Roosevelt Speech

The Speech That Set Off the Debate About America’s Role in the World

By Josh Zeitz

Seventy-five years ago this evening, on December 29, 1940, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—recently reelected to an unprecedented third term in office—took to the airwaves at 9:30 p.m. Eastern time to address an increasingly restive nation on the sobering topic of war mobilization. Across the Atlantic, Britain was engaged in a death struggle with Hitler’s Germany, which had already laid claim to vast regions of Europe, from France and the lowlands in the west to Poland in the east. In Asia, Japan had swallowed up large parts of China and cast a watchful eye toward the Central and South Pacific.

For over 36 minutes and 53 seconds, Roosevelt spoke to his captive audience about the imperative of American engagement in the conflict. Staying true to his campaign pledge of several weeks earlier, that America would not declare war on the Axis powers unless it were attacked, the president still made a forceful case for American military support to Britain. “If Great Britain goes down,” he warned, “the Axis powers will control the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and the high seas. … It is no exaggeration to say that all of us, in all the Americas, would be living at the point of a gun.”

To preserve universal freedom, the president urged, “we must have more ships, more guns, more plans—more of everything. We must be the great arsenal of democracy.”

A canny student of language, FDR had been holding the watchwords “arsenal of democracy” in check for the right moment. After hearing it roll off the tongue of French economist Jean Monnet (who likely coined it) earlier in the year, FDR’s confidant, Felix Frankfurter, secured Monnet’s agreement “not to use that phrase again.” Now by design, it entered America’s wartime lexicon as the living expression of the country’s march away from isolation.

FDR’s fireside chat laid the groundwork for America’s entry into the war less than a year later. Equally important, it sparked a vibrant debate over the meaning of America’s role in the world and, indeed, the very meaning of American freedom itself. Today, as America enters its 16th year of active military operations in the Middle East, and as the war on terror (at home and abroad) assumes greater prominence in the 2016 election cycle, the conversation that Roosevelt initiated so long ago remains surprisingly relevant.

In the months preceding his “arsenal of democracy” address, faced with a country that was divided about sending economic and military aid to Britain but very much against getting itself into the war, FDR worked assiduously to thread a very thin needle.

On June 1, weeks before France surrendered to Germany, Roosevelt unilaterally bypassed the Neutrality Act by declaring enormous caches of military equipment “surplus” and ordering that they be shipped with dispatch to Britain. He did so over the strong objections of his military advisers, including Army Chief of Staff George Marshall. When the secretary of war voiced concern about the legality of the order, the president ordered him to comply or resign. When Hap Arnold, a high-ranking Army general, repeated concerns that the order would adversely affect America’s war readiness, FDR told an aide that “if Arnold won’t comply, maybe we’ll have to move him out of town.” When the Navy’s judge advocate general balked at sanctioning the transfer, FDR instructed Secretary of the Navy Charles Edison to send the “sea lawyer” on a protracted vacation. (Edison refused, to which the president replied tartly, “forget it and do what I told you to do.”) Hugh Johnson, FDR’s former recovery chief and by then a committed isolationist, wasn’t far from the truth when he noted that the president was “shooting craps with destiny.”

In mid-September, amid the fall presidential canvass, FDR announced that he would exchange upwards of 50 American destroyers for two British naval bases and 99-year leases on several others. Again, he acted without congressional approval and in full circumvention of existing neutrality laws. Later that fall, with the endorsement of both Roosevelt and GOP presidential nominee Wendell Willkie, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the first peacetime draft in U.S. history, with substantial opposition in both houses.

Isolationists howled. Roosevelt, nearing the end of his third presidential campaign, publicly howled back, joyously deriding some of the most vocal anti-interventionists in speeches around the country.

Still, even in electoral victory, FDR understood that the country had little appetite for war. So it was on the evening of December 29, and in the coming weeks, that he began to articulate for the country his understanding of America’s broader role in the world. Neither the president nor his expansive radio audience could have anticipated the events of December 1941 (which would all but discredit isolationism as a public policy option and isolationists as a political group), but the conversation that Roosevelt inaugurated a year earlier in his “arsenal” speech signaled an emerging shift from surreptitious and legally questionable support for mobilization to full-throated advocacy for American involvement in the war. That conversation would in turn soon attract participants with quite divergent opinions about how such American involvement should unfold, and just what the purpose of American engagement should be.

During his fireside chat on December 29, FDR warned, “at this moment the forces of the states that are leagued against all peoples who live in freedom are being held away from our shores.” The Axis powers represented the “revival of the oldest and the worst tyranny. In that there is no liberty, no religion, no hope. … It is not a government based upon the consent of the governed. It is not a union of ordinary, self-respecting men and women to protect themselves and their freedom and their dignity from oppression. It is an unholy alliance of power and pelf to dominate and to enslave the human race.”

In effect, the president framed the war as a momentous struggle for the preservation of human liberty, even going so far as to invoke the specter of an institution (slavery) that cost the country millions of black and white lives before nearly destroying the American project. In this struggle, the United States was to provide the material means with which to save the free world.

Roosevelt further elevated the war’s meaning a week later, on January 6, 1941, when he famously declared before Congress that America was committed to extending “four essential human freedoms”—the famous freedoms to which he alluded six months earlier during an impromptu press conference at Hyde Park, and which would henceforth become an ideological and rhetorical cornerstone of America’s mobilization and war effort. As he did in a radio address in 1942, Roosevelt would frequently invoke the freedoms of speech and religion (and freedoms from want and fear) as fundamental liberties to be enjoyed by “men of every creed and every race, wherever they live” and identified America’s commitment to them as “the crucial difference between ourselves and the enemies we face today.”

For New Dealers—those who supported a stronger welfare state and civil rights for racially and disadvantaged groups, many of whom were already inclined to associate fascism abroad with conservatism at home—the Four Freedoms represented a clarion call to extend economic and civil liberties everywhere in the world. Certainly FDR believed this was so when he argued in November 1941 that “there can be no real freedom for the common man without enlightened social policies.”

Conservative internationalists, on the other hand, held starkly different ideas about what the four freedoms should augur.

Freedom of speech and religion were acceptable, conservatives typically argued, but freedom from fear and want were “New Deal Freedoms,” not “American Freedoms,” as they portended the expansion of a public-sector welfare state that made dependent children of otherwise sturdy and self-sufficient citizens. Edith Nourse Rogers, a Republican congresswoman from Massachusetts, even proposed a Fifth Freedom—the “Freedom of Private Enterprise,” in the absence of which the four enumerated “by the President of the United States are meaningless.” For representatives of business and industry, World War II provided an opportunity, even an imperative, to save “free enterprise” from domestic and foreign enemies. Especially as the war effort cranked the American economy into full gear, organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers drew direct linkage between the virtues of the free market and the political liberties for which soldiers and sailors were fighting and dying. One consumer advertisement went so far as to claim that the war’s purpose was to “hasten the day when you … can once more walk into any store in the land and buy anything you want.” To conservatives, freedom was more government restraint than government entitlements. In the context of 1941, as the United States awoke from an isolationist sleep and mobilized for war with a collection of authoritarian states, this position resonated with many Americans who looked askance at the New Deal’s vast expansion of government authority and prerogative.

On February 17, 1941, the influential American publisher Henry Luce gave expression to the conservative interpretation of the war when he introduced the idea of an “American Century” into the national lexicon. Writing in his popular magazine, Time, Luce predicted that the United States would emerge from the war as a “dominant power in the world,” with a mission to evangelize “free economic enterprise” and “the abundant life” around the globe. Not only by its economic, military and industrial might would America come to press its influence, but also by its dynamic cultural force. In effect, his article represented a powerful attempt to distance conservatism from isolationism and to distance internationalism from the New Deal.

“Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism,” Luce insisted, “we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways—in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world.”

Every bit as much as Roosevelt’s pledge to make America the world’s “arsenal of democracy” or his herald of a world guided by four freedoms, Luce’s formulation came to dominate public discourse during and after the war. His essay was not necessarily at odds with Roosevelt’s rhetoric—indeed, it implored that “for every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic effort to feed the world. … Every farmer in America should be encouraged to produce all the crops he can, and all that we cannot eat—and perhaps some of us could eat less—should forthwith be dispatched to the four quarters of the globe as a free gift, administered by a humanitarian army of Americans, to every man, woman and child on this earth who is really hungry.” Luce’s American Century would be secured not only by military might, but by “engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators.”

But given his wider reputation as a conservative Republican, when Luce extolled America’s “love of freedom,” “feeling for the equality of opportunity” and “tradition of self-reliance and independence,” some New Dealers worried that he might hijack the conflict in Europe for the exclusive benefit of private industry. Their vision of a postwar peace anticipated more expansive rights and entitlements for ordinary citizens, not new markets and resources for American companies.

In 1942, following America’s entry into the war, Vice President Henry Wallace, one of the most progressive members of Roosevelt’s administration, issued a response to Luce. “Some have spoken of the American Century,” Wallace wrote. “I say that the century on which we are entering—the century which will come of this war—can and must be the century of the common man.” In such a world, “no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations,” and “older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither economic or military imperialism.” Wallace’s vision closely mirrored the most ardent hopes of New Dealers, who looked forward to a world order in which established governments helped free people everywhere from hunger, unemployment, sickness and political oppression.

The vice president and Luce weren’t necessarily in disagreement, but they placed sharp emphasis on different virtues. For Luce, World War II would introduce an era in which free enterprise, fashioned in the American way and exported by American institutions, would secure a new form of freedom and democracy for all the world to enjoy. For Wallace, the war would unlock a universal New Deal to be enjoyed across all four corners of the map. In such a future, America would shoulder moral responsibilities, but it would not emerge as the world’s economic hegemon, policeman or culture factory.

Luce and Wallace had both agreed with the president that America would inevitably and necessarily enter the war and that the war, in turn, would create a vastly different world from that which preceded it. But what that world would look like was a question on which New Dealers and conservatives sharply differed.

In his closing lines on December 29, Roosevelt shared his “profound conviction that the American people are now determined to put forth a mightier effort than they have ever yet made to … meet the threat to our democratic faith.”

By challenging the nation to become an “arsenal of democracy,” and in later cataloging four broad and interpretable freedoms that should guide its emergence as a global power, FDR ignited a vibrant discussion about the very meaning of words like “democracy” and “freedom” and provided citizens with a new framework by which to consider, debate and envision their place in the world. Those deliberations remain relevant even today, as we enter the last quarter of the American Century.

Over the past decade and a half, the United States has devoted trillions of dollars and thousands of lives to the business of exporting “freedom” and “democracy”—terms that politicians and pundits employ loosely, as though their definition were universal. As in 1940, the lexicon of democracy is malleable enough to accommodate materially different understandings of what it means to export and promote American values. As in 1940 and 1941, agreement that we should fight does not equate to consensus about what we’re fighting for. The national discussion that FDR opened 75 years ago rages on, and remains as essential now as it was then. There’s no shame in waging that discussion loudly—only in not having it at all.