文档介绍：2014高考英语冲刺阅读理解专项 50-35
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During times of trouble, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke from a small room without a fireplace in the White House basement to millions of Americans. In his calm and conversational manner, he reassured(使……恢复信心)the nation in the depths of the Great Depression(大萧条)and through a World War.
Saul Bellow described his own experience of listening to President Roosevelt, hold the nation together, using only a radio and the power of his personality.
“I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway… drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, its odd Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have angered Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you walked by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women…”
The nation needed the assurance of those Fireside Chats, the first of which was delivered on March 12, 1933. Between a quarter and a third of the work force was unemployed. Every bank in America had been closed for at least eight days. It’s hard for us to imagine. It was the hardest time of the Great Depression.
The “Fireside” was symbolic(象征性的; most of the chats came from a small room in the White House basement. Frances Perkins, Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, described the chang