President Franklin D. Roosevelt's State of the Union Address to Congress on 6 January 1941 deserves renewed attention today.
It became known thereafter as one of his most eloquent and important speeches. FDR proposed four essential human freedoms people throughout the world should enjoy, and went on to say more concretly what they imply for any of us.
We might begin by reading and reflecting upon his own words, and listening, as we still can, to his resonant clarion voice.
More important, we have both reason and opportunity to read and listen as if we heard the same words spoken today, for Roosevelt evoked values and needs, fear and thanksgiving, deeply of this day as well as his own.
He spoke of freedoms grounded in the U.S. Constitution — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship. Then Roosevelt added two more, drawn from his New Deal for an American people suffering from the Depression:
- freedom of people everywhere to enjoy economic security, and
- freedom from aggression, as he memorably put it, "freedom from fear" at home and everywhere in the world.

Norman Rockwell's painting of Freedom from Fear
In the autumn of 2011, this nation — 99% of us — know too little economic security, and have reason to fear, with others of this world, the political and military policies of our own American government, a corporate and military oligarchy as much as or more than a democracy.
We need the energy, transparency, clarity and leadership represented by Franklin Roosevelt as deeply as did the nation he addressed in the war-shadowed and war-torn year of 1941, seventy years ago.
It is valuable, then, to assess the relevance of the four freedoms to this earth's and its people's well-being.
In the next few days and weeks, I hope to do that, and I welcome response from others.
The Occupy movement is at a crossroads; we must not let it wither in the face of oligarchic opposition and suppression.
Below are the critical moments in FDR's address. (Emphases are mine, added to draw out for the reader unfulfilled needs in our own time.)
Eleanor Roosevelt, in her own right one of the most admired people of the 20th century, was an important voice in her husband's conception of the four freedoms. She went on, after his death in April 1945, to serve their accomplishment — everywhere in the world — for the remaining years of her life, until her death on November 7, 1962.
The nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America. Those things have toughened the fiber of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.
Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world. For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy.
The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
- Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
- Jobs for those who can work.
- Security for those who need it.
- The ending of special privilege for the few.
- The preservation of civil liberties for all.
- The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.
Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:
- We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
- We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
- We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.
I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and
- the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay
should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.
If the Congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.
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.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
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.
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.
Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere.
Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.
I don't think my Amherst College classmate (1960) Dave Wood would mind my repeating here a short Facebook exchange he and I had in response to my earlier post of Scott Russell Sanders's reflections on listening to trees. And speaking of the pleasures of one thing putting another in mind, I am reprinting below a moving and closely related poem by David Wagoner, who still spends a lot of time listening in his beloved Pacific Northwest.
DW
JRB
Many thanks, Dave, for your stories of living with the birds of eastern Maine. I share your love of loons, who feel like lifelong companions - along with mourning doves - I listen for them wherever I am, wonder at their voices - most vividly on early morning and evening kayaking on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, where I lived for several years. Ravens, too, are special companions of a different sort - I'm influenced by Raven's large and problematic place in Indian legend, not unlike a winged Coyote. It is indeed a wondrous world. My gratitude for membership is unbounded.
Here is David Wagoner's poem:In the Kalihari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
Half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear nights
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence where the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending even tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.