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Four Freedoms, OneWorld and the Dream ofOvercoming Our Imperialisms
Men need more than arms with which to fight and win this kind of war. They need enthusiasm for the future and a conviction that the flags they fight under are in clean, bright colors.
—Wendell Willkie, One World, 1943
Ours must be a generation that will distill the stamina and provide the skills to create a war-proof world. We must not bequeath a third bloodbath to our children.
—Henry Wallace, America Tomorrow, 1943
America has always had a radical streak, going back to the days when Thomas Paine began his call for the revolution of 1776 with the words: “Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”
Paine proposed a radical response. “O! ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the Old World is overrun with oppression,” he wrote in Common Sense, which would inspire not just the American Revolution but revolutions in France, Haiti and beyond. “Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her. Europe regards her like a stranger and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.”
General George Washington ordered that another of Paine’s pamphlets, The American Crisis, be read aloud to the soldiers huddled in the cold at Valley Forge. What distinguished Paine’s writings from the traditional call to arms, however, was a vision of what might come after victory. This is not merely the fight for survival. This is what writer Rebecca Solnit meant when she described “hope” to me as “a seizing of possibilities and an embrace of uncertainty, a sense that the future is yet to be determined, and our interventions may help determine it.” It is the “why” in “Why We Fight”—the promise that the struggle is not to renew an old order but to initiate a new one.
Perhaps this is why, after many years of neglect in which he was virtually written out of American history, Paine was brought back into the picture by FDR. In the early days of World War II, historian and Paine biographer Harvey Kaye recalls: “Americans faced their gravest crisis since the Civil War. The Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor had propelled the United States into the Second World War, a global conflict in which the very survival of freedom, equality and democracy were at stake. And things did not look good at all. Germany had conquered most of Europe, Japan had overrun East Asia, and on every front from the Atlantic to the Pacific the Axis powers were advancing. At home, the reports of military disasters and setbacks triggered criticism of the government’s handling of the war, rumors of invasion and a sense of despair, if not defeat.”
Kaye explains: “Roosevelt understood that he needed to firmly engage American collective memory and imagination. Rallying support for the New Deal, he had regularly evoked historical images and personages such as Jefferson and Lincoln. But on this occasion, the nation’s 32nd president would reach even more deeply into America’s Revolutionary heritage, to the very crucible of war out of which the United States had emerged.”
Just ten weeks after America’s entry into World War II, on February 23, 1942, with a bow to the 210th anniversary of George Washington’s birth, FDR gave one of his “fireside chats” on national radio and identified “a most appropriate occasion for us to talk with each other about things as they are today and things as we know they shall be in the future.” Speaking on a day when a Japanese submarine shelled coastal targets near Santa Barbara, California, the president was remarkably frank in spelling out the details of the new crisis. “We have most certainly suffered losses—from Hitler’s U-boats in the Atlantic as well as from the Japanese in the Pacific—and we shall suffer more of them before the turn of the tide,” he conceded. “But, speaking for the United States of America, let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it. We and the other United Nations are committed to the destruction of the militarism of Japan and Germany. We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies, will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.”
This was an example of the lofty rhetoric that the president who popularized the phrase “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” in the midst of the Great Depression was capable of employing in dire circumstances. But for the conclusion of one of the most important addresses of his presidency, FDR turned to the words of another wordsmith in another time of war.
“The task that we Americans now face will test us to the uttermost,” he said, acknowledging the challenge that lay ahead. “Never before have we been called upon for such a prodigious effort. Never before have we had so little time in which to do so much. ‘These are the times that try men’s souls.’ ”
Roosevelt noted, with only slight embellishment, that:
Tom Paine wrote those words on a drumhead, by the light of a campfire. That was when Washington’s little army of ragged, rugged men was retreating across New Jersey, having tasted naught but defeat. And General Washington ordered that these great words written by Tom Paine be read to the men of every regiment in the Continental Army, and this was the assurance given to the first American armed forces.
The United States was not just waging a necessary fight against fascism, Roosevelt made clear; it was fighting to begin the world anew. “We of the United Nations are agreed on certain broad principles in the kind of peace we seek,” he told tens of millions of listeners. “The Atlantic Charter applies not only to the parts of the world that border the Atlantic but to the whole world; disarmament of aggressors, self-determination of nations and peoples, and the four freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.”
Even before the United States had entered into the war, FDR devoted time and energy to crafting a vision of what would come after. This was vital work, as his was a war-weary and war-wary land. The experience of World War I, a fight of kings and kaisers into which the U.S. had been drawn at immense human and material cost, had soured Americans on seemingly distant conflicts. The “war to end all wars” had enriched munitions merchants but it had left a generation of young men shell-shocked and receptive to the isolationist appeals of Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee.
Freda Kirchwey, editor of the Nation magazine, recognized the challenge. “Before its total, uncompromising demands are laid upon them,” she explained as the daunting prospect of American involvement in a second world war emerged, “the people of America must learn that this war is their war.” Labor unions and civil rights groups, leaders like A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and H.L. Mitchell of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and dramatist Lillian Hellman, all championed the view that America must fight not merely to defeat fascism but to win a new world in which the root causes of bigotry, demagoguery, inequality and injustice would be addressed.
The poet Langston Hughes put it more bluntly, writing in a 1943 reflection on the racial violence that had flared in cities such as Beaumont, Texas, and Detroit, Michigan: “You jim crowed me/ Before hitler rose to power/ And you’re STILL jim crowing me/ Right now, this very hour…/ Yet you say we’re fighting/ For democracy/ Then why don’t democracy/ Include me?” The Pittsburgh Courier, a widely circulated African-American newspaper during the war years, launched what it referred to as the “Double V” campaign, which demanded victory over fascism abroad and racism at home.
Woody Guthrie, whose guitar
