The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party. John Nichols
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from the vision that Roosevelt outlined in the “Four Freedoms” speech, his epic 1941 State of the Union address to Congress and the American people in which he outlined his own radical hope. Recently re-elected to an unprecedented third term as president, FDR recognized lingering economic challenges at home, but he was increasingly focused on global threats. The United States was not at war, but the president knew that the conflicts raging across Europe and Asia would soon go global.
To a greater extent than any president since Lincoln, FDR was an obsessive speedwriter. He was capable of delivering off-the-cuff comments that charmed the reporters who covered him and the politicians who debated with him. But when he delivered speeches to conventions or the Congress, he devoted hours of his precious time to identifying each epic turn of phrase. According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum account of the drafting of the “Four Freedoms” address, “as with all his speeches, FDR edited, rearranged and added extensively until the speech was his creation. In the end, the speech went through seven drafts before final delivery.”
Roosevelt worked late into the night in the White House study with aides Harry Hopkins, Robert Sherwood and Samuel Rosenman. According to the FDR Library, the president said he had an idea for how to close the speech. “As recounted by Rosenman: ‘We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling. It was a long pause—so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leaned forward again in his chair. … He dictated the words so slowly that on the yellow pad I had in my lap I was able to take them down myself in longhand as he spoke.’ ”
These were the words that Roosevelt dictated:
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 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.
Roosevelt saw the Four Freedoms as program, not preachment. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress. “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.”
The president framed this as an innately American project. “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 quick-lime in the ditch,” he said. “The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.”
Before the year was finished, FDR would lead the United States into the war with his post–Pearl Harbor designation of December 7, 1941, as “a date which will live in infamy.” It would be a fight for the future. America would make itself “the arsenal of democracy,” but the emphasis would be on achieving sufficient democracy so that the arsenal—all arsenals—would become less necessary. FDR understood the American disinclination toward war; if it was necessary to fight against the aggression of Hitler and Mussolini, then the fight needed to have as its end “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.” This was a contemporary restatement of the Paine-ite impulse: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”
The “Four Freedoms” were not Roosevelt’s final word on what the United States would fight for in World War II. In 1944, in the midst of the war, he would use another State of the Union address to outline a “Second Bill of Rights,” which would come to be referred to as an “Economic Bill of Rights.”
But the Four Freedoms speech set the stage for FDR’s win-the-war, win-the-peace message, by providing what the president believed to be “a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.” His vice president, Henry Wallace, would crystalize the message in July 1943, as the war raged in Europe and the Pacific. “Along with Britain, Russia and China,” he said, “our nation will exert a tremendous economic and moral persuasion in the peace.”
But, added Wallace, who was speaking that day to a multiracial audience in Detroit, “many of our most patriotic and forward-looking citizens are asking: ‘Why not start now practicing these Four Freedoms in our own back yard?’ Yes, they are right! A fuller democracy for all is the lasting preventive of war. A lesser or part-time democracy breeds the dissension and class conflicts that seek their solution in guns and slaughter.”
That debate about how to prevail in the conflict at hand and prevent the next engaged the United States in the early 1940s. The war had to be won. But, so, too, did the peace. To achieve both ends, FDR believed it was necessary to secure the high ground in American politics going forward. In 1944 he sought re-election as an ailing man, aged beyond his years, so that he might shape the future as the leader of a new Democratic Party. That new kind of party, he hoped, would link liberal Democrats, liberal Republicans and progressive independents in a movement that might finally overwhelm the Southern segregationists and the conservatives of both the old parties. Roosevelt, Wallace and many others believed that the end of World War II could be a pivot point in American history, where the greatest generation, having beaten fascism overseas, would return with a determination to beat reaction at home.
The great political debate of the war years gave rise to two clear camps, which formed in and around the two major parties. One side sought a postwar regression toward the America that existed before the war and before the New Deal, as was the fervent hope of right-wing fabulists such as Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick. Even then, the country had its “Make America Great Again” contingent.
The other side saw the New Deal and the united front against fascism as a blueprint for postwar progress. They might quibble about approaches and agendas, but these liberal internationalists seemed to have the upper hand. For a brief moment during World War II, the isolationists were isolated, as prominent Republicans such as Wendell Willkie and New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia aligned with Roosevelt. The best of the liberal internationalists knew that greatness could be achieved only when segregation, sexism and poverty were addressed. America was “the hope of the world” and had to continue to acquit itself as such, announced La Guardia, who was elected to his position as the nominee of the party of Lincoln but identified as a New Dealer. An ardent advocate for social-welfare programs at home and abroad, La Guardia served after World War II as the director general for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, putting into practice a view he had expressed from his days as a young congressman serving after World War I: “You cannot preach self-government and liberty to people in a starving land.” La Guardia was a frequent ally and sometime candidate of the Socialist Party, like a number of progressive Republicans in that time, and he preached that economic security was necessary for the full enjoyment of freedom. “Only a well-fed, well-schooled and well-housed people can enjoy the blessings of liberty,” he argued.
The son of an Italian Catholic immigrant father and a Jewish immigrant mother from Trieste whose own sister was interned in a Nazi concentration camp, La Guardia was a predictable Republican ally of FDR and the visionary politics of the World War II era. Wendell Willkie was not. As president of the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, the nation’s largest utility holding company, during the 1930s Willkie emerged as an outspoken critic of the