President, Franklin D. Roosevelt

We live in a nation and a world shaped by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During his twelve years as President of the United States, he transformed the government into an active instrument of social and economic justice. He understood the need to create a social safety net for the poor, the unemployed, and the aged. Roosevelt did so through an extensive program of public works known as the New Deal, which changed the face of the United States by building roads, hydroelectric dams, airports, schools, post offices, hospitals and national parks. By harnessing the labor of the unemployed, including young people, through the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Project Administration, Roosevelt helped inpiduals to help themselves while increasing the wealth of our nation.

During the 1930s the United States was committed to a policy of isolation from the problems of the rest of the world. Both political parties defended the Neutrality Acts as the menace of Hitler emerged. Roosevelt carefully and tactically moved the nation from this isolationism to gradual engagement by supplying war material to Britain to use against the Nazis, and finally to direct involvement in World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. At the time of Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the United States had only the nineteenth largest army in the world. In an unprecedented military build-up that included the conversion of its industry, FDR helped transform the United States into the “arsenal of democracy,” while simultaneously making the Armed Forces of the United States the most powerful and sophisticated in the world. As President Roosevelt mobilized the full resources of the nation, he made clear that U.S. leadership of the Allied war effort was linked to the furtherance of democracy and human freedom throughout the world—the only guarantor of international peace in the long run.

Roosevelt set forth his vision of what must come out of the chaos of World War II in a speech given on January 6, 1941, almost a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Here he called upon democratic loving peoples to fight for the establishment of four essential human freedoms—freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear—which constituted the only basis on which democracy and eventually world peace could be built. At the end of his description of each freedom, he added the phrase “everywhere in the world.” Thus from a still isolationist nation, the newly re-elected president committed his fellow countrymen to the furtherance of the Four Freedoms throughout the globe. As the war progressed, Roosevelt embedded his Four Freedoms in his evolving formulation of an international organization, which at war’s end, would come into being to help preserve the peace. Not only did the Four Freedoms become part of the Charter of that new organization, the United Nations, they also guided First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who was selected to chair the commission that drafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She regarded her leadership of this effort to be the most important contribution of her public service. A crucial component of Roosevelt’s vision that has ongoing importance in our own time was his Economic Bill of Rights.

Then, in a conclusion that linked the capacity of the United States to be a world leader to the health of her own people, Roosevelt affirmed that “America’s own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for our citizens. For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.” -Dr. Christopher N. Breiseth