Canned Rposevelt

Canned Roosevelt

All Franklin Roosevelt's fireside chats have been "live" stuff, i.e., not transmitted from recordings. Only "canned" Roosevelt the radio audience ever got was that culled from recordings of his 1932-33 speeches by a Chicago pressagent for Senator Arthur Vandenberg's bizarre "spook" debate with him over CBS in the 1936 campaign. One day last month, however, in the White House's fireside-less Diplomatic Room from which all the fireside chatshave been broadcast, Franklin Roosevelt sat down with National Emergency Council Chairman Lowell Mellett and recorded a 15-minute interview.

Last week, inaugurating a recorded series of NEC get-acquainted interviews with Cabinet members on the workings of their departments, the voice of the President spoke over 150 local U. S. radio stations, and it left no doubt as to what the President's favorite publicity medium is. From one of the sturdiest planks in George Washington's parting platform ("In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion be enlightened") the President dived overboard with his biggest splash for radio. Said he:

"It is hard for me to conceive of any method of diffusing knowledge that would more exactly meet the purpose our first President had in mind. ... I am sure the heads of the Government departments will not fail to make good use of it ... to correct the kind of misinformation that is sometimes given currency for one reason or another. In some communities it is the unhappy fact that only through the radio is it possible to overtake loudly proclaimed untruths or greatly exaggerated half-truths."

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