FDR - Jean Edward Smith [305]
On January 6 Roosevelt went to Capitol Hill to deliver his ninth State of the Union message. The bulk of the president’s speech was devoted to preparedness, defense production, and the necessity for Lend-Lease. “Let us say to the democracies: ‘We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge.’ ”
But the address is remembered for Roosevelt’s peroration:
In 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.…
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.…
The third is freedom from want.…
The fourth is freedom from fear.… 28
Like Lend-Lease, the Four Freedoms were Roosevelt’s idea. “Nobody ghost-wrote those words,” said Robert Sherwood.29 Sitting in his upstairs study two nights before the speech was to be delivered, going over the third draft with Rosenman, Sherwood, and Hopkins, FDR said he had an idea for the peroration. “We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling,” Rosenman remembered. “It was a long pause—so long that it began to be uncomfortable.” Then he began dictating. “The words seemed to roll off his tongue as though he had rehearsed them many times to himself.* A comparison with the final speech will show that his dictation was changed by only a word here and there, so perfect had been the formulation in his own mind.”30
Shortly after the State of the Union, Wendell Willkie paid a courtesy call at the White House preparatory to a goodwill visit to England.† When he was announced, FDR was closeted in the Cabinet Room with Rosenman and Sherwood working on his January 20 inaugural address. The president shifted himself onto his wheelchair and moved into the Oval Office to greet Willkie, only to discover that his desk was clear of papers. He turned back to the Cabinet Room and told Rosenman and Sherwood to give him some papers.
“Which particular papers do you want, Mr. President?” asked Rosenman.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” said FDR. “Just give me a handful to strew around on my desk so I will look very busy when Willkie comes in.”31
Roosevelt and Willkie spent more than an hour together. “At regular intervals great bursts of laughter could be heard coming through the closed doors,” James Roosevelt reported.32 At one point Willkie asked Roosevelt why he retained Harry Hopkins as an intimate adviser in view of Hopkins’s general unpopularity. “Someday you may well be sitting here where I am now,” FDR replied. “And when you are, you’ll realize what a lonely job it is, and you’ll discover the need for somebody like Harry Hopkins who asks for nothing except to serve you.”33
As Willkie prepared to leave, Roosevelt took a sheet of his personal stationery and commenced writing:
Dear Churchill,
Wendell Willkie will give you this. He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.
Then from memory FDR wrote out a passage from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Building of the Ship,” which he had learned as a schoolboy at Groton:
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.34
On January 10, 1941, the Lend-Lease bill (H.R. 1776) was introduced by Majority Leader John W. McCormack of Massachusetts in the House and Alben Barkley in the Senate. Isolationist opponents had a brief field day. The Chicago Tribune called H.R. 1776 “a dictator bill” designed to destroy the Republic. New York’s Thomas E. Dewey said it meant “an end to free government in the United States.