their development and introduced them to expanded markets. When World War I broke out, countries adapted these technologies to military use. Telegraph cables crisscrossed the country and the sea floor, connecting people around the world almost in real-time. Larger and faster ships, including the first modern battleships, plied the oceans. Improved steel rails meant longer trains could carry more goods, and the rail network expanded. The Wright brothers proved that heavier-than-air flight was possible. Before World War I, economies of scale and Ford’s invention of the assembly line increased production and lowered costs. And an increasingly small number of individuals controlled increasingly large methods of production – and wealth. People, products, ideas, and information moved faster and on a more global scale than any time before. Several changes that took place leading up to and because of World War I influenced America in the Second World War. Each has at least one phrase that resonates eerily with today's crisis.Wheeling and Lake Erie Rail Yard, Brewster, Ohio. Some of these recordings are from his famous fireside chats others are taken from speeches. Just imagine listening as a Dust Bowl farmer who could maybe only print his name. The second thing is the grandiosity of his language, which would be lost on many of today's educated Americans. The first thing you're struck by when listening to these recordings - other than their sometimes-staticky quality - is the timbre of Roosevelt's patrician voice, so unfamiliar to us. In our time of financial crisis, when everyone from the President to the world's richest person is telling us we're near the abyss, it's worth hearing what a previous president said when Americans actually were in the abyss. Imagine how far from Main Street Wall Street must have seemed then. Millions still depended on farms for subsistence, much less a livelihood. Only one-third of Americans were high school graduates. Unemployment was 25 percent in 1933 and didn't drop to single digits until the U.S. population of 130 million was poor, uneducated and without hope. FDR won popular support for radical programs and executive power grabs by comforting and uplifting his listeners. Roosevelt seized on the power of a new technology - radio - to explain the complex financial situation to frightened, helpless Americans. Seventy-five years ago, the nation was gripped by a Great Depression. What might FDR say in a fireside chat during the financial crisis of 2008? FDR delivers one of his famed fireside chats from the White House. ![]()
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