The reason I compared the Fireside chats from the Great Depression with those from World War Two is because I wanted to see if Franklin Delano Roosevelt used different words when addressing the American public during these two periods of American history. I wanted to see if there was a pattern of similarity between the Fireside chats of the Great Depression and World War Two.
While using the website Lexos, I found that Roosevelt did use different words when addressing the American public in both periods with his fireside chats.
Here are the most frequent words that Roosevelt uses in his Fireside chats during the Great Depression. He uses bank, credit, government, and work a lot. This makes sense because these Fireside chats would have taken place during the Great Depression, the worst economic crisis in the history of the United States of America.
When looking at the most common words used during his World War Two Fireside chats, you can see he says world, force, air, ship, men, and fight very frequently. This makes sense because during World War Two happened, he would have told Americans more about the war effort than anything else. There would have been a lot of stress about not knowing what was happening by the public, so it is only natural that President Roosevelt would have chosen to speak on the war effort in hopes of easing the minds of Americans.
While using Lexos, I wanted to see which fireside chats resembled a particular fireside chat. Before doing this test, I assumed that all of the Great Depression chats, President Roosevelt would have said similar words so they would all resemble each other, with the same assumption for the chats during World War Two. What I found is that some of the similar period chats did resemble each other, but sometimes a different period would resemble each other more than a chat from that period. An example is looking at the first fireside chat, below is a picture from the Lexos website that has the comparisons.
Here, the top two most common chats are from the Great Depression. However, the third most similar Fireside chat is from World War Two. This is shocking because in my mind I assumed that all of the Great Depression Fireside chats would have been more similar to each other than to one from World War Two. I also did this test for the Fireside Chat from Pearl Harbor. Here I saw that the most similar Fireside chat came from World War Two, yet the next three most common Fireside chats actually came from the Great Depression. While this is shocking, it also makes sense. It makes sense because we were not involved in the whole world war, and this was an attack on our soil, so it makes sense that he would have used similar words to the Great Depression because we were not involved in Europe or Japan yet.
In conclusion, Lexos helped show what were the most common words that Franklin Delano Roosevelt used for his Fireside chats from the arguably most important periods of American history, the Great Depression and World War Two. Along the way of finding this information, I came across some unexpected results, like the results of the text similarity tests. I was not expecting that there would be a closer resemblance of some of the Great Depression chats than the World War Two chats with the Pearl Harbor Fireside chat.
