The Four Freedoms

"I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call." - Franklin D. Roosevelt

Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" speech in 1941 was a very powerful speech with a dominant message of the freedoms that we have and that the rest of the people in the world deserve to have. I hold this to be one of the greatest speeches in the history of this country, right up there with Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” and Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address”. Why do I think that it is so great? The ideas presented in the speech are the principles on which our whole nation was founded upon and stand for. He uses articulate language to increase the patriotism in the hearts of the listeners. At its root, the speech is a call for all Americans to give all that they have in order to make our society and the entire world a better place for all. However, if you look past the first layer and delve deeper into the speech, it is easy to see that Roosevelt is trying to join the whole country together as they head into a brand new war. He realizes the importance of unity as a nation. People of all races, from all different backgrounds, and from all different lifestyles are required to come together at a time of war. Only then will our efforts not be in vain. Only then can we succeed to spread peace throughout the world.