ABSTRACT
In his 1941 State of the Union address, Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that he “unhappily” found it “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.” Freedom was under siege around the globe, he continued, and the United States was not going to be able to remain neutral in that struggle. Nor should it want to, because winning the fi ght would allow for a restructuring of the international state system. “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” he told his listeners, and, notably, the readers of his speech (an audience that reached far beyond the United States): “freedom of speech and expression,” “freedom of every person to worship God in his own way,” “freedom from want,” and “freedom from fear.”2 It was just a speech, but it was a speech that changed the way people thought about the war. Its language framed the Allied struggle for victory and for “a diff erent world order,” both during and after the war.
