ally sitting on a front porch with his neighbors. Eleanor Roosevelt later observed that after her husband's death, people would stop her o the street and say, "they missed the way the president used to talk to him. They'd say: 'He used to talk to me about my government.' There was a real dialogue between Franklin and the people," she wrote.The first fireside chat, a few days after he took office, dealt with the banking and financial crisis. After discussing his program -a four-day national banking holiday -Roosevelt asked the public to share their views with him. The White House received thousands of letters from ordinary people who were convinced that the president was willing to listen. And he did. Many of the letters simply told of the listeners' faith in his leadership.The most pressing and immediate problem when Roosevelt took office was to feed the millions of hungry. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) in 1933 provided immediate federal grants to the states to assist the most needy with money. When this proved inadequate, the President established the Civilian Works Administration (CWA) which between November 1933 and April 1934 put some six million people to work on specially created jobs. These jobs such as road maintenance and building of playgrounds, parks, sewers, and airports -were not created to compete with private businesses but to create public projects to employ the employed. Another agency in 1933, the Public Works Administration (PWA) planned bridges, dams, hospitals, and other public projects. The PWA contracted and paid private companies to do the work. All construction contracts awarded by the PWA required the hiring of some black workers. This set a president for other federal agencies. Among PWA's many achievements were the Triborough Bridge in New York City, a new sewage system in Chicago, a municipal auditorium in Kansas City, and a new water-supply system in Denver.In 1935 most reli...
