First Inaugural Address ("The only thing we have to fear")

Summary

Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated on Saturday, 4 March 1933, at the low point of the Great Depression. About a quarter of the work force was unemployed, farm prices had collapsed, and in the weeks before the ceremony a wave of bank runs had led governors in most states to close or restrict their banks. The address, spoken from the East Portico of the Capitol and carried nationwide by radio, ran to about 1,900 words. Roosevelt opens by promising candor and asserting that the nation will revive, then gives the line for which the speech is remembered: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, a nameless, unreasoning terror that paralyzes the effort to turn retreat into advance. He lists the material damage plainly, values shrunk, savings gone, farmers without markets, and insists that the trouble is no failure of substance; there is no plague of locusts. The fault lies with the rulers of exchange, the money changers who have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. The middle of the speech turns from diagnosis to remedy. Happiness lies in achievement, not possession; public office must not be prized for profit; and above all the nation asks for action, and action now. Roosevelt sketches the lines of attack: direct government employment, help for agriculture, relief from foreclosure, reduced government cost, oversight of banking, an end to speculation with other people's money, and a sound currency. Abroad he pledges the policy of the good neighbor. The close shifts to the image of a trained and loyal army. Roosevelt hopes the normal balance of executive and legislative power will suffice, but warns that if Congress fails to act he will ask for broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency. He ends by asking the blessing of God. Within days he declared a national bank holiday and called Congress into the special session that became known as the Hundred Days.

Top Lessons

• Naming the real enemy

  Roosevelt's most famous sentence identifies fear itself as the danger: a panic that stops people from spending, lending, and working and so deepens the very collapse it dreads. A leader's first task in a crisis, the speech suggests, is to tell the truth about conditions while refusing to let terror govern the response.

• Wealth and its proper place

  The address argues that the Depression exposed a false standard of success. Happiness lies in achievement and creative effort; public office is a trust, not a source of profit; and confidence depends on honesty and honor. Roosevelt frames economic reform as the recovery of older moral truths.

• Emergency and constitutional limits

  Roosevelt praises the Constitution's flexibility and hopes the ordinary balance between Congress and the executive will be enough, but he warns that he may ask for war-like power over the emergency. The speech raises a perennial question: how far a free government may concentrate authority in a crisis without losing its essential form.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The famous sentence describes collective panic in nearly clinical terms: a nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that paralyzes needed effort. Read beside the bank runs of February 1933, it is a description of contagious anxiety and avoidance at the scale of a whole economy, and it is often cited in discussions of fear and behavior. Roosevelt's own paralysis after the illness of 1921 was diagnosed as poliomyelitis; some later writers have proposed Guillain-Barre syndrome instead, a retrospective reading that remains debated. The speech itself does not refer to his illness.

• Paragraph 1

  Fear itself described as nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror that paralyzes the effort to convert retreat into advance.