Today in History

Today in History

1941

Franklin D. Roosevelt Speaks of Four Freedoms

On this day in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress in an effort to move the nation away from a foreign policy of neutrality.

The president had watched with increasing anxiety as European nations struggled and fell to Hitler’s fascist regime and he was intent on rallying public support for the United States to take a stronger interventionist role.

In his address to the 77th Congress, Roosevelt stated that the need of the moment was that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily–almost exclusively–to meeting the foreign peril. For all our domestic problems were a part of the great emergency.

Roosevelt insisted that people in all nations of the world shared Americans’ entitlement to four freedoms:

1. the freedom of speech and expression

2, the freedom to worship God in his own way

3. the freedom from want

4. the freedom from fear.

After Roosevelt’s death and the end of World War II, his widow Eleanor often referred to the four freedoms when advocating for passage of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Mrs. Roosevelt participated in the drafting of that declaration, which was adopted by the United Nations in 1948.