FDR and the Four Freedoms

USCIS 100:80. Who was President during the Great Depression and World War II?

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.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), excerpted from the State of the Union Address to the Congress, January 6, 1941

Listen to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's January 6, 1941 State of the Union Address speech introducing the theme of the Four Freedoms (starting at 32:02)

USCIS 100:80. Who was President during the Great Depression and World War II?

▪ (Franklin) Roosevelt

Picture Source: Library of Congress