It's a Fireside Chat given April 28, 1935, in the White House Diplomatic Reception Room, one of the 27 fireside chats that FDR gave and it's on the Works Relief Program, when he's really trying to force the Congress to address the issues that didn't get attention in the first two years of his inauguration.

You know, historians often talk about the first New Deal and the second New Deal as if there were clear benchmarks, that there were clear, like, highways down the middle that divided the two. I think it's easier, really, to talk about when you look at this document, to look at the overarching goals that FDR had for the New Deal and what the problems were that he confronted when he came into office.

He says, "Our responsibility is to all the people in this country. There's a great national crusade to destroy enforced idleness which is an enemy of the human spirit generated by this Depression." FDR believed that confidence and action were essential to confronting the Depression individually, collectively, and politically.

The purpose of this is to show the American people that the Roosevelts care, that the economy is fundamentally sound and that what is just as important as solid government policy is their confidence in themselves and in the government to get through this, because America is the only society in the history of the world from the beginning of time—the history of the world—not to have a violent revolution and an overthrow of the government when their economy tanked.

When FDR comes into office he is elected in November 1932, and he will not take office until March so there's a five-month dead time or political vacuum, if you will, where FDR's trying to get a handle on how best to deal with the great crisis in the country.

Now, historians disagree on how pervasive the Great Depression was. What they do agree on is that it's the greatest depression in American history. The day he takes the oath of office, the vast majority of farms in Mississippi were on the auction block. At the same time that this Fireside Chat will occur, the Midwest will have a horrific dust bowl. So you had a natural crisis, you had an economic crisis, and you had a great crisis of confidence.

The Great Depression starts really the day World War I ends, not just because of the Treaty of Versailles but because the farm economy goes into the toilet. And so when the farm economy, which is almost 50 percent of the American economy at that point, goes into the toilet, that has a significant impact on people's ability to purchase, to buy goods and that has a huge impact on inventories which has a huge impact on manufacturing which has a huge impact on small business, has a huge impact on bank loans, and so it's a downward cycle.

What FDR fundamentally believes is that the Great Depression is as much psychological as it is economic and so what he wants people to believe is that it can get better. And his fundamental approach, what he will call this great national crusade, is to get business and citizens working together for the common good. Capitalism and government for a united purpose that serves not only small vested interests or business interests or individual selfishness, but the common good. And there's still poor, but the gap is narrowed.

So when FDR comes into office in March of 1933, he's got to deal with a banking system that is in shambles. People are taking out their savings because they don't trust the banks. A third of the banks have shut their doors, have collapsed, so what FDR first has to do is to prop up the banks.

The next thing he's got to do is prop up the agricultural economy because agriculture is where the vast majority of unemployment is. Once FDR gets the banking system set up, he deals with the two fundamental sectors of the American economy—business and agriculture. And agriculture is dealt with the Agricultural Adjustment Act because it's the issues of over-production and under-consumption. So FDR says to the farmers, listen, we got to control over-production which means that you can't use all of your land. But the government wants to help you and not penalize you for doing this, so if you take 10 percent of your land out of cultivation, if you leave it fallow, then the government will pay you 10 percent of what you made last year to help make up for that loss.

So, once FDR deals with the farm economy, he's got to deal with big business and small business. The legislation is the National Industrial Recovery Act, the NIRA. It sets up the NRA, the National Recovery Administration. Now, instead of saying, okay, take 10 percent of your business aside and we'll pay you, they set up a gazillion codes—price codes and wage codes. And if you adhered to it, you got this great blue eagle that you put in your window as this great government seal that says "we do our part," you know. And what're you doing, what is your part?

By 1935, the economy is back to where it was in 1929. It's back to where it was when the stock market crashed, but the stock market is not the beginning of the Great Depression. It's when the Great Depression hit the middle class.

And so what FDR realizes in 1935 is that he has to take additional steps to deal with these crises because the big overarching programs, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Recovery Administration, are not dealing with the problems in as comprehensive and widespread way as FDR wants.

So how does FDR navigate this?

Well, he's got a great Democratic majority in 1934 because the Democrats really come back and take over Congress, so he's got to capitalize on this good will. He's got to address his critics and he's got to address the American people to get them involved.

FDR is getting ready to present all of this legislation in 1935 and it's this together that's collectively known as the second New Deal. And so when FDR begins to do this, he understands how to talk. He can talk to the American people without being condescending. Whenever FDR was on the radio, as many people listened to FDR as listened to Amos & Andy which was the most popular show on the radio.

It is a remarkable study in power and in conversation. It's not a press conference. It's more like a graduate tutorial to the American public on how relief policy is going to work and the extents, the limits and successes, that his early policies have put into play. He talks about how far they've come, but clearly there's much more to do.

He does believe, if you look at this, that America has to get away from the trees and look at the forest. He talks about getting out of Washington and going to Hyde Park or going to Georgia. I mean, that's a great metaphor, but it's a metaphor not just for him. It's also a metaphor for the American people. Don't just think about you. Think about the country as a whole.

You get a real clear picture of how smart FDR thought the American people were. I mean he's talking to them about checks and balances. He's talking to them about laying out a whole new vision. This is what the vision's going to be based on.

One of the reasons that this speech is so detailed is that it's a conceptual speech. He's laying out the vision. He wants America to buy into the vision without getting distracted by the details. He's going to say this is the hull of the boat, this is the framework. This is where the boat's going to go.

Let's think about the ship building analogy that he uses at the start. All you know is it's a ship and so FDR's saying the economy and recovery is like a ship. And so what he's doing is he's getting the American people to visualize as they sit around this radio the construction of a boat. And then what can happen in their local community if the state and federal government partner together to address issues of concern in that community in a way that puts a significant number of the unemployed and those who are on the relief rolls back to work.

He gives you six clear principles. He calls them six fundamental principles that govern all projects that will receive federal funding. The first is they've got to be useful. Now, useful is a great word because you can interpret it any way you want. We need post offices, right? So the WPA builds a boatload of post offices which are incredibly useful.

FDR signs the Executive Order creating the Federal One Programs. And the Federal One Programs are the Federal Writers Project, the Federal Theater Project, the Federal Dance Project, and the Federal Arts Project. It's useful because it puts people to work.

The second thing: "Projects shall be of a nature that a considerable portion of the money spent shall go into wages for labor." What this is saying is the money has to be targeted to workers and the auditing of the books will pay very close attention to that.

"In all cases, the project must be of a character to give employment to those on a relief roll." Sure, it's federal money and, sure, there're federal guidelines, but they're local projects. They're local projects that are set up by county boards, by school systems, by state agencies, and this, by and large, it's a compromise that FDR made to get it through because local groups think that they should control the money.

From its inception in 1935 until Congress withdraws funding for it in 1943, the WPA has an enormous impact on the United States. Seventy-five percent of this was targeted toward construction. Why? What we need is we need projects that will benefit the country, but that also will put huge numbers of Americans to work fast in ways that gives them new job skills. So let's take people that might have been janitors and let's teach them how to be carpenters. So let's not only construct, but let's have on-the-job training that will enhance people's job skills and make them more employable and give them more skills to which they can market themselves once they get off relief.

One of the ways that FDR changed the government was expanding the role the government had in managing the economy and he did this in several ways. He did this with the Banking Act, with the Emergency Banking Act, which set up standards, regulatory standards, practices for banks that banks had to meet in order to be federally insured.

Let's look at the National Labor Relations Act or the Wagner Act. This said, for the first time in our history, the first time, that it was legal for a worker to join a trade union.

Then let's look at Social Security. The government began to set up a retirement system for the American public. What FDR hoped would happen would be a three-pronged stool of Social Security payments, corporate retirements or, you know, company pensions, and individual savings.

The other thing that FDR did was with the income tax, with the graduated income tax. Have it taken out of your paycheck rather than having you to have to write the check at the end of the year. So they really helped set a way to manage the cash flow of the federal government.

He also put the federal government in some cases in direct competition with private industry to spur private investment. So we have the federal government involved in almost every aspect of the American economy, from regulating the stock market and setting rules for how much you had to have in the bank to buy stocks on margin, what standards banks had to meet to be healthy, how you insured deposits in the bank, how you addressed the issues of over-production and under-consumption in the farm economy. How do you deal with the volatility of a skilled and unskilled labor force? How do you deal with labor conflict, organized labor conflict between labor and management? How do you deal with reforming the income tax system and how do you deal with the federal government controlling the way that monies are spent in the states.

So in many ways, what the New Deal did was establish the tax policy, the wage policy, the farm policy, the banking policy, the utility policy that govern modern America. When, you'd never have the Great Society. You'd never have public housing. You'd never have the National Endowment for the Humanities. You'd never have federal aid to education. You'd never have Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security indexed to the cost of living if you didn't have the New Deal because the New Deal is the bedrock. It's the platform upon which all modern government policies are based. Because the bottom line for this is that the New Deal said that the government had a role to play in propping up capitalism in a way that benefited the broadest number of Americans.

This is an editorial cartoon by Paul Conrad that ran in the Los Angeles Times and was picked up by a lot of other newspapers. And the image itself was in reaction to a particular moment in history when Lieutenant William Calley—who was on trial for war crimes committed in March of 1968—was convicted and sentenced. There was a great deal of public reaction of varying kinds at the time and this cartoon was as much a reaction to the verdict as it was to the reaction to the verdict.

People sent hundreds of thousands of letters and telegrams to the White House, 99 percent of them demanding his release. What Paul Conrad is drawing here is that reaction: the cheering, the yelling, the flag waving. At the top of the ditch represents that swell of sentiment, that Calley was this hero and he was being scapegoated unfairly. You see mostly male figures and they seem to be wearing suits. And there are two signs evident. One says "We're With You, Lt. Calley." The other says, "Well done, Lt. Calley."

The caption is "The My Lai Ditch Claims Another Victim." It references the event of My Lai itself. And the ditch in My Lai was one of the most searing moments of the massacre. Conrad is clearly saying that the United States lost something very dear in that moment.

What appealed to me and caught my eye initially was that he was not just targeting some narrow facet of this story, but was literally attacking the American sense of conscience, and the American sense of what is right and what is wrong. Everything that American soldiers are supposed to be fighting and protecting is gone.

A turning point in the Vietnam War took place in January or February of 1968 with the Tet Offensive. Anti-war sentiment in the United States was swelling in late 1967 and to try and keep a lid on opposition sentiment, President Johnson and his administration embarked on a kind of pep talk campaign for the American people. The message to the American people was that we've almost got the communists licked and this war is almost over.

The enemy in fact was laying in wait and so January 31st, 1968, the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies launched a massive, country-wide assault on both American and South Vietnamese military and government installations. And the hope of the enemy with this offensive was that the people would join them and rise up, a mass uprising to evict what they saw as this American invader in their country.

So, the American people, having just been told that the war is almost over, are now treated on the nightly news to images of fighting in the American embassy compound in Saigon, to images of great carnage at the Marine Base at Queshan, at the imperial city of Hue. People are thinking, this war is not over. We've been lied to. We've been had. And public opinion started to tank.

In Vietnam, this really unnerved American soldiers. And the knowledge that the enemy had been able to orchestrate this offensive without any awareness on the part of the United States was deeply disturbing to soldiers who were trusting that the guys in charge know what they're doing.

They were enduring very harsh conditions in terms of rain and mud and sleeping outside and not eating hot meals. And they were experiencing casualties, but not casualties due to enemy engagement. They were getting picked off by snipers or by booby traps or by injuries. And there's a great sense of frustration that they can't find the enemy. They don't have anybody to blame.

The 1st Platoon, and perhaps the company as a whole, were not particularly well led. There's evidence from February 1968 of a breakdown in discipline. But what we see of Charlie Company in the month of February, in the early weeks of March 1968, is a group of soldiers starting to unravel. So when they were charged with this operation to go into My Lai, which the military referred to as "Pinkville," tensions were very, very high.

Vietnamese villages are complexes of little hamlets and this village was, to the Vietnamese, known as Song My. My Lai was just one of several hamlets in Song My village.

In fact, everyone agrees that the first shots fired at My Lai were against an old man who was farming when the helicopters came in. He waved at them and they shot him. The fog of war is often invoked for what came after that. Maybe some soldiers heard shots and interpreted that as enemy fire. But they basically moved the 150 meters from the landing zone into the village and continued firing at any Vietnamese person they saw.

At one point, a large group of civilians was gathered into the irrigation ditch, about 170 people. Calley told them, told some of his soldiers to "take care of them." So these guys are standing there watching these villagers, and Calley came back after a while and said, "I thought I told you to take care of them," and they said, "We're watching them, we're guarding them." And he said, "No, I meant kill them."

There was one instance where a helicopter landed and interceded. There was a helicopter piloted by a man named Hugh Thompson and he had a good view of what was going on underneath him. And he saw American soldiers shooting at women and children and he landed near the ditch and put his ship in between American guns and Vietnamese civilians. He managed to pick up around 20 people and loaded them on his helicopter and carried them to safety.

A turning point in the Vietnam War took place in January or February of 1968 with the Tet Offensive. Anti-war sentiment in the United States was swelling in late 1967 and to try and keep a lid on opposition sentiment, President Johnson and his administration embarked on a kind of pep talk campaign for the American people. The message to the American people was that we've almost got the communists licked and this war is almost over.

The enemy in fact was laying in wait and so January 31st, 1968, the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies launched a massive, country-wide assault on both American and South Vietnamese military and government installations. And the hope of the enemy with this offensive was that the people would join them and rise up, a mass uprising to evict what they saw as this American invader in their country.

So, the American people, having just been told that the war is almost over, are now treated on the nightly news to images of fighting in the American embassy compound in Saigon, to images of great carnage at the Marine Base at Queshan, at the imperial city of Hue. People are thinking, this war is not over. We've been lied to. We've been had. And public opinion started to tank.

In Vietnam, this really unnerved American soldiers. And the knowledge that the enemy had been able to orchestrate this offensive without any awareness on the part of the United States was deeply disturbing to soldiers who were trusting that the guys in charge know what they're doing.

They were enduring very harsh conditions in terms of rain and mud and sleeping outside and not eating hot meals. And they were experiencing casualties, but not casualties due to enemy engagement. They were getting picked off by snipers or by booby traps or by injuries. And there's a great sense of frustration that they can't find the enemy. They don't have anybody to blame.

The 1st Platoon, and perhaps the company as a whole, were not particularly well led. There's evidence from February 1968 of a breakdown in discipline. But what we see of Charlie Company in the month of February, in the early weeks of March 1968, is a group of soldiers starting to unravel. So when they were charged with this operation to go into My Lai, which the military referred to as "Pinkville," tensions were very, very high.

Vietnamese villages are complexes of little hamlets and this village was, to the Vietnamese, known as Song My. My Lai was just one of several hamlets in Song My village.

In fact, everyone agrees that the first shots fired at My Lai were against an old man who was farming when the helicopters came in. He waved at them and they shot him. The fog of war is often invoked for what came after that. Maybe some soldiers heard shots and interpreted that as enemy fire. But they basically moved the 150 meters from the landing zone into the village and continued firing at any Vietnamese person they saw.

At one point, a large group of civilians was gathered into the irrigation ditch, about 170 people. Calley told them, told some of his soldiers to "take care of them." So these guys are standing there watching these villagers, and Calley came back after a while and said, "I thought I told you to take care of them," and they said, "We're watching them, we're guarding them." And he said, "No, I meant kill them."

There was one instance where a helicopter landed and interceded. There was a helicopter piloted by a man named Hugh Thompson and he had a good view of what was going on underneath him. And he saw American soldiers shooting at women and children and he landed near the ditch and put his ship in between American guns and Vietnamese civilians. He managed to pick up around 20 people and loaded them on his helicopter and carried them to safety.

Any soldier who was there that day would have had the ability to write a complaint or to let someone in authority know what had happened. Hugh Thompson was the only one who did. He spoke with his chaplain with the understanding that the chaplain would follow this up the chain of command. The chaplain in this case dropped the ball and didn't pursue it.

Thompson also spoke with Colonel Henderson, Lieutenant Colonel Barker's superior officer, and nothing official was done about the accusations. In fact, there was a great deal of effort to cover up what had happened. The official report sent up the chain of command said that 128 enemy combatants had been killed in combat at My Lai and that three weapons had been captured.

The person who actually made the effort to tell the story wasn't even there. There was a soldier named Ron Ridenhour who was serving in Vietnam. He was not in Taskforce Barker. He had nothing to do with the incident at My Lai in March 1968.

Ridenhour was really troubled by it and so he started to seek out other men from the company to find out what happened. As a result of his own informal investigation, he starts to hear that the first guy's story is being corroborated down to the finest details.

And so in March of 1969, he writes a letter to his congressman who had just come out against the war. And he also sends copies of the letter to military and government officials, other congressmen, senators, the president, senior officials in the Pentagon. And so in April of 1969, the Army launches a preliminary inquiry.

Details about what Calley did started to come out in November of '69. The rumors were starting to emerge that a massacre had taken place, that perhaps hundreds of Vietnamese civilians had been killed by American soldiers. And I think people didn't want to believe that it was true.

Anything that makes it into Life Magazine is kind of a big deal. And so you're flipping through your Life Magazine, having heard these rumors or read a newspaper article or two about this Calley guy, and suddenly you turn the page and there, in Technicolor, is a pile of bodies. A pile of Vietnamese women and children. There's one photograph in particular that's become iconic of the My Lai massacre and it is of this pile of people in a road. On the top of the pile is a baby, a little, naked baby, with its bottom facing up. It's really hard to understand why the baby needed to be shot.

So the photographs pretty much silenced the naysayers who said this was a rumor. This was definitive proof, vindication for Vietnamese people who knew that this had happened. And it became the biggest story of the day, which is quite an amazing thing given that the war itself was incredibly controversial. Given that atrocities committed by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army had recently been unearthed in the city of Hue in Vietnam. It reignited anti-war sentiment. So what ensued then was the release of a lot of detail as the trials were underway and publicized with updates day in and day out. The people who cheered William Calley had seen those photographs and they had seen the interviews with the perpetrators and they had seen interviews with the victims in My Lai. And they had read the testimony in court. They knew what they were cheering.

Eventually, the charges that came down were charges of murder against William Calley. I think he was charged with over a hundred murders because of the incident at the ditch where he ordered his men to kill. And then there actually came a moment where his soldiers refused to continue because there were only children left and Calley took one of their rifles and "finished the job."

Calley's trial drew a tremendous focus and part of it was because of the defense that he used. He did not deny that he had done these things. In fact, he testified rather proudly about his conduct at My Lai. The Army law is the Uniform Code of Military Justice, says that soldiers have to follow orders and if in a combat or a wartime situation, they don't follow orders, that is a treasonable offense. So the defense went something like this: Calley was given these orders and under penalty of being shot or being prosecuted, he had to follow through. But the Uniform Code of Military Justice says that soldiers are not under any obligation to follow unlawful orders. So the question then becomes whether or not Calley and his men understood that the orders to kill unarmed civilians, women and children, were unlawful.

When I've used images like this or images of propaganda, I have them just work through the story. I think students sometimes are reluctant to just tell a narrative, where they think that somehow they're supposed to be offering some incredibly complicated insight. And, so, if you just have students answer the question, what is going on here, what do you see, they can collectively start to put it together. I see people about to fall off a cliff, or people celebrating.

He gives us this maw in the ground, this sense of divide, that there's one figure on one side and that there's another group of people on another side. They will, I think, arrive, at some sense of division, and that's a great starting point for understanding what happened to the American public during the Vietnam War.

There are clues that Conrad gives us. "The My Lai ditch claims another victim," so obviously this space that he's drawing represents the My Lai ditch. It's not any ordinary ditch. It's this iconic image of the 20th century, and Lt. Calley, his name as well is spelled out. He is not an anonymous person.

I would look at an image like this as a starting place and as a launching point to get students interested in a really complicated story. You can engage so many facets of the Vietnam War, you can talk about the actual incident at My Lai, you can talk about the trial, public reaction to the trial.

The image of the ditch and the incident at My Lai lends itself to a discussion of American strategy there, but I think what it ultimately arrives at is questions of the ethics, of who's responsible and which version of the story American wants to claim. And if students are conflicted I think that's okay. Anyone who has too definitive a perspective on My Lai isn't really paying attention.

I think Conrad would agree with me because he's targeting not the people who are confused, he's not criticizing the people who are sorting through, he's criticizing the people who are cheering and celebrating and are taking this singular one-sided view of the event.