founding in the 1930s, and became a member of the unionized fighting force that braved U-boats to deliver supplies and save soldiers and sailors. In “Talking Merchant Marine,” he sang of preparing to drop a depth charge on the Nazis:
Walked to the tail, stood on the stern,
Lookin’ at the big brass screw blade turn;
Listened to the sound of the engine pound,
Gained sixteen feet every time it went around.
Gettin’ closer and closer, look out, you fascists.
I’m just one of the merchant crew,
I belong to the union called the N.M.U.
I’m a union man from head to toe,
I’m U.S.A. and C.I.O.
Fightin’ out here on the waters to win some freedom on the land.
Roosevelt saw this bigger picture. He knew that the politics of the moment demanded a bold assertion not merely of military necessity but of postwar possibility—a vision rooted in the premise that the fascist threat had to be met with weapons and with ideas. It was a call to arms as urgent and meaningful as that of the battlefield trumpet.
FDR was not alone in this understanding. Indeed, it was the essential premise of liberal and progressive thinking in the early 1940s, and the basis for the essential divide in debates about the contribution that the Democratic Party would make to postwar politics. Americans, Henry Wallace counseled in 1943, expected a serious response to the question “What will we will get out of the war?” The answer could not be a transitory period of “peace” characterized by the recessions, depression, authoritarian power grabs and simmering conflict that marked the interlude between World War I and World War II. “We shall decide sometime in 1943 or 1944 whether to plant the seeds for World War No. 3,” Wallace contended. To avert that prospect, FDR’s vice president argued his party and his country must champion “the new democracy, the democracy of the common man,” embracing “not just the Bill of Rights but also economic democracy, ethnic democracy, educational democracy and democracy in the treatment of the sexes.” Author Max Lerner wanted a crusade on behalf of “militant democracy” as an antidote to authoritarianism, while Kirchwey proposed “A New Deal for the World.” Historian Norman Markowitz argues that “social liberals came to enthusiastically define the war as a revolutionary struggle and to look to America to redeem her own revolutionary heritage by uniting with the forces that sought the destruction of colonialism and by working to construct international organizations to eliminate the social and economic inequalities that produce war.”
These arguments extended from the vision that Roosevelt outlined in the “Four Freedoms” speech, his epic 1941 State of the Union address to Congress and the American people in which he outlined his own radical hope. Recently re-elected to an unprecedented third term as president, FDR recognized lingering economic challenges at home, but he was increasingly focused on global threats. The United States was not at war, but the president knew that the conflicts raging across Europe and Asia would soon go global.
To a greater extent than any president since Lincoln, FDR was an obsessive speedwriter. He was capable of delivering off-the-cuff comments that charmed the reporters who covered him and the politicians who debated with him. But when he delivered speeches to conventions or the Congress, he devoted hours of his precious time to identifying each epic turn of phrase. According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum account of the drafting of the “Four Freedoms” address, “as with all his speeches, FDR edited, rearranged and added extensively until the speech was his creation. In the end, the speech went through seven drafts before final delivery.”
Roosevelt worked late into the night in the White House study with aides Harry Hopkins, Robert Sherwood and Samuel Rosenman. According to the FDR Library, the president said he had an idea for how to close the speech. “As recounted by Rosenman: ‘We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling. It was a long pause—so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leaned forward again in his chair. … He dictated the words so slowly that on the yellow pad I had in my lap I was able to take them down myself in longhand as he spoke.’ ”
These were the words that Roosevelt dictated:
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
• The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.
• The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.
• The third is freedom from want—which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants everywhere in the world.
• The fourth is freedom from fear—which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.
Roosevelt saw the Four Freedoms as program, not preachment. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception—the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.”
The president framed this as an innately American project. “Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change—in a perpetual peaceful revolution—a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions—without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch,” he said. “The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”
Before the year was finished, FDR would lead the United States into the war with his post–Pearl Harbor designation of December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.” It would be a fight for the future. America would make itself “the arsenal of democracy,” but the emphasis would be on achieving sufficient democracy so that the arsenal—all arsenals—would become less necessary. FDR understood the American disinclination toward war; if it was necessary to fight against the aggression of Hitler and Mussolini, then the fight needed to have as its end “a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.” This was a contemporary restatement of the Paine-ite impulse: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
The “Four Freedoms” were not Roosevelt’s final word on what the United States would fight for in World War II. In 1944, in the midst of the war, he would use another State of the Union address to outline a “Second Bill of Rights,” which would come to be referred to as an “Economic Bill of Rights.”
But the Four Freedoms speech set the stage for FDR’s win-the-war, win-the-peace message, by providing what the president believed to be “a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” His vice president, Henry Wallace, would crystalize the message in July 1943, as the war raged in Europe and the Pacific. “Along with Britain, Russia and China,” he said, “our nation will exert a tremendous economic and moral persuasion in the peace.”
But,
