Eleven months before Japan’s attack on the United States’ Pacific naval base at Pearl Harbor violently pulled America into the war, FDR delivered his 1941 Annual Message to Congress. In that speech—the Four Freedoms speech—he not only made clear the intensifying Axis threat to the nation, dismissed isolationist arguments that the United States could and should remain neutral in the already-raging war, and urged his fellow citizens to turn the country into the “Arsenal of Democracy” and enact a Lend-Lease program to aid Britain. He also translated his previous eight years in office and Americans’ resurgent aspirations and energies into the terms that would give historic purpose to the five years of global struggle to come. He cautioned against those who would try to take advantage of the crisis for personal gain, insisted on the need to enhance American readiness by building upon the progressive initiatives of the 1930s, and articulated the vision that became the cause of a generation.1
The President and his advisors had spent days on the speech before he delivered it on the afternoon of Monday, January 6. But he had spent much longer on it than that. He knew he had strong public support for what he was to say. Only weeks before, he had won reelection to an unprecedented third term. The response to his Fireside Chat of December 29, in which he first advanced the “Arsenal of Democracy” idea, had been extremely positive. Even longtime critics of the New Deal such as Frank Kent of The Baltimore Sun acknowledged that “the President has voiced what the great bulk of Americans have in their hearts.” And polls showed that approximately two-thirds of the American people wanted to aid Britain even if it meant going to war as a consequence.2
However, FDR knew as well that up until only a short time ago most Americans wanted no direct involvement in overseas conflicts. As he prepared his speech, the task before him was to present their achievements in a way that sharpened appreciation of what they had accomplished while conveying just why European fascism and Japanese imperialism imperiled everything they believed in and held dear. At the same time, he recognized that even now, with Germany occupying Europe and Japan overrunning East Asia, there were many Americans, including some very prominent ones, who would vehemently reject what he was proposing. Among their number were quite a few of those gathered at the Capitol, who would not applaud for no other reason than their profound dislike of everything he and the New Deal represented.
The 1941 Annual Message went through seven drafts before Roosevelt felt it was ready for delivery. As his chief of staff Samuel Rosenman later recounted: “The President himself had dictated five pages, and worked on it very hard through the various drafts . . . filling each of them with his handwritten corrections and insertions.”3
The Four Freedoms had been taking shape in FDR’s mind for some time. He had spoken of them in various ways for a numbers of years. But not until the writing of the fourth draft did he state them precisely. Rosenman clearly recollected that moment. It was the night of January 1. The speechwriting team of Harry Hopkins, Robert Sherwood, and Rosenman himself, along with the White House secretary Dorothy Brady, was sitting with the President in his study going over the third rendition of the address when, just as they neared the end of it, Roosevelt exclaimed that he had “an idea for a peroration.” Then, “[after] a long pause—so long that it began to feel uncomfortable,” the President said, “Dorothy, take a law.” And he proceeded to dictate, “We must look forward to a world based on four essential human freedoms . . .” Indeed, Rosenman said, “the words seemed now to roll off his tongue as though he had rehearsed them many times to himself.”4
Roosevelt fully grasped that when he went up to Capitol Hill to deliver his Message five days later, he would be addressing not just the members of Congress, but the American people as a whole. And it surely must have seemed that all of the political campaigns and struggles and legislative victories and defeats of the previous two terms had led him to what he was about to do.
Anticipation of what the President was going to say ran high. Despite the January cold, hundreds had gathered outside the Capitol building. They would not hear Roosevelt speak. They just wanted to be there. Inside, the House chamber was full to overflowing. Representatives and senators, cabinet officers and diplomats, the First Lady and other dignitaries awaited the President’s words. And as Time magazine reported, FDR did not delay: “The President leaned heavily on the rostrum, threw open the big black leather binder, straightway began his message . . .” 5
Speaking without hesitation, Roosevelt proceeded to expound upon the profound crisis and mortal dangers facing the United States and to explain how the nation could not only confront them but prevail in doing so. Rejecting as utterly foolish the isolationists’ argument that Americans should simply hunker down behind great defensive walls, he rallied his fellow citizens around a dynamic image of America serving as the great Arsenal of Democracy. And dismissing conservatives’ claims that the crisis required Americans to suspend or give up their hard-fought-for social and economic advances of the past eight years, he argued that an effective industrial and military mobilization required them to not simply sustain their achievements, but to extend and deepen them. Time would observe, “Mr. Roosevelt spoke clearly as ever, but there was no lightness in his voice, no touch of humor. As he went on, his big head thrown back, his voice gained depth and strength, and emotion.” And his words garnered fervent applause—at times, thunderous applause.6
Finally, the President proclaimed his vision of what Americans might actually realize in the struggle that lay before them: “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 . . . The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way . . . The third is freedom from want . . . The fourth is freedom from fear . . .” And, he confidently averred: “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.”
The vision was global. But Roosevelt rooted it firmly in American experience and aspiration: “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 quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”
The historic rendezvous of which he had spoken in 1936 had arrived: “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 . . . there can be no end save victory.”
Headlining its coverage “Roosevelt Rallies Democracy for Finish Fight on the Axis,” Newsweek called the speech a “challenge to the world.” And welcoming his abandonment of “unrealistic and dishonorable . . . neutrality,” The New York Times editorialized not only that FDR’s “message is a confession of deep faith, a summons to duty and a call to action,” but also that it clearly “has the endorsement of the vast majority of our people, and that they will approve whatever measures are needed to put it into practice.” All recorded as well that while most of the Republicans present did not applaud (The New York Post columnist Samuel Grafton figured “a few Democrats” did not do so, either, on hearing “freedom from want”), ardent isolationists made quite a bit of noise afterward. That was to be expected, for the President, to the great applause of most Americans, had essentially called the country to war in the name of the Four Freedoms.7
• • •
From the time he first took office in 1933, Roosevelt had been concerned about the threat that Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan’s rulers posed to world peace. And ever since his days in the Wilson administration, FDR had hoped that the United States would participate in international collective-security arrangements to counter just such ambitions. However, in his failed 1920 vice presidential campaign, and again early in his presidency, he had learned that Americans were leery of foreign alliances.8
Americans did not like Hitler, Mussolini, or the ruling clique in Japan. But neither did they like the idea of going to war against them. When Japanese planes attacked and sank the USS Panay, anchored near Nanking, China, killing two U.S. seamen and wounding thirty more, Americans demanded nothing more than an apology and indemnity. Imagining that they were protected by geography, Americans had little interest in fighting wars on distant shores. Besides, they already were fighting the Great Depression.9
Roosevelt, convinced that his countrymen would think otherwise if they perceived the real dangers threatening American shores and values, set himself to “educating” them to the perils of too great a reliance on isolationism. His goal wasn’t to incite fear and anxiety, but rather—as in his efforts to recruit them to the labors of the New Deal—to remind them who they were and what that both afforded and demanded. In an October 1937 Fireside Chat, he said, “I want our democracy to be wise enough to realize that aloofness from war is not promoted by unawareness of war. In a world of mutual suspicions, peace must be affirmatively reached for. It cannot just be wished for. It cannot just be waited for.” And after observing in his 1938 election-eve radio remarks that “the flares of militarism and conquest, terrorism and intolerance [in other lands], have vividly revealed to Americans for the first time since the Revolution how precious and extraordinary it is to be allowed this free choice of free leaders for free men,” he stated. “The rest of the world is far closer to us in every way than in the days of democracy’s founders—Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. Comparisons in this world are unavoidable. To disprove the pretenses of rival systems, democracy must be an affirmative, up-to-date conception.”10
America’s work in the world, the president was reminding Americans, was far from over. Assuming the burden of that work did not mean they had to give up the New Deal. The converse was true. In his April 14, 1938, Fireside Chat, Roosevelt explained, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations . . . not because the people of those nations disliked democracy, but because they had grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion, government weakness through lack of leadership in government.” Yet, he continued, “We in America know that our own democratic institutions can be preserved and made to work. But in order to preserve them we need to act together, to meet the problems of the Nation boldly, and to prove that the practical operation of democratic government is equal to the task of protecting the security of the people.” And in a speech to the National Education Association convention later that spring, he declared: “If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own.”11
The task FDR and a cohort of similarly concerned citizens set themselves was daunting. The vast majority of Americans were disgusted by the blatant criminality and brutality of the Axis regimes; what direction that disgust took the nation was an entirely different matter. The public-opinion researcher Jerome Bruner would term American ambivalence “nightmarish.”12
Americans did not trust Europe’s, let alone Asia’s, rulers. White Americans had “escaped” the Old Country and, while they might feel affection for the lands of their ancestors, they had little confidence that Europe or any other continent could be progressively transformed. And black Americans, given the record of western European imperialism and colonialism in Africa, had even less reason to care about Europe’s destiny.
Furthermore, the memory of World War I, which had cost 116,000 American lives, had left Americans mistrustful, even downright cynical, about foreign “entanglements.” After all, what President Wilson had claimed would be a war to “make the world safe for democracy” had been followed by Fascist and Communist dictatorships, continuing imperialism, and economic depression. Books bearing titles such as The Merchants of Death and Iron, Blood and Profits deepened their cynicism, along with their isolationist sentiments. As, too, did the 1934 Senate hearings on the munitions industry chaired by the North Dakota Senator and ardent isolationist Gerald Nye. In the course of nearly one hundred sessions and two hundred oral testimonies, the latter gave disturbing credence to charges that financial capitalists and munitions manufacturers had conspired to “dupe” the country into war in 1917.13
Deep social divisions made unifying the country for action against fascism and imperialism all the more challenging. Decrying supposed Jewish power and influence, the pro-Nazi “Radio Priest,” Father Charles Coughlin, not only drew a loyal following, but incited young Irish-Catholic youths of the Christian Front, a new paramilitary organization, to assault Jewish children and elderly people on the streets of Boston and Brooklyn. However, the Boston Irish had no corner on anti-Semitism. Congress, the State Department, the U.S. Army, and the American Legion—as well as the nation’s premier colleges and universities—contained many a Jew-hater who would successfully oppose legislative efforts by Senator Robert F. Wagner to lift immigration quotas in order to permit greater numbers of refugees fleeing Hitler to enter the country. And similarly, white supremacists, spouting “states’ rights” and racial epithets from the corridors of Congress to the courthouses of Dixie, stiffened their resistance to African-American demands for justice and equality, which included blocking passage of antilynching bills.14
Moreover, not only did harsh conflict between capital and labor persist. The labor movement itself was splitting into the AFL and the CIO. And while capitalists were hardly pacifists, the war that most of them hoped to see would have pitted Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In fact, some of America’s largest companies, such as GM, Ford, DuPont, and Alcoa, had licensing and production agreements with Germany’s biggest corporations.15
Also, as Roosevelt well knew, many German and Italian Americans, while by no means pro-fascist, sympathized with their nations of origin; Irish Americans remained strongly anti-British; and the Catholic faithful, whatever their qualms, generally did not dissent from the Vatican’s support for conservative and even fascist movements battling secular and anticlerical leftists.
Most Americans looked out from their shores, saw a world edging ever closer to war, and had good reasons for wanting to stay out of it. Indicative of the nation’s prevailing popular isolationism, little more than rhetoric and a heroic volunteer brigade of 2,500 Americans could be mustered in support of the Spanish Republic while Mussolini and Hitler transparently used the civil war as training ground for conflicts to come.16
Roosevelt was not without his own doubts about responding aggressively to German, Italian, and Japanese aggression. He dreaded the prospect of war: “I have seen war . . . I hate war.” He also wondered if he could trust the British and French, given their own imperial interests and repeated willingness to appease Mussolini and Hitler—which would include giving way to Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia and signing the now-infamous September 1938 Munich agreement that compelled Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Germany, paving the way for Hitler to occupy all of the country six months later.17
Despite reservations, Roosevelt also knew, as with the New Deal, that the stakes were too high to cede the initiative to isolationists or detractors. And with the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939, the fall of France in June 1940, and Germany’s ensuing “Blitz” against Britain, he steadily regained command of foreign policy. Even as he headed into the 1940 presidential campaign, he not only convinced Congress to revise the Neutrality Act and expand the American military. He also created a “war cabinet” with the Republicans Henry Stimson and Frank Knox serving, respectively, as Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy; embargoed steel and scrap-iron sales to Japan; donated old destroyers to Britain in exchange for Caribbean bases; and even secured passage, though just barely, of the Selective Service Act—not to mention, secretly gave the go-ahead to explore the making of an atomic bomb, in order to beat Germany to it.18
Seeing that the country was moving to a war footing, isolationists and “non-interventionists” rallied in the summer of 1940 around the banner of the America First Committee, a group organized by several leading midwestern businessmen. Described by the journalist and historian John Egerton as a “motley assortment of pacifists, anti-Semites, pro-Nazis, and laissez-faire capitalists,” the Committee nonetheless gained a reported membership of 850,000 that, along with a few liberal oddities, included such notable mouthpieces as the former ambassador to Britain Joseph P. Kennedy and the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh. Convinced that Britain would soon collapse under the Blitz, Kennedy contended that the United States should not waste its efforts trying to save it, and Lindbergh, an anti-Semite who had accepted honors from Hitler’s Third Reich, echoed Kennedy’s assertion. And all the while, reactionary newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, the New York Daily News, and those of the Hearst chain propagated America First positions in their editorial pages, and senators such as Burton K. Wheeler of Montana and Gerald P. Nye of North Dakota advocated them in Congress.19
• • •
Nevertheless, FDR had reason to feel encouraged. The America First Committee did not represent majority opinion. In fact, Americans’ already resurgent democratic impulses quickened all the more and their sense of their own precarious international position, as well as their sympathy for Britain, was intensifying. The poet and playwright Stephen Vincent Benét gave voice to these sentiments, answering fascist assertions that “Democracy is dead and finished” and fascism “is the wave of the future” with the declaration, “freedom . . . is new,” “democracy . . . goes forward,” indeed, “Democracy is the Revolution.”20
Sympathies notwithstanding, Americans were reluctant to go to war. They were understandably fearful of the consequences, and yet they were equally mindful of the risks, both abroad and to the democratic accomplishments of the past seven years.
Democratic talk, both inspired and anxious, pervaded American culture and references abounded to the Founding Fathers—not just Washington and Jefferson, but also the radical-democratic author of Common Sense and The Crisis, Thomas Paine—and to the Great Emancipator and wartime president, Abraham Lincoln. Finding audiences were new literary anthologies like The Democratic Spirit and A Treasury of Democracy; biographical collections such as American Heretics and Saints and They Worked for a Better World; and treatises such as The Course of American Democratic Thought and The Prospects of American Democracy. Edward Bernays, the “father of public relations,” not only authored Speak Up for Democracy: What You Can Do—A Practical Plan of Action for Every American Citizen, but also persuaded organizations like the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and the Elks to take up the project. And while colleges and civic groups held forums on the “Foundations of Democracy” and “Democracy and National Unity,” schoolchildren studied Democracy Readers, celebrated “Democracy Days,” and performed “Democracy” plays.21
From the launch of PM, the independent-left, New York daily newspaper that openly advanced an “anti-fascist, pro-labor, pro–New Deal outlook,” to the release of Hollywood films like the populist director Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Meet John Doe (1941), advocates for both continuing the New Deal and preparing to meet the reactionary menace abroad rallied the public.22
“Intercultural” activists, led by the writer Louis Adamic, created the Common Council for American Unity to develop ideas of “cultural” or “ethnic” democracy; the National Conference of Christians and Jews (NCCJ) promoted the “Judaic-Christian ideal of brotherhood” through publications, classroom programs, and annual “Brotherhood Days”; and the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League (ADL) championed “freedom and democracy for all.” Similarly motivated, a cohort of renowned playwrights that included William Saroyan, Robert E. Sherwood, Stephen Vincent Benét, Orson Welles, and Archibald MacLeish formed the Free Company and proceeded to produce ten original radio dramas to “remind” Americans of the promise of the Bill of Rights. And remarkably, all three major Baptist Conventions—Southern, Northern, and National (African-American)—approved an “American Baptist Bill of Rights” in 1939 in which they declared: “Believing religious liberty to be not only an inalienable human right, but indispensable to human welfare, a Baptist must exercise himself to the utmost maintenance of absolute religious liberty for his Jewish neighbor, his Catholic neighbor, his Protestant neighbor, and for everybody else.”23
These diverse initiatives expressed the widespread sense Americans had that they shared something special, something that overwhelmed their differences, something that, while rooted in the meaning of America, had been cultivated anew by their New Deal labors and struggles, something to be assured for future generations—liberty, equality, democracy.
Exclaiming that the “U.S. was singing, as it had not done in years, of pride in its past, of hope in the future,” Time reported in July 1940 that 13,000 people turned out to Manhattan’s Lewisohn Stadium to hear a concert dedicated to “Democracy” that, while celebrating America, shined a light on its continuing injustices as well. The New York Philharmonic debuted Challenge 1940 by the Oklahoma-born composer Roy Harris; “white and Negro choirs and musicians” performed And They Lynched Him on a Tree, a cantata written by Katherine Garrison Chapin with music by the black composer William Grant Still; and Paul Robeson sang everyone’s favorite, “Ballad for Americans.” The magazine also reported that sales of Kate Smith’s recording of “God Bless America” had leapt dramatically since the outbreak of war in Europe. And in that same spirit, the NCCJ organized an “I Am an American Day” at the New York World’s Fair that October that was attended by more than 125,000 people—the grand climax of which was a two-and-a-half-hour pageant featuring the thousand-member chorus of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Narrated by a figure dressed as Walt Whitman, the pageant presented critical moments from American history and a rousing performance of I Hear America Singing, a cantata based on Whitman’s poems.24
In May 1940, prominent antifascists led by the Kansan William Allen White, the famed publisher-editor of the Emporia Gazette, founded the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies. And that October, members of the Committee, joined by a host of progressive figures such as Louis Adamic, A. Philip Randolph, the Nation editor Freda Kirchwey, and the poet Carl Sandburg—as well as Eleanor Roosevelt—created the Council for Democracy (CFD). Sponsoring lectures, rallies, and two weekly radio programs, Speaking of Liberty and Americans All, the CFD, headed by the news commentator Raymond Gram Swing, criticized prejudice and promoted unity to combat fascist subversion. Though White’s committee itself never exceeded ten thousand members, it increasingly reflected popular opinion. Tuning in to CBS radio to hear Edward R. Murrow’s eyewitness reports—“This is London”—from the Blitz-besieged capital, Americans in growing numbers now backed aid to Britain.25
• • •
As Americans prepared themselves for the global defense of democracy and the ideals of the past eight years, forces were already in play that would be given full expression in FDR’s Four Freedoms speech. More and more prominent and progressive voices such as the writers Archibald MacLeish, Max Lerner, Lewis Mumford, and Samuel Grafton came out for entering the war against fascism and for pursuing the struggle in an avowedly radical-democratic fashion. MacLeish, whom FDR named Librarian of Congress in 1939, insisted that the defense of democracy demanded renewed democratic initiatives: “For democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing . . . Democracy in action is a cause for which the stones themselves will fight.”26
At the same time, figures very close to Roosevelt were now talking publicly about enhancing or augmenting the Bill of Rights along the lines he himself had begun to lay out in 1937. Solicitor General Robert H. Jackson, whom FDR would appoint Attorney General in 1940 and name to the Supreme Court the following year, told the National Lawyers Guild in 1938, “We too are founders . . . We too are makers of a nation . . . We too are called upon to write, to defend and to make live, new bills of right.” Indeed, he said, the “economic bill of rights” that liberals were crafting would encompass “collective bargaining for labor . . . the ending of starvation wages and sweatshops, the right of the willing to work, the right to a living when work is not available, the right to some shelter from the cruelties of impoverished age.”27
Dedicating the “Plaza of Four Freedoms” at the New York World’s Fair on April 30, 1939, with the President and First Lady seated nearby, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia directed everyone’s attention to the four towering statues arrayed around the pool at the plaza’s center that were designed to symbolize the four freedoms of the First Amendment: Religion, Speech, Press, and Assembly. Saying he did not think Americans would ever want to live under a government that denied those freedoms, La Guardia bluntly stated that they “cannot be fully enjoyed without economic security,” and then prophesied: “soon there will be a fifth . . . the right to live properly and decently and happily, and to give to your children a chance to enjoy the other four freedoms.”28
And the political scientist Charles E. Merriam revealed, in a lecture at the University of Chicago in November 1940, that the administration was already working on the possibility of expanding the Bill of Rights. Serving as vice chair of the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB)—created by FDR to devise policies and programs that government might institute to rebuild the economy, address citizens’ needs, and prevent another depression—Merriam explained that “we undertake what was declared but not done . . . when life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were set forth as the rights of man.” And he predicted that the “modern bill of rights” would encompass “the right to a job, the right to economic security, the right to a fair share of the gains of the civilization in which one participates.”29
But the administration’s foremost advocate for extending and deepening Americans’ fundamental freedoms was surely Mrs. Roosevelt. In her 1940 book, The Moral Basis of Democracy, she not only asked Americans to consider what democracy meant to them and what they were willing to do to sustain it. She also reminded them of the revolutionary origins of American democratic life, decried the fact that “We [still] have poverty which enslaves, and . . . prejudice which does the same,” and spoke of what needed doing to better realize the nation’s historic purpose and promise. Here, too—almost a year before FDR enunciated his Four Freedoms—she began to articulate the “Four Equalities” that would soon become the hallmark of her speeches and writings in these years: “Equality before the law; Equality of education; Equality of opportunity to earn a living; Equality to express oneself and participate in government.”30
The President, however, did not leave such talk to others. Campaigning in Cleveland, Ohio, just before Election Day 1940, he rejected fascist claims—if not also conservative, reactionary, and corporate hopes—that the democratic story had run its course: “We have seen a rebirth of American democracy in America” and “It is the destiny of this American generation to point the road to the future for all the world to see.” He celebrated Americans’ labors: “You provided work for free men and women . . . You used the powers of government to stop the depletion of the top soil . . . decline in farm prices . . . foreclosures of homes and farms. You wrote into law the right of working men and women to bargain collectively . . . You turned to the problems of youth and age . . . You made safe the banks . . . You advanced . . .” And he challenged his fellow citizens with a vision of what they might yet accomplish:
I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime . . . I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people. I see an America where small business really has a chance to flourish and grow . . . I see an America of great cultural and educational opportunity . . . An America where the wheels of trade and private industry continue to turn . . . where the legitimate profits of legitimate business are the fair reward of every businessman . . . An America where the workers are really free and . . . can take their proper place at the council table with the owners and managers of business . . . An America where those who have reached the evening of life shall live out their years in peace and security . . . I see an America devoted to our freedom—unified by tolerance and by religious faith—a people consecrated to peace, a people confident in strength because their body and their spirit are secure and unafraid.31
FDR won reelection to a third term. But his triumph was shadowed by the question of what was to be done. He had promised American mothers in the 1940 campaign that unless the country was attacked, he would not send “[their] boys . . . into any foreign wars.” Moreover, he knew the country was not yet prepared for military action, physically or otherwise. And yet, action was imperative.32
Just days later, Stephen Vincent Benét addressed the American Academy of Arts and Letters on the task of writers in the face of the world crisis. Urging an appreciation of the “deep-rooted, inarticulate thing that democracy is in the lives and hearts of our people,” he exhorted his colleagues to engage American memory and imagination: “We can call upon the great men, the great words of our own past . . . for in looking back . . . we can see at what a price, by what endurance and fortitude, the freedom we have inherited was bought.” But, Benét explained: “We need new words also—and great ones—to match the present, to build for the future that must be . . .” Then, with a nod to Paine, he said: “I do not know by whom these words will be made. They will not be made by the summer soldier or the sunshine patriot. And yet, if we believe in freedom—if we believe in life itself—they must be made.” Benét was not alone in thinking so.33
When the President delivered his 1941 Annual Message to Congress in January, one might have imagined that he or she heard Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln in his words, for Roosevelt spoke directly to American historical memory and imagination. But he did not quote those “great men.” And yet, articulating Americans’ historic ideals and aspirations in words old and new—“Freedom of speech and expression . . . Freedom of worship . . . Freedom from want . . . Freedom from fear . . .”—he charged a generation with fresh purpose and promise. That day, through those words, FDR gave voice to the widely held presumption, the boon of the lived experience of the New Deal, that the American experiment was unfinished, its ideals expressed in action not remembrance, that venerating the country’s past demanded rededication to the Founding spirit of expansive, restless, at times exuberant, democracy.
• • •
Not everyone would call the Four Freedoms “revolutionary,” as the economist Eliot Janeway did, or proclaim that “the people of the United States through their President have given the world a new Magna Carta of democracy,” as William Allen White did. But most Americans took them seriously, if not for the world, at least for the United States. Not only would they commit themselves to the nation’s defense, soon to become officially the war effort. They also accelerated their pursuit of the vision FDR had projected. They did so not because it was FDR’s vision, but because it accorded with their own vision of country and themselves.34
While they still did not want the country militarily engaged (as the historian Robert A. Divine has noted: “rarely do people respond positively to a simple query about entering a major conflict”), the great majority not only backed Lend-Lease even at the risk of war, but believed the United States would soon “get into the war.” More critically, an October 1940 Gallup poll of “young men and boys” had shown that 76 percent of them were ready to serve if called. And most critically, by October 1941, 67 percent of all Americans would say they were “ready to risk war with Japan rather than allow her to become more powerful,” and more than 70 percent that “it is more important to defeat Hitler than to stay out of the war.”35
That spring and summer the President spoke often of the Four Freedoms. He also called on the words of Washington and Paine, though tellingly, he now made Lincoln, “the war president,” his primary presidential reference. And to the outrage of isolationists, he severely tested the limits of a president’s war-making powers by steadily positioning the nation for more than defense.36
In March, Roosevelt secured further increases in military spending and signed the Lend-Lease Act. In April, he extended America’s “security zone” into the mid-Atlantic. In May, he declared an “unlimited national emergency.” In July, he ordered the occupation of Iceland and cut off oil exports to Japan. And in August, he secured renewal of the Selective Service Act and met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill off the Newfoundland coast to both develop a war strategy and issue the Atlantic Charter.37
The Atlantic Charter signed by FDR and Churchill did more than move the United States much closer into a formal alliance with Great Britain. It also made the pursuit of the Four Freedoms and a democratic world order central to that developing alliance—which represented a significant diplomatic victory for Roosevelt because Churchill, a Conservative, was ever determined to hold on to the British Empire. The Charter directly challenged that assumption. In fact, the Charter committed the two nations both to assuring “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live” and to seeking “for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security.” As the historian Elizabeth Borgwardt has put it, the Charter projected nothing less than “a New Deal for the world.”38
Meanwhile, the President also took steps to both defend and promote democratic life at home. Responding to the rising inflation generated by the military buildup, he created the Office of Price Administration (OPA) in April 1941 under the direction of the liberal economist and veteran New Dealer Leon Henderson. Though assigned the job of supervising and regulating prices, Henderson had no enforcement authority. However, corporate bosses knew that if they failed to comply with OPA-ordered price controls they might not only look bad in the eyes of the public, but also lose out on military contracts. Moreover, hoping to enhance the power and influence of the OPA, Roosevelt and Henderson set out to secure popular backing for its efforts by setting up a Consumer Division with consumer activist Harriet Elliott as its head. And Elliott quickly reached out to consumer organizations in favor of initiating grassroots activities that would come to include offering consumer-education programs, staffing “consumer information centers,” and “watching prices” at local stores. While the OPA had little immediate success in controlling inflation, its Consumer Division garnered the active support of both the consumer and labor movements and laid the foundations for more authoritative interventions and grander grassroots mobilizations to come.39
Roosevelt next set up the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD) under the direction of Fiorello La Guardia and assigned it responsibility not only for “Planning and implementing programs . . . to protect civilian life and property in the event of an emergency,” but also for “Promoting activities designed to sustain the national morale and creating activities and opportunities for constructive civilian participation in the defense program.” Plus, to assure the latter, as well as cultivate the vision of the Four Freedoms through popular initiatives, he created the Civilian War Services Division (CWS) within the OCD and named the First Lady herself to head it.40
Propitiously, the American Junior League of America (AJLA) had contacted Mrs. Roosevelt immediately after FDR delivered the 1941 Annual Message, to propose the creation of a “national network of Volunteer Bureaus” and, with its aid, along with that of hundreds of other civic, religious, labor, fraternal, and youth groups, the CWS established Bureaus all around the United States, carried out a nationwide survey of community needs and services, and enlisted the labors of nearly 5 million people to serve in shorthanded community agencies. At the same time, the CWS spurred local institutions not only to reinvigorate their efforts in providing traditional social services, but also to organize new programs, including courses on everything from nutrition and physical fitness to civil liberties. Americans in their millions responded to the nationwide call to participate. The OCD itself recruited 6 million volunteers specifically for civil defense work.41
La Guardia himself suggested that to enhance popular morale and unity Americans should commemorate the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Relishing the idea, FDR quickly garnered the endorsements of numerous organizations and state and city governments. With congressional approval, December 15, 1941 was proclaimed “Bill of Rights Day.” And in both speeches and writings—as well as in We Hold These Truths, a radio play produced by Norman Corwin that was heard by 60 million Americans—many a liberal public figure and union leader drew a direct line from the four freedoms of the First Amendment to FDR’s Four Freedoms.42
In May 1941, the administration also launched its campaign to sell Defense Bonds and Stamps (soon to be renamed “War Bonds and Stamps”). Recruiting labor unions, farmers’ groups, civic organizations, and women’s, youth, and ethnic-heritage associations to help sell them, the Treasury Department made the bonds and stamps not only widely available for purchase (including via payroll savings plans), but also readily affordable by working people. Additionally, it created school programs to encourage saving and good citizenship; sponsored the Treasury Star Parade, a weekly radio show emphasizing the need to make sacrifices in defense of democracy and unite against America’s fascist enemies; and staged several star-studded national “Bond Drives” in the course of the war years. All told, 85 million people would eventually purchase nearly $186 billion worth of the bonds and stamps.43
However, the imperative to prepare for war set limits to what Roosevelt could do in favor of democratic activism. New Dealer and close associate Harry Hopkins would say of him: “You can see the real Roosevelt when he comes out with something like the Four Freedoms. And don’t get the idea that those are any catch phrases. He believes them! He believes they can be practically attained.” So, too, did most Americans. However, circumstances would compel the President to make compromises to assure the cooperation of industrialists, the votes of southern congressional Democrats, and the unflagging loyalty of the nation’s military elite.44
Often more anti–New Deal and antiunion than antifascist, corporate executives in key sectors such as automobiles and aviation were hesitant to convert from civilian to military production. And fearing that the defense effort would subject them all the more to government controls and the demands of labor, they staged what the journalist I. F. Stone cleverly termed a “capital sitdown strike”—which was surely one of the things FDR had in mind when he warned of those who “would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.” With Secretary of War Stimson’s words—“If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work”—echoing in his ear, the President moved to engage the “economic royalists” rather than further antagonize them. He never gave them full control, but to offset their antipathies and anxieties he basically handed over the industrial mobilization to men of their class. Moreover, he not only gave in to their demands for tax breaks to underwrite the new plants and equipment that were urgently needed to meet the nation’s immediate military needs. He also allowed major defense contracts to go to companies, such as Ford and Bethlehem Steel, that were still refusing to recognize their workers’ unions.45
Roosevelt deferred to racists as well. Responding to organized African-American pressure during the 1940 election campaign, he had directed the military to enlist blacks in proportion to their numbers in the country’s total population, increase the abysmally small number of black army officers, and create a flight school for blacks at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute that would train the pilots of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, the renowned “Tuskegee Airmen.” However, the power of southern congressmen, as well as the opposition of the country’s military leaders (including Secretary of War Stimson), discouraged FDR from immediately doing more. Southern Democrats favored military preparedness, but not at the expense of white supremacy and the separation of the races. Bowing to Jim Crow, the President sanctioned the segregation of the armed forces in the autumn of 1940 and effectively licensed the Navy and Marines to continue to exclude African Americans, other than as messmen, and the Army to continue to assign them to all-black noncombat “service companies.”46
Diverse Americans, however, would not wait for the President to elaborate upon the Four Freedoms. To rally “those forces who believe that the struggle for democracy at home and the fight against the foreign foes of democracy is one struggle on two fronts,” progressive (but anti-Communist) intellectuals led by James Loeb and Reinhold Niebuhr—with the endorsements of labor leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Walter Reuther—created the Union for Democratic Action (UDA) in April 1941. UDA chapters formed around the country, members staged public “gatherings” outside the halls where isolationists met, and that fall a “School for Democratic Action” opened in New York.47
The CIO and AFL alike firmly backed a strong defense and the social-democratic vision of the Four Freedoms, but the CIO’s leaders were also eager to extend and deepen “industrial democracy,” and with that objective in mind they proposed plans for labor’s direct participation in guiding the mobilization. Philip Murray, the new president of the labor congress, called for creating “industrial councils” that would reorganize America’s defense industries so as to make labor an equal partner with business and government in coordinating production and give workers a real voice in the production process. And Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers’ General Motors Department and a major UAW Detroit local, issued a plan to rapidly convert automobile plants into military aircraft factories that he projected would enable the country to produce a phenomenal “500 planes a day” if labor was treated as an equal in the project.48
FDR’s Four Freedoms speech also led the labor movement to undertake direct democratic action—and 1941 would witness 4,300 strikes involving 2.4 million workers and see union membership increase by 1.5 million. Strengthened by industry’s growing demand for labor, the UAW and the United Steelworkers of America (USWA)—as FDR had hoped—won major victories, starting at Ford and Bethlehem Steel. Moreover, workers secured wage increases both at the newly organized firms and at previously unionized ones such as General Motors, U.S. Steel, and General Electric.49
Labor’s renewed aggressiveness led FDR to set up the National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB) in March 1941, but in some instances neither the National Labor Relations Board nor the new NDMB could secure industrial peace. A walkout for higher wages by a Communist-led UAW local at North American Aviation in Southern California severely curtailed production of fighter aircraft and compelled the President—under intense pressure from corporate bosses, Congress, and the Secretary of War—to order armed troops to occupy the plant in June 1941.50
While African Americans had plenty of reason to be cynical about the talk of defending democracy, most had no intention of remaining marginal to the struggle, even if they first had to “fight for the right to fight.” Nine days after hearing FDR proclaim the Four Freedoms, A. Philip Randolph called for African Americans to march on Washington to “fight for jobs in National Defense . . . struggle for the integration of . . . the armed forces . . . [and] demonstrate for the abolition of Jim Crowism in all Government departments and defense employment.” Scheduling the event for July 1 and talking publicly of a turnout of 10,000 (with hopes of far more), Randolph set up the March on Washington Movement (MOWM). Aided by the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, he secured the support of nearly every major national black organization and innumerable local black churches and civic groups. Soon thirty-six chapters were established around the country and huge rallies were held in New York, Chicago, and St. Louis—leading the Chicago Defender to predict the march would be “the greatest crusade for democracy ever staged by America’s black minority.”51
In Washington anxiety was rising. Worried about the hostile reaction of southern congressmen and the military, and even more so about the likelihood of violence, the President sent the First Lady, a friend of Randolph’s, to try to dissuade him and his allies from proceeding with their plans. She failed.
FDR then invited Randolph, along with Walter White of the NAACP, to meet with him at the White House on June 18.
At the meeting Randolph and White no longer insisted upon the integration of the military, realizing such a request would be futile at this time. But they continued to demand an executive order banning discrimination in defense industries and vocational training programs. Urging them to cancel the march, Roosevelt tried to assuage them with personal promises. But they would not be moved. Asking Randolph exactly how many marchers he anticipated, Randolph replied, “One hundred thousand,” which White immediately affirmed. And seeing no alternative, FDR responded—in perhaps the classic instance of “you’ve persuaded me, now make me do it”—by proceeding to issue the desired executive order and establish the Fair Employment Practice Committee (FEPC) to oversee compliance with it. In return for which, Randolph, though he would not disband the movement, called off the march.52
MOWM was a “Negroes-only” initiative. But other, related efforts were not. In July 1941, southern progressives black and white, supported by both labor federations and several national civic groups, organized the National Council to Abolish the Poll Tax to try to secure the vote for the 11 million southerners disfranchised by the tax (60 percent of whom were white). And that fall the federal government launched a weekly radio show, Freedom’s People, which highlighted African-American contributions to the nation’s advancement past and present. Featuring guest artists such as Paul Robeson and Josh White, the show’s producers made their message brilliantly clear by closing every episode with: “Onward they march—13 million Negro citizens of the United States, sharing the labor, accepting the responsibilities of our Democracy. Knowing the weight of chains—the helplessness of bondage—they are today a mighty force for freedom. To them liberty is a precious thing. For—truly—they are Freedom’s People.”53
A generation of Americans had struggled against extraordinary odds and opposition to not only right the country’s economic ship, but also do so while expanding democracy, liberty, and equality on every front. Their labors were history making and transformative, but it now seemed as though they had been just preparatory, and in every sense they remained incomplete. The challenges ahead—made clear by the constant media reminders of the European war—were tremendous. And yet Americans did not turn away. Indeed, younger cohorts were coming up alongside older—young men and women who would soon not only shoulder the burdens of war most directly and intimately, but also expand their elders’ accomplishments in ways unforeseen nine years earlier. New Deal Americans of every age recognized that their rendezvous with destiny had come.
On December 4, 1941, the Chicago Sun made its first appearance on the streets of the Windy City. Intended by its owner Marshall Field III to provide a liberal alternative to the reactionary and isolationist Chicago Tribune, the new Sun firmly declared itself committed to “the Four Freedoms of President Roosevelt and all the other freedoms vouchsafed to American citizens by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” And just a few days later it and every other newspaper in the country would bear banner headlines declaring that on Sunday, December 7, Japanese planes had attacked Pearl Harbor and killed 2,500 Americans.54