American Rhetoric in the New Deal Era, 1932-1945

The New Deal era is hard to define with precision―in time or in ideology. Some historians use New Deal to designate the intense period of domestic reform legislation of the first Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, 1933–37. Others confine discussion of the era to the legislation of 1933, and identify another wave of legislation in 1935 as a Second New Deal. Most of the essays in this book focus on the prewar period, with glimpses that look forward to the rhetoric of the approach to and engagement in World War II.

Thomas W. Benson is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric at The Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of Writing JFK: Presidential Rhetoric in the Bay of Pigs Crisis and other books, and has served as editor of The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Quarterly, and The Review of Communication.