Hello, and welcome the the Presidential Archives Project. The mission of this program is to catalog and share some of the most important presidential speeches in American history.

Each page includes a transcription of the well-known speech, a brief overview of its context and, when possible, an audio recording of the speaker.

Thank you for you interest in keeping this important history alive!

-P.A.P. Staff

Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech "Fear Itself" was delivered in 1933.

Franklin D. Roosevelt
“Fear Itself”
Washington D.C.
March 4, 1933

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is: this present emergency.  Changes in nature, the level of the underground water, the fields of wheat so blasted by heat that they cannot be harvested, lack of grass or lack of winter feed, the effects of future droughts.

Faulty economic directions.  Abuses in our national life, individual self-interest and group selfishness, private enterprise in times such as these, vast agencies of commerce, undermined confidence on the part of the public, the brink of common ruin, frenzied finance.  Exceptional instances of wrong-doing in government.  Occasional instances of inefficiency, bad management, or misuse of funds, a purely fault-finding or partisan spirit, a barrier to progress, a do-nothing policy, broad executive power, the creation of new governmental machinery for supervising, the God who watches over America.

Various localities.  The Middle West, The Great Plains area, The Western Corn Belt and the states that lie further South, England, Hawaii, San Francisco, The Empire of Japan, the local community, the broad highway, the whole forest, the air.

The overwhelming majority of people in this country.  The general public, the average citizen, the privileged few, white collar workers and manual workers, those who work with hand or brain, those who have reached the age of retirement, the workers in the steel mills in Pittsburgh, the men and women working in the clothing factories of New York, thousands and thousands of families on western farms, artists and artisans, musicians and mechanics, lawyers and accountants and architects and miners, more and more people, great masses of men, so many people, the two hundred and fifty or three hundred kinds, chiselers in every walk of life.

An enemy of the human spirit generated by this depression.  Lack of interest, insecurity, disapproval, some imperfections, uneasy apprehension, unhappy efforts to get rich quick, pardonable irony, the inconvenience and the hardships, the arduous burdens and the threatening dangers, hostility, treachery, discrimination, the establishment of fear and hatred as the dominant emotions in human life, the growth of a class conscious society in this country.

False statements and expressions of hope.  Order out of the old chaos, rhyme or reason, the whole rather than a mere part.  The shortness of time, every day that passes, past experience and present needs, the spur of the moment, the necessity for speed, the greater part of the general decline, the inevitable vicissitudes of life, the signs of the times, the phantom of fear, and fear itself.

You may listen to a copy of the original audio recording here: