Obama traded gloom for reality and promised Americans in his first speech to a joint session of Congress that better days were just over the economic horizon.

Returning to the message of hope that carried him from relative political obscurity to the White House, Obama told a vast prime-time television audience that Americans were not consigned to withering economic suffering that gripped the country in the decade of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

"The weight of this crisis will not determine the destiny of this nation," Obama said in the speech that was interrupted 61 times by applauding lawmakers. "Tonight I want every American to know this: We will rebuild, we will recover, and the United States of America will emerge stronger than before."