1936 Madison Square Garden speech 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 before that year's presidential election. In the speech, Roosevelt pledged to continue the New Deal and criticized those who, in his view, were putting personal gain and politics over national economic recovery from the Great Depression. The speech was Roosevelt's last campaign speech before the election. Roosevelt had to wait around 15 minutes for the enthusiastic crowd at Madison Square Garden to calm down before commencing his speech. Most of the speech outlined
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.