1936 Madison Square Garden speech speech "one of the great political speeches in American history." Political analysts have compared the straightforwardness of Roosevelt's rhetoric, such as the "I welcome their hatred" comment, with the relative timidity of later politicians, such as Barack Obama; psychologist Drew Westen made such an argument in "The New York Times". Historians, however, have pointed out that Roosevelt delivered the speech in much more favorable political conditions than later politicians have had to face. 1936 Madison Square Garden speech The 1936 Madison Square Garden speech was a speech given by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt on October 31, 1936, three days
Madison Square Garden (1890) third Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street, which was the first to be located away from Madison Square. Madison Square Garden II, as it has come to be called in retrospect, was designed by noted architect Stanford White, who kept an apartment there. In 1906 White was murdered in the Garden's rooftop restaurant by millionaire Harry Kendall Thaw over White's affair with Thaw's wife, the well-known actress Evelyn Nesbit, whom White seduced when she was 16. The resulting sensational press coverage of the scandal caused Thaw's trial to be one of the first Trials of the Century.