Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms: Speech & Impact
The Four Freedoms: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Vision
The Four Freedoms were goals articulated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd President of the United States. In January 1941, he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people “everywhere in the world” ought to enjoy:
- Freedom of speech
- Freedom of worship
- Freedom from want
- Freedom from fear
The first two freedoms, speech and religion, are protected by the First Amendment in the United States Constitution. Roosevelt’s inclusion of the latter two freedoms went beyond the traditional Constitutional values protected by the U.S. Bill of Rights.
The Context Behind the Speech
The truth behind the Four Freedoms speech was preparing Congress and the American nation for the possibility of war. Roosevelt delivered his speech 11 months before the United States declared war on Japan. The State of the Union speech before Congress was largely about the national security of the United States and the threat to other democracies from the world war being waged across the continents in the eastern hemisphere.
On December 8, 1941, the United States Congress declared war upon the Empire of Japan in response to its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor the prior day.
Impact and Legacy
The declaration of the Four Freedoms as a justification for war resonated through the remainder of the war and for decades longer as a frame of remembrance. The Freedoms became a staple of America’s war aims and the center of all attempts to rally public support for the war.
Although the Freedoms became a forceful aspect of American thought on the war, they were never the exclusive justification for the war. Polls and surveys conducted by the Office of War Information (OWI) revealed that “self-defense” of American values and vengeance for Pearl Harbor were still the most prevalent reasons for war. Though Roosevelt sought to use the Four Freedoms as an ideological counter to fascism and a force to mobilize a nation apathetic to the war in Europe, records suggest that the American people were more concerned with their own personal experience than liberal humanitarianism.
Native Americans and Colonial Expansion in the 1800s
During the first part of the 1800s, as the United States expanded its continental boundaries, Native Americans were displaced.
The Clash of Cultures
The story of the Native American population is a sad confrontation of identities. In the colonial expansion towards the West, Natives were progressively displaced by people with different cultures and beliefs, who formed ‘the other’. Why could not the Amerindians be integrated into the new colonial society?
The main answer lies in the way both peoples understood life. While for the settlers the conquered land meant expansion and ways to acquire properties and money, the Natives did not have such a conception of ownership: the land of nature can never be owned. The Amerindian lifestyle had its basis in a nature that, with colonial progress, was becoming no longer available.
Therefore, besides an issue of cultural difference, there was a notion of land in which ownership was not understood by natives (who thought that, when you buy stuff, you are only borrowing it). This created a disconnection between settlers and Amerindians from the very beginning. In addition, we can analyze the settlers. Who were they? Colonial settlers were a multitudinous group, but this group was only composed of white people, and therefore, other races such as the black one and the Amerindian were not included. This is very related to the American contradiction of being a nation of immigrants and a nation of races and hierarchies at the same time. Within this context, two different peoples were marked from the moment of the colonial arrival: natives versus settlers, who would condemn ‘the other identity’ to genocide following their own way to understand life.