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| Norman Rockwell made clear that the Four Freedoms were at the heart of World War II aims in this famous series of paintings. |
Technically
it was a State of the Union Address,
his eighth since taking office in 1933.
Nobody else ever got to deliver that many such messages to Congress either as an in person speech or
as a written document to be read by some droning clerk as had been the custom
through most of the nation’s history.
And as it turned out, no one will ever get a chance to break that
record. But that’s another story.
History
remembers Franklin D. Roosevelt’s remarks on January 6, 1941
for one paragraph in a long recitation of the nation’s challenges and his
administration’s accomplishments and proposals for the future:
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
world-wide 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. That is no vision of a
distant millennium. 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.
And
so the famous Four Freedoms were
announced to the world as an American vision and purpose. The first two, Freedom of Speech and
Expression, and Freedom of Religion were unremarkable restatements of ideals
embraced by the Founding Fathers and
Constitution. The second two were kind of revolutionary
and looked on as such by alarmed domestic conservatives and belligerent powers
and cheered by progressives and starry-eyed idealists of various stripes.
The
world was at war that January and Roosevelt knew that sooner or later that the
United States would be drawn into the war.
And he knew clearly on which side—with the beleaguered British and their mostly defeated
allies against Nazi Germany and Axis Powers. He had been doing everything possible he
could to aid the British skating to the brink of American neutrality with Lend Lease and other aid. But he faced an American public still firmly
in the grips of isolationism and
powerful domestic political operations and mass movements like America First fanning opposition to any
American intervention.
The
Four Freedoms provided an ideological platform to rally support for war
preparations and the inevitable.
After
conferring with Churchill in the Mid Atlantic in August, the two would proclaim the Atlantic Charter which would be close
to an open announcement of alliance and a declaration of eventual war aims that
would incorporate the elements of the Four Freedoms, along with renouncing the
aim of territorial gain or post-war vengeance on the losing nations.
When
Japanese bombs swept away any political opposition to entering the war, the Allies wanted to provide the world wide
conflagration with a higher and grander
purpose than simply defenses against aggressors. Roosevelt wanted to transform a typical war
time military alliance of convenience, which had grown to include the Soviet Union, into an enduring union of
nations grounded in noble principles. The President had obviously absorbed the
idealism of Woodrow Wilson, who he
had served as Assistant Secretary of the
Navy.
The United Nations was proclaimed in
January 1942 just a year after the Four Freedoms speech. Once again, largely at
the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt, the declaration of a united world embodied the
freedoms.
In the post war
world Eleanor would work to embody them in the founding documents of the post
war UN and in the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.
The American
right wing has always hated Roosevelt, the Four Freedoms, and the international
world community that they envisioned. They
recognized that Freedom from Want would inevitably undermine unfettered
Capitalism based on ruthlessly competing interests competing for advantage and
market share by keeping wages down and maintaining a large reservoir of the
poor prepared to go to war with their peers over table scraps. The United
Nations was seen as surrender of American
sovereignty and a malevolent force for one
world government.
But in the
post-war years there was little they could do but rage against it. Even at the very height of McCarthyism and the second Red Scare, the public overwhelming
embraced the ideas of the Four Freedoms, which were celebrated by paintings by
the all American Norman Rockwell. Republican
President Dwight D. Eisenhower enthusiastically endorsed them. They were at the heart of a great American
consensus that survived the Vietnam War
only to shatter to pieces during the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Triumphant neo-conservatives renounced idealism
and put naked American “self-interest”
enforced by overwhelming military might at the center of foreign policy. The aspiration of other nations and peoples
mean nothing. Even pretending otherwise
was cast aside on the presumption that fear, “shock and awe” would carry the
day.
Even as the disastrous
consequences of that policy became apparent, the inheritors of liberalism, the Obama administration, have been tied up
in “real politic” cynicism and while sometimes trying to dress things up with
references to past idealism, deal instead in Drone attacks, and suspension
of civil liberties and human rights abroad and even at home.
Were the Four
Freedoms ever more than a lofty rhetorical device? Maybe.
Maybe not. But the world seemed
to be a better place when we at least tried to live up to them.
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