Why Biden cited FDR’s ‘Four Freedoms’ speech in his State of the Union

President Biden began his State of the Union speech Thursday night by invoking another president’s address to Congress 83 years ago. “In January 1941,” Biden said, “President Franklin Roosevelt came to this chamber to speak to the nation.”

In what became known as the “Four Freedoms” speech, Roosevelt sought to rally Americans to support European democracies facing annihilation from Nazi Germany.

“Hitler was on the march,” Biden said. “War was raging in Europe. President Roosevelt’s purpose was to wake up Congress and alert the American people that this was no ordinary time. Freedom and democracy were under assault in the world.” Biden then warned that democracy is again under attack, not only in Europe with Russia’s war against Ukraine, but also from domestic opponents who he said were undermining democracy in this country in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

In 1941, Roosevelt was singularly focused on the external threat. And it was not an easy sell, especially with many isolationists committed to keeping America out of World War II.

Roosevelt had just won an unprecedented third term in office after promising, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

But in his Jan. 6, 1941, speech to Congress, he made the case that the United States needed to get involved, at least by providing military aid to democracies like Britain that were under siege from Germany.

“Let us say to the democracies: ‘We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom,’” he said. “‘We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge.’”

At that point, Germany had overrun much of Europe, and Britain was under a barrage of attacks from the Nazis. Roosevelt told Congress that America’s security had never been as threatened from outside its borders as it was then.

“The democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world – assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace,” he said. “During 16 long months, this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small.”

He added, “Therefore, as your president, performing my constitutional duty to ‘give to the Congress information of the state of the Union,’ I find it, unhappily, necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.”

He took aim at opponents of American involvement in the war, saying, “The need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily – almost exclusively – to meeting this foreign peril. For all our domestic problems are now a part of the great emergency.”

Roosevelt laid out his vision for what he called “four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. Those ideas would be enshrined in the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights after the war.

Roosevelt said freedom from fear “means a worldwide 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.”

According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the first three drafts of the speech didn’t include any mention of the four freedoms.

As Samuel I. Rosenman, special counsel to Roosevelt, recounted in his book “Working With Roosevelt,” Roosevelt met with several top aides in the White House study and told them he had an idea for the speech’s closing section. “We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling,” Rosenman wrote. “It was a long pause – so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leaned forward again in his chair” and read aloud the Four Freedoms.

Newspapers, including the Washington Post praised the speech.

“The President in yesterday’s address put ardor into our struggle,” the Post wrote in an editorial, “he justified our sacrifice, by enouncing war aims committing us to the reestablishment of the ‘four essential human freedoms.’”

But the conservative Chicago Tribune mocked the speech as “not the work of a man facing a situation dispassionately.”

Not surprisingly, it didn’t go over well in Germany either.

“German Press Hurls Invective At Roosevelt,” ran the Washington Post headline on a Jan. 8 Associated Press story from Berlin. The AP quoted a German newspaper editorial that called Roosevelt’s speech “unique in American history for its untruthfulness, for its unscrupulousness, unique for its twisting of history and for the hypocritical manner in which it attempted to picture the totalitarian states as aggressors and arch-enemies of all the Americas.”

Roosevelt’s State of the Union address catalyzed congressional support for his efforts to aid Britain. Four days later, Democrats introduced his Lend-Lease bill, which authorized the U.S. to lend or lease war supplies to “any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.” The Lend-Lease Act passed Congress overwhelmingly, despite vehement opposition from isolationists, and helped Britain stave off the Germans until the United States entered the war later that year following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.