Like FDR, Obama Learns from People's Letters

A report by ABC's Jake Tapper on Monday that President Obama is reading a selection of letters from the public each day to get a feel for people's thoughts and problems is heartening. In establishing this means of connection with the feelings, hopes, and problems of "ordinary" Americans, Mr. Obama is adopting a practice that served President Franklin D. Roosevelt well during the Great Depression.

For one of my books, Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man," I read through some 15,000 of the more than 15 million letters from the public that were received by the Roosevelt White House, in order to select nearly 200 for inclusion in the volume.

A look at FDR's experience with letters from the public suggests that President Obama -- and the nation -- may benefit substantially from the adoption of the practice by the new president.

"From his first hours in office," historian William E. Leuchtenburg has written, "Roosevelt gave people a feeling that they could confide in him directly." And confide they did. In the week following FDR's inauguration, 450,000 letters poured into the White House. For years the average remained at 5,000 to 8,000 communications each day. Under Roosevelt the White House staff for answering such letters quickly increased from one person, who had been adequate in past administrations, to fifty.

Letters from the public were very important to Roosevelt, who saw the mail as a way to gauge fluctuations in public sentiment. According to his aide Louis Howe, FDR "always maintained that a personal letter from a farmer or a miner or little shopkeeper or clerk who honestly expresses his conviction, is the most perfect index to the state of the public mind." The president therefore had the mail analyzed on a regular basis and sometimes read a random sampling of letters himself "to renew his sense of contact with raw opinion."

President Obama's motivation in reading a sampling of the letters from the public is essentially the same as Roosevelt's was. Press secretary Robert Gibbs says the new president has asked to see a selection of letters "to help get him outside of the bubble."

President Roosevelt gave many people a feeling that he was their personal friend and protector, that they could tell him things in confidence. The results were clear enough in the letters from the public. "At no time," a New Hampshire woman wrote in 1934, "have the people been so free to write and feel that the President or his wife would be interested to know what each community were doing." An Alabama woman agreed: "Never before have we had leaders in the White House to whom we felt we could go with our problems, for never before have our leaders seemed conscious of the masses," she declared. "The knowledge that my President is trying to uplift 'the forgotten man' has made me bold to write to you."

No other source I have seen provides as powerful and informative a sense of what many Americans were going through in the Depression as the letters do. I am especially glad to learn that President Obama is having letters from children included in the sample he reads each day. Children's letters during the Depression were especially poignant. To cite one example, a 12-year-old boy in Chicago wrote about his father in a 1936 letter to the President. 'All the time he's crying because he can't find work. I told him why are you crying daddy, and daddy said why shouldn't I cry when there is nothing in the house. I feel sorry for him.'"

Many victims of the Depression wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt. As one 1938 put it, "centuries back Catholics prayed to the Virgin Mary because they thought she might intercede with a deity who could not take time to hear every petitioner. In some such spirit we turn to you." Among the more common messages in the letters to the first lady were requests for used clothing. "A thought came to me," a Philadelphia woman wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt in 1935, "that you may have a few old discarded dresses among the ones that you have tired of that you would like to get rid of, and do some good at the same time."

The letters to the Roosevelt White House were generally answered promptly, and these interactions were of great service to Roosevelt in maintaining his popularity and the people's sense of contact with him. Many felt that they knew the president personally, Federal Emergency Relief Administration investigator Lorena Hickok reported from New Orleans in 1934. She attributed this in large measure to Roosevelt's radio addresses, in which he spoke to people "in such a friendly, man-to-man fashion." Listeners felt, Hickok said, that FDR was "talking to each one of them, personally." She also mentioned the replies to the letters that people sent to the White House. Many Americans cherished their form letters from the offices of Franklin or Eleanor Roosevelt. "And these people take them all very seriously," noted Hickok, "as establishing a personal relation."

Barack Obama is wise to have chosen to follow this precedent of the last president to face an economic disaster similar to that we are now confronting.

Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College and the author of The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941 (Random House) and Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the "Forgotten Man" (North Carolina). His latest book is Grand Theft Jesus: The Hijacking of Religion in America (Crown).

Comments

[ejhickey]

"Barack Obama is wise to have chosen to follow this precedent of the last president to face an economic disaster similar to that we are now confronting."

Obama is actually performing more like Hoover than FDr. falling stock market , rising unemployment, falling confidence in the administration's ability to fix things. Don't say "It's only been six weeks" by this time into FDR's term, things were looking up.

[nevadaandy]

Give the man credit for wanting to keep in touch with Americans from across the nation - this will help him to stay grounded and to focus on the issues important to the suffering public.

Wouldn't it be nice if members of Congress were to adopt this practice?

[evekendall]

Echoing DuPageDem below... if President Obama wants to find out what's really going on outside his bubble, he should make sure that Rahm Emanuel is not the one doing the screening of the letters.

[nycdave]

What Obama needs is FDR's spine (metaphorically). Maybe due to the privlege of his upbringing, the status of his name, or the personal stregnth he knew from his struggle with Polio, FDR, whatever his flaws, could never be described as Timid. Obama is too willing to be deferential to the establishment, too wary of "rocking the boat" -- and he needs to get over it NOW. No more half-measures, no more concessions to the market ideology of the past 30 years or the stalwarts on the far right. We need dramatic changes, and intensive programs NOW. We can't wait until the unemployment rate is at 30% and anything less simply is no longer an option!

[madatnewsmedia]

I think he is learning that lesson! President Obama is by no means timid; he's been trying to do exactly what he promised the country he would do! He found out that he might not be able to do what he pledged! That doesn't make him timid! He just have to learn how to go around those knuckleheads and I think he is adjusting.

[PlaceboStudman]

I've been considering writing the president about my thoughts on the health care reform issue for a long time now, and these stories claiming that President Obama is reading letters from citizens makes me feel confident that he might actually listen to some of us who have concerns that we will be cast off like gangrenous arms in the fight for lower costs, because we don't fit into any model of the super healthy Charles Atlas world that is being set up by the computerized Cost/Benefit analysis program that everyone is applauding

[madatnewsmedia]

You should write him if that's what you feel!

[hubblee]

You really should! If he gets to read it he will definitely take your view into consideration, isn't that a nice change? :)

[sptatt]

I wonder how those letter he reads are screened. Do they just hand him a dozen that have been checked for anthrax and such without being read, or do they read them, and screen them on what they say. Big difference that way.

[DuPageDem]

Bingo. I'll bet the final picks some from Rahm, which means any ideas from real progressives go straight into the shreader.

[JinChicago]

well if roosevelt had 50 readers, the staff prolly picks 'gems' and hands them up the ladder, so on and so forth til it reachers the president

i highly doubt emanuel has enough free time to 'squash the progressive letter campaign' LOL

[madatnewsmedia]

It doesn't matter, as long as he reads them! Did George Bush read letters while he was the president?

[CaptainStormfield]

No one is sure that Bush could read.

[larry278]

BHO is doing some FDR things; that may be nice but I get the impression that the people who elected him POTUS expect a lot more out of him & they expect it now. The recession has become the mother of all depressions. The depression is growing rapidly. Perhaps BHO can't beat the depression. Tim & Larry are in love with CW. CW got us into this mess. Pres Obama needs to oust them. Larry would make a good provost for ORU. He clearly can't run an Ivy League school. ORU is the place for him.
Tim has admissions officer at Boondock North Eastern written on his forehead.