Video: 'FDR Fala Campaign Speech 1944'
(Saturday, September 23, 1944, 9:31 p.m. EWT; during the 1944 United States presidential election campaign, held during World War II) — U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened his campaign for a fourth term tonight, derisively defending Fala, his black Scottie dog, against a Republican political attack.
In a speech to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Chauffeurs, Warehousemen and Helpers of America at Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C., Roosevelt addressed Republican charges that he had accidentally left Fala behind on the Aleutian Islands while on tour there and had sent a U.S. Navy destroyer to retrieve him at an exorbitant cost to the taxpayers.
Opponents alleged that FDR had dispatched a destroyer to bring the dog back.
Amid laughter, the president said:
Video: 'Roosevelt Turns His Dog On Dewey (1944)'
“These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala.
“Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks — but Fala does resent them. You know, Fala is Scotch, and being a Scottie, as soon as he learned that the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story that I had left him behind on the Aleutian Islands and had sent a destroyer back to find him — at a cost to the taxpayers of 2 or 3 or 8 or $20 million — his Scotch soul was furious. He has not been the same dog since.
“I am accustomed to hearing malicious falsehoods about myself — such as that old, worm-eaten chestnut that I have represented myself as indispensable. But I think I have a right to resent [and] object to libelous statements about my dog.”
The story of being left behind on the Aleutian Islands was false (Fala did cause some minor trouble once on the cruiser USS Tuscaloosa in the West Indies by licking the feet of sailors relaxing on deck).
Video: 'FDR "The Fala Speech"'
The idea of turning the Republican charges into a joke was that of Orson Welles. Campaigning extensively for Roosevelt, Welles occasionally sent him ideas and phrases that were sometimes incorporated into what Welles characterized as “less important speeches.”
One of these was the “Fala speech.” Welles ad-libbed the Fala joke for the president, who was so delighted that he had a final version written into the speech by his staff.
After the broadcast Roosevelt asked Welles, “How did I do? Was my timing right?”
“The audience went wild, laughing and cheering and calling for more,” wrote historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “And the laughter carried beyond the banquet hall; it reverberated in living rooms and kitchens throughout the country, where people were listening to the speech on their radios. The Fala bit was so funny, one reporter observed, that ‘even the stoniest of Republican faces cracked a smile.'”
