President Franklin Roosevelt's Four Freedoms Speech
1/6/1941
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This annual message to Congress delivered by President Franklin Roosevelt on January 6, 1941, became known as his "Four Freedoms Speech," due to a short closing portion in which he described his vision for extending American ideals throughout the world.
Very early in his political career, as state senator and later as Governor of New York, Roosevelt was concerned with human rights in the broadest sense. During 1940, stimulated by a press conference in which he discussed long-range peace objectives, he started collecting ideas for a speech about various rights and freedoms.
In his 1941 State of the Union Address to Congress, with World War II underway in Europe and the Pacific, FDR asked the American people to work hard to produce armaments for the democracies of Europe, to pay higher taxes, and to make other wartime sacrifices. Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people deserved.
At a time when Western Europe lay under Nazi domination, Roosevelt presented a vision in which the American ideals of individual liberties should be extended throughout the world. Alerting Congress and the nation to the necessity of war, Roosevelt articulated the ideological aims of the war, and appealed to Americans' most profound beliefs about freedom.
In his Four Freedoms Speech, Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that all people should have. His "four essential human freedoms" included some phrases already familiar to Americans from the Bill of Rights, as well as some new phrases: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These symbolized America's war aims and gave the American people a mantra to hold onto during the war.
As America became more engaged in World War II, painter Norman Rockwell created a series of paintings illustrating the four freedoms as international war goals that went beyond just defeating the Axis powers. In the series, he translated abstract concepts of freedom into four scenes of everyday American life. Although the federal government initially rejected Rockwell's offer to create paintings on the four freedoms theme, the images were publicly circulated when The Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation's most popular magazines, commissioned and reproduced the paintings. After winning public approval, the paintings served as the centerpiece of a massive U.S. war bond drive and went on a national tour to raise money for the war effort.
After the war, the four freedoms appeared again, embedded in the Charter of the United Nations.
Very early in his political career, as state senator and later as Governor of New York, Roosevelt was concerned with human rights in the broadest sense. During 1940, stimulated by a press conference in which he discussed long-range peace objectives, he started collecting ideas for a speech about various rights and freedoms.
In his 1941 State of the Union Address to Congress, with World War II underway in Europe and the Pacific, FDR asked the American people to work hard to produce armaments for the democracies of Europe, to pay higher taxes, and to make other wartime sacrifices. Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people deserved.
At a time when Western Europe lay under Nazi domination, Roosevelt presented a vision in which the American ideals of individual liberties should be extended throughout the world. Alerting Congress and the nation to the necessity of war, Roosevelt articulated the ideological aims of the war, and appealed to Americans' most profound beliefs about freedom.
In his Four Freedoms Speech, Roosevelt proposed four fundamental freedoms that all people should have. His "four essential human freedoms" included some phrases already familiar to Americans from the Bill of Rights, as well as some new phrases: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. These symbolized America's war aims and gave the American people a mantra to hold onto during the war.
As America became more engaged in World War II, painter Norman Rockwell created a series of paintings illustrating the four freedoms as international war goals that went beyond just defeating the Axis powers. In the series, he translated abstract concepts of freedom into four scenes of everyday American life. Although the federal government initially rejected Rockwell's offer to create paintings on the four freedoms theme, the images were publicly circulated when The Saturday Evening Post, one of the nation's most popular magazines, commissioned and reproduced the paintings. After winning public approval, the paintings served as the centerpiece of a massive U.S. war bond drive and went on a national tour to raise money for the war effort.
After the war, the four freedoms appeared again, embedded in the Charter of the United Nations.
Transcript
TO THE CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES:I address you, the Members of the Seventy-seventh Congress, at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union. I use the word "unprecedented," because at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.
Since the permanent formation of our Government under the Constitution, in 1789, most of the periods of crisis in our history have related to our domestic affairs. Fortunately, only one of these--the four-year War Between the States--ever threatened our national unity. Today, thank God, one hundred and thirty million Americans, in forty-eight States, have forgotten points of the compass in our national unity.
It is true that prior to 1914 the United States often had been disturbed by events in other Continents. We had even engaged in two wars with European nations and in a number of undeclared wars in the West Indies, in the Mediterranean and in the Pacific for the maintenance of American rights and for the principles of peaceful commerce. But in no case had a serious threat been raised against our national safety or our continued independence.
What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition, to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past.
[pages omitted]
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We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.
I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call.
A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.
If the Congress maintains these principles, the voters, putting patriotism ahead of pocketbooks, will give you their applause.
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.
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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.
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.
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. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the
supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The White House,
January 6, 1941
This primary source comes from the Records of the U.S. Senate.
National Archives Identifier: 5752373
Full Citation: President Franklin Roosevelt's Annual Message to Congress [Four Freedoms Speech]; 1/6/1941; Presidential Messages to the Senate in the 77nd Congress; Presidential Messages, 1789 - 1875; Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46; National Archives Building, Washington, DC. [Online Version, https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/four-freedoms-speech, May 11, 2024]Rights: Public Domain, Free of Known Copyright Restrictions. Learn more on our privacy and legal page.