Questions and Topics We Can Help You To Write: 

​Write a three-page paper, which explains, illuminates, challenges or confirms the ideas and claims made by President Franklin Roosevelt in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention made on June 27, 1936. Use material taken from Jason Scott Smith’s A Concise History of the New Deal, as well as the lectures, to explicate the historical developments, New Deal policies, and political and ideological conflicts referenced in FDR’s short speech. Like any politician making a speech, the President uses short-hand phrases, brief references, and pejorative naming to make his larger political and ideological points. Although listeners and voters in 1936 might well have been familiar with his allusive comments, 21st century men and women need your help to explain his meaning.

​If you quote or paraphrase material from either the book, please footnote the material. Do not use social science notation.

​Here are a couple of sample footnotes:

​As Jason Scott Smith makes clear, the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 was designed to stabilize and democratize American capitalism. President Roosevelt called the NIRA “the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by the American Congress.” In his 1936 speech accepting his party’s nomination, FDR would call the bankers and industrialists of those years “economic royalists” who falsely claim that “we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power.”