To read a brief biography of Mrs. Roosevelt, click here or scroll to the bottom.

In a series of 1958 articles for The Saturday Evening Post called “On My Own,” Mrs. Roosevelt continued to be outspoken about some of the most important world leaders of the time—including Winston Churchill, Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and a young Queen Elizabeth II.

Roosevelt spoke at length about the British royal family, whom she came to know closely during World War II:

King George VI and Queen Elizabeth came to the White House before the war and later visited us at Hyde Park. I shall never forget the day they left. It was in June, 1939, when the threat of tragic events in Europe already weighed heavily in all our minds. Franklin and I went with them to the Hyde Park railroad station, where their train was waiting. Nobody had arranged anything special, but, of course, the public knew the time of their departure and crowds had gathered. The steep little knolls rising on each side of the railroad tracks were simply covered with people, who waited, rather silently, until our good-bys were said. But then, as the train pulled out, somebody began singing Auld Lang Syne and then everybody was singing, and it seemed to me that there was something of our friendship and our sadness and something of the uncertainty of our futures in that song that could not have been said as well in any other words. I think the king and queen, standing on the rear platform of the train, were deeply moved. I know I was.

Roosevelt recalled how she was impressed by the young Queen Elizabeth while visiting England:

I was particularly struck by the then Princess Elizabeth, just twenty at the time of my visit, but very serious-minded. She came to me after a dinner given by the Pilgrim Society and said, “I understand you have been to see some of the homes where we are trying to rehabilitate young women offenders against the law. I have not yet been to see them, but could you give me your opinion?”

I told her I was very favorably impressed by the experiment in which the government had taken over some of the country’s historic houses that the owners could no longer afford to maintain. These houses had been put under the care of young women prisoners, who had done the work of rehabilitating the houses and gardens to preserve them as national monuments. Thus it was hoped not only to maintain these monuments to the past but in doing so to assist the young women to rebuild their own lives in a useful way. What struck me at the time was that this young princess was so interested in social problems and how they were being handled.

The monarchs were not the only Brits who made an impression on the former First Lady, although Prime Minister Winston Churchill made one of a different sort:

Mr. Churchill—now Sir Winston—is, of course, one of the very unusual figures of our time. He was frequently at the White House during the tense years of the war and he and Franklin had many interests in common—not counting winning the war—so that they enjoyed each other’s company. They could talk for hours after dinner on any number of subjects. My husband, however, was so burdened with work that it was a terrible strain on him to sit up late at night with Mr. Churchill and then have to be at his desk early the next day, while his guest stayed in his room until eleven A.M. I suppose I showed my concern about this at the time, and the prime minister probably remembered it when he said to me, “You don’t really approve of me, do you, Mrs. Roosevelt?”

Looking back on it, I don’t suppose I really did.

Although she didn’t get along famously with Churchill, Roosevelt did leave a very favorable impression on other noteworthy dignitaries—including Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie:

One of the most interesting [visitors] was Emperor Haile Selassie, of Ethiopia, who came to Hyde Park while on an official visit to the US. He was a slight, bearded man with dignity and strength of character and, I felt, a desire to foster freedom, peace and progress in his country …

He would arrive at noon and I was to meet him at my husband’s grave in the rose garden. He was to visit the library where the records of my husband’s administration are kept. He positively must get to the house by one o’clock because he wanted to see a television broadcast of a film that he had made. Then the State Department representative added sternly that it was imperative that the emperor have a half hour alone in his room before luncheon for rest and contemplation.

I thought this a rather crowded schedule, but I didn’t try to argue with the State Department protocol officer. I met the emperor and accompanied him to the library. He was much interested in modernizing his own country and when he saw the excellent system for keeping records in the library he became excited and summarily ordered his entire staff to be assembled.

“Look!” he exclaimed, waving his hand toward the library stacks. “Study this system! Here is how you do it! Here is how you keep history!”

He was so busy examining the library that I barely managed to get him to the house on the stroke of one o’clock. He found a low stool in the living room and seated himself in front of the television set and seemed to forget everything else as the film of himself came on the screen. I am not sure that he had ever seen television of any kind before. In any event, he was fascinated and the minutes passed with no sign that he was ready to retire to his room for the scheduled half hour before luncheon. This rest period had been so strongly emphasized to me, however, that at last I approached and spoke to him in French.

“Your Majesty,” I said. “I believe you want to rest for half an hour alone.”

He did not turn his gaze from the television screen, but his reply was prompt, “Oh, no. It is not necessary for me to be alone. I only wanted to take off my shoes for a little while.” Still watching the screen, he pointed downward. “And,” he added, “my shoes are off.” I looked down. The emperor’s shoes were certainly off and he was wiggling his toes comfortably …

After the emperor returned to his own country, he thoughtfully sent me some Ethiopian whole coffee beans. In fact, he sent me 400 pounds of them and I had quite a time using them up.

Roosevelt also had much to say of another important world leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of newly sovereign India:

As I got to know the prime minister better when I later visited India, I felt he was a man with great physical and moral courage. But I discovered that his remarkable intellectual abilities did not free him entirely from prejudice. In the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, Mr. Nehru was completely emotional because of his personal ties to Kashmir. I felt he suffered a stoppage of all reason on that particular subject and contradicted the high ideals that he normally expressed in regard to the right of people to decide their own destiny …

It seems to me that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ method of dealing with Prime Minister Nehru has been unfortunate and unwise. You have to remember that India is newly independent and the Indians are highly sensitive in regard to their independence. You have to remember, too, that since the Communists came into power in China, India is the only large non-Communist nation in Asia. Mr. Nehru firmly expects India will remain non-Communist, and this is of great importance to the West. Yet Secretary Dulles has, in my opinion, made several grave errors in dealing with India. When negotiating the Japanese treaties, for example, he visited various Far Eastern countries, but did not go personally to India. Mr. Nehru felt this was an obvious slight, and I cannot see how it was wise to create resentment toward us in such an important country. Then when India and Pakistan were in conflict, we sent arms to Pakistan, theoretically at least for defense on her northern borders. It created more bitterness against us in India, and it might well have been avoided by limiting our aid to Pakistan to the economic field. I cannot help but feel that Mr. Dulles fails to understand the feelings of many of the peoples with whom we must deal—that he lacks antennae with which to reach out and sense the attitudes of others at times when such attitudes may be of utmost importance in our struggle against Communism.

After recalling her visit with Nehru, Roosevelt reflected on the very different impression she received while hosting a dignitary from India’s even more highly populated neighbor, Madame Kai-shek of China:

[Kai-shek] had stayed with us at the White House and she came to Hyde Park after Franklin’s death. She once told me that she and her husband felt it was their duty to establish democratic government in China and that they should carry on to the bitter end in the struggle toward that goal. She always seemed to me to be a woman of great ability, but I never ceased to be perplexed by her ideas about the establishment of democracy. I think that intellectually she understands what democracy means, but despite the fact that she went to college in this country she does not know how to live democracy.

A Brief Biography of Eleanor Roosevelt

Born in 1884, humanitarian, civil rights activist, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the most influential woman in American history. Throughout the Great Depression and World War II—and afterward—she ceaselessly worked to better the lives of all, and her achievements still resonate globally today.

At home, she fought to improve the rights of women, African Americans, farmers, and the unemployed, and—alongside husband Franklin Delano Roosevelt—helped shape policies to combat deplorable living conditions, provide a safety net and jobs for the poor, establish child labor laws, set a minimum wage, and provide better working conditions. Abroad, she helped create and served for the United Nations and helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Roosevelt was shy as a youth, but her compassion and desire for social reform were evident by young adulthood when she became a social worker in New York City’s decrepit East Side. Around this time she met FDR. During their courtship, she exposed him to the hardships faced by people in the slums; a transformative experience for the “New Deal” president. In 1905, they married.

Eleanor worked with the UN after FDR’s death, where she continued her fight for the downtrodden on a global stage. At this time she helped create what she considered her greatest achievement—the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Adopted by 48 countries, it stated freedom and justice were universal and condemned discrimination, torture, and slavery.

Roosevelt continued to work for equality until her death in 1962; she was serving on President John F. Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women—which aimed to overcome gender discrimination—when she passed away.

Famous Contributors: Eleanor Roosevelt The Saturday Evening Post

Swigert, now 102, was pleased to be offered a $15-a-week job at a time when “there were men selling apples on the street corner.” His father, on the other hand, saw his own business falter in the harsh economic times, and ultimately went bankrupt.

It all has a familiar ring. What Swigert remembers from the ’30s echoes what millions of Americans are experiencing now. The economy has lost more than 8 million jobs since the recession began in December 2007. As of March this year, the unemployment rate stood at 9.7 percent for the third consecutive month, edging up to 9.9 percent in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Although there are signs the recession is lessening, a record 6.7 million Americans have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer.

The comparisons between the ’30s and today are both painful and inevitable, but it’s pretty obvious this hasn’t been our fathers’ (or grandfathers’) depression. No economist has suggested our predicament is anything close to what occurred in the 1930s, when the market collapsed and 15 million people, one-fourth of the work force, were unemployed.

Nor has the current crisis led to as much imagery associated with the Great Depression: bread lines, shantytowns, homeless men—called tramps then—wandering door to door in search of handouts and charity.

A scene common in american cities during the 1930s, skilled and unskilled laborers alike stood in bread lines like this one near the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City.
Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.

One reason, of course, is the New Deal itself. The Social Security Act of 1935 created, in addition to the retirement insurance for which it’s named, a federal and state system of unemployment compensation that provides temporary, partial wages to the newly out-of-work. It’s a cushion for families, and it helps stabilize the economy during recessions.

The safety net devised under Roosevelt protects the country today “from looking like it did in 1931 and 1932,” says Nick Taylor, whose book, American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA, analyzes the economic crisis that began under Herbert Hoover, brought FDR into office, and prompted creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), among other economic reforms.

Perhaps more significant, the New Deal forever changed the public’s expectation of the government’s role in times of hardship. The pre-World War II generation hit bottom before government stepped in. Republican Herbert Hoover, who prematurely declared “The Depression is over” in June 1930, steadfastly opposed government action, which led to his lopsided loss to FDR. In 2008 presidential candidates Obama and McCain stood together against laissez faire banking; to have done otherwise could have been political suicide.

“The Roosevelt administration was the first one to recognize that the government was responsible for the welfare of the people,” Taylor says. “One of government’s purposes is to have a humanitarian side.”

Roosevelt’s program was controversial then. It still is igniting debate that rages among pundits and economists. Did the New Deal help end the Great Depression, or was it just a distraction until World War II provided the real economic stimulus?

Wake Forest University economist Robert Whaples conducted a survey of economists in 1995 and asked if they agreed with the following: “Taken as a whole, government policies of the New 
Deal served to lengthen and deepen the Great Depression.” Fifty-one percent disagreed and 49 percent agreed (many 
with provisions).

The most glowing analyses credit the New Deal for lifting the country out of the worst of the Depression and improving the mood of a panicked nation. The most critical suggest that Roosevelt’s fiscal policies not only aggravated the crisis but extended the Depression by as many as seven years. But on one aspect of the New Deal, its humanitarian impact on suffering individuals, almost everyone agrees: Government-sponsored jobs improved the economic circumstances of the people who held those jobs.

Roosevelt first proposed the idea of a permanent jobs program during his annual message to Congress on January 4, 1935. A variety of temporary relief measures had been implemented by then, but Roosevelt considered them handouts and demeaning to human dignity. At that time, 5 million people were receiving some form of government aid, 3.5 million of whom Roosevelt felt were able-bodied and could be working.

The WPA renewed America's infrastructure, building roads, bridges, airports, and water and sewer systems, among other improvements.
Photos: Library of Congress

His proposal became the Works Progress Administration. At its peak in March 1938, the WPA rolls hit 3.4 million. By June 1943, when the program was ended because it was no longer needed—unemployment had fallen to 1.9 percent—the WPA had employed more than 8.5 million people on 1.4 million different projects.

After that, Taylor writes, “No one would care to look at the WPA again for quite some time. In the heat of war, there was too much else to think about, and the agency closed its doors without fanfare. Two years later, when the war was ending and life slowly began to return to normal, Americans did not want to remember the Depression.”

Its legacy, Taylor says, is measured in statistics and still evident all around us. The WPA fought floods, hurricanes, and fires; recycled toys; inoculated the sick; and “created works that even without restoration have lasted for more 
than 70 years.”

President Barack Obama consistently invoked the New Deal as historic evidence to support his stimulus plan. “With the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back into life. It is only government that can break the vicious cycle where lost jobs lead to people spending less money, which leads to even more layoffs,” he said.

The WPA produced unforgettable posters from 1936 to 1943 by drawing on the talents of hundreds of out-of-work artists. The posters were designed to promote health and hygiene, cultural activities, domestic travel, community involvement, and educational programs.
Poster courtesy of the Library of Congress

Many similarities can be found between the New Deal and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. The most obvious is that both were designed to save or create about 3.5 million jobs.

Yet Roosevelt himself could not have imagined the size of the government’s commitment this time around. The Works Progress Administration, massive as it was, spent $11 billion during its eight-year tenure. Adjusted for inflation, that would be more than $130 billion today. That pales in comparison to the $787 billion in the stimulus package, which has gone to tax cuts; extended unemployment benefits; and government spending on education, health care, weatherization, and infrastructure. That was all on top of the $700 billion financial services bailout passed by Congress earlier.

The enormity of the investment may be what most distinguishes ARRA from the New Deal. Quoted in a report by Voice of America, historian Alan Brinkley of Columbia University suggested that the weakness of the New Deal was that it wasn’t big enough to compensate for the loss of wealth of the Great Depression. “If you want to counteract a severe recession, you have to take big measures to generate economic activity. And I think that is what the stimulus package is designed to do,” he said.

In April, President Obama said the stimulus bill has succeeded and can be credited with helping business bounce back. Economic research firms Macroeconomic Advisers, IHS Global Insight, and Moody’s Economy.com estimate that the bill has added 1.6 million to 1.8 million jobs to the economy so far.

Without question, opportunities for waste and corruption have occurred just as they did during the ’30s, when “stories were legion about people leaning on shovels,” Taylor 
says. Indeed, the government agency charged with keeping track of expenditures and job creation has found the task next to impossible, releasing data that indicates stimulus money has been distributed to 440 congressional districts that don’t even exist: the “phantom zip code scandal.”

The stimulus act also has piled debt on taxpayers that may not get paid off for decades. That’s a concern for many, including J. Mack Swigert, the pavement-pounding Harvard graduate who eventually became a labor and litigation attorney. “I don’t know whether a stimulus package is good or not,” Swigert says. “On the one hand, it puts us further in debt. On the other hand, it keeps businesses going and people at work.”

That’s a sentiment he’s held ever since the Depression and experienced the relief that came from getting any kind of job, even a $15-a-week one. “My feeling then was if you had a job, you ought to be happy. And I was.” And that’s good advice for every generation, not just in times of want, but times of plenty.

Putting America Back to Work The Saturday Evening Post

It’s unofficial name — the only name it ever had — was the Blue Eagle, and it was the emblem of the National Recovery Administration (not of the National Rifle Association). It was displayed by businesses that supported the NRA codes for price and wage-controls.

The NRA was one of President Roosevelt’s first efforts to stimulate the depressed economy. It created codes that would reduce competitive pricing and increase employment.

It took time to write these codes for each industry. So, in 1933, the NRA asked businesses to accept a voluntary code for all employers. The NRA code set minimum wages and maximum hours, but allowed competing businesses to set prices for their industries.

The businesses that adopted the blanket code, according to John Kennedy Ohl, were asked to display “a Blue Eagle accompanied by the words ‘We Do Our Part,’ on a placard in their windows or on their products. Consumers were to give their business only to those firms that adhered to the code.”

The Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth By General Hugh S. Johnson January 19, 1935

The program was run by Hugh S. Johnson, a blunt and impassioned zealot who used every medium in his power to achieve compliance. Under this direction, says Ohl, “the NRA orchestrated a great outpouring of ballyhoo and patriotic appeal replete with radio speakers, motorcades, torchlight processions, mass rallies, parades, and a nationwide speaking tour by Johnson… The Blue Eagle appeared on posters, billboards, flags, movie screens, magazines, newspapers, and numerous products. Beauty contestants had the Blue Eagle stamped on their thighs, and in Philadelphia fans cheered a new professional football team dubbed the Eagles after the NRA’s icon.”

For all the wing flapping, though, the Blue Eagle never left the ground. After two years, and determined opposition from some industries, the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional.

Later that year, Hugh Johnson published a series of articles in the Post that attempted to justify what he called “the greatest social and economic experiment of our age.” In his article, he claimed the NRA had several achievements.

“Whatever may properly be criticized about NRA, it created 2,785,000 jobs at a desperate time and added about $3,000,000,000 to the annual purchasing power of working people. It did more to create employment than all other emergency agencies put together, and it did so by creating normal jobs everywhere and without drafts on the Federal Treasury… It abolished child labor. It ran out the sweatshops. It established the principle of regulated hours, wages and working conditions. It went far toward removing wages from the area of predatory competition. It added to the rights and freedom of human labor.”

National Archives

Few historians would agree with his assessment. By making these claims, David M. Kennedy says, “for neither the first time nor the last, Johnson was whistling ‘Dixie.’ Much of the modest rise in production and employment in the spring of 1933 owed not to the salutary ministration of NRA but to nervous anticipation of its impact.”
Kennedy points out that Johnson’s attitude proved a handicap for the agency.

“Johnson faced… persistent industrial recalcitrance with his trademark mix of bluster, bravado, and baloney. ‘Away slight men!’ he railed to a group of businessmen in Atlanta. ‘You may have been Captains of Industry once, but you are Corporals of Disaster now.’ Pleading for minimum wage standards, he declaimed that ‘men have died and worms have eaten them but not from paying human labor thirty cents an hour.’ The ‘chiselers’ who tried to shave NRA standards, he thundered, were ‘guilty of a practice as cheap as stealing pennies out of the cup of a blind beggar.’”

In his Post article, Johnson never considered apologizing for his devotion to what he called his “holy cause.”

“Perhaps I am overzealous or even fanatic on this subject, but I feel it so intensely that I will fight for it. I have sacrificed, and will sacrifice, for it. No personal interest — neither my own nor another’s — can stand in the way of anything which I think will help it.”

His passionate devotion sometimes blinded him to the impracticability of the NRA. In other areas, though, he was keenly perceptive, and some of his observations about business and employment were true for the 1920s as well as today:

“Savage wolfish competition without any direction whatever has proved to be one of the most destructive forces in our economic life. When it got savage and wolfish enough, it began immediately to gnaw upon the living standards of wage and salary earners, and that happened to include over 80% of our population.

“When times are fabulously good, the great prosperity of the few filters down to the many and tends to obscure this tendency. But in normal times, and especially when a depression such as that which began five years ago comes upon us like a blight and millions of men begin tramping the streets, looking for any kind of work that will afford a crust of bread for their families, the whole aspect changes.

“Families are no longer self-contained, economic units that can be put on wheels and trundled into a new environment to start things over again. Our nineteenth-century safety valve of cheap or free new lands and a constantly expanding country has ceased to exist. The old order of our frontier days is gone forever, and by no man’s designing.

“All this has brought benefits, but it has also brought great griefs. The roaring, clacking engine of our industry and commerce has become a vast and highly active machine of which no individual is more than an integrated part. Each performs a specialized function. In most cases, living income comes as a matter of determination by a power with whom there is no bargaining in any true sense. The individual worker accepts the wage scales decreed by employers and is thankful, and his separation from the particular ratchet in which he revolves may be a tragedy. At his doorway there is no longer an open road to high adventure in a new and brighter country, and even if there were such a road, his specialization has unfitted him to take it.

The official cause of death for the Blue Eagle was the Supreme Court’s decision in Schchter v. The United States. However, it faced a more immovable opponent in American industry, as Ohl points out:

National Archives

“Ultimately… the NRA failed because of its underlying premise… the belief that the various segments of the economy could look beyond their own interest and work together for the national welfare. This belief was naive in the case of organized business. Starved for profits and often unwilling to accept labor as even a junior partner, it pursued its own interests and used the NRA to restrict production, raise prices, and thwart labor’s aspirations.”

Sixty-six years later, the government rushed to the aid of American banks that were facing collapse. Within the year, though, bank executives were paying themselves large bonuses made possible by the support of taxpayers. Now, as in 1933, many businessmen in America view catastrophe and government emergency-assistance as an opportunity for profit.

Read the Blue Eagle from Egg to Earth [PDF].

“The National Recovery Administration,” John Kennedy Ohl,

Encyclopedia of the Great Depression

, Robert S. Mclvaine, Thompson Gale, 2004.

David M. Kennedy,

Freedom From Fear

, Oxford University Press, 1999.

The Eagle That Never Flew The Saturday Evening Post

The discussion was quoted in the editorial The Spenders from the August 8, 1936 issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

Americans wanted to know the facts about the government’s expenditures but where could they obtain such information? Many believed since ¼ of every dollar they made was being turned into the government they had earned the right to know about the government’s spending.

In comparison, Americans today still want to know the answers to those same questions. Although the wave of the New Deal happened over 70 years ago, President Barack Obama is strongly being compared to the New Deal creator, FDR.

“Obama’s plea for a massive government spending program is based on his belief that Roosevelt’s New Deal helped lift the country out of the 1930s depression,” states the article “Amid echoes of FDR, debate rekindles over New Deal” in the January 15, 2009 edition of The Boston Globe.

Regardless of your opinion of the new deal, Obama is clearly eager to tread foot on the foundation built by presidents before him. “Obama is a serious student of the period and is trying to apply its lessons, both in terms of economic theory and inspirational message. The President [Elect], however, cautioned in a recent television interview that he wouldn’t simply copy the New Deal because ‘no period is exactly the same,’” states the Boston Globe article.

POST script, May 24, 2012:

The Spenders The Saturday Evening Post

Rockwell spent six months painting The Four Freedoms, which were published in a series of Saturday Evening Post issues in 1943, accompanied by short essays from four distinguished writers. The U.S. Government subsequently issued posters of Rockwell’s paintings in a highly successful war bond campaign that raised more than $132 million for the war effort. Rockwell’s homey depictions of Roosevelt’s abstract concepts were widely popular across America, yet not everyone was completely in tune with the ideas elaborated in Roosevelt’s speech.

In an editorial published later in 1943 (reprinted below), Post editors addressed a controversy over the meaning of the freedoms, in a debate that still has relevance today. Perhaps not since FDR has a president faced challenges as daunting as those that await our new Commander in Chief, who like FDR promised significant “change” in a time of tremendous economic and global turmoil.

“It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get to where we are today, but we have just begun,” Barack Obama said during the campaign. “Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.”

Is the dream still alive? As then, we are certainly permitted to hope and aspire to the same ideal.
The Four Freedoms Are an Ideal

For millions of people throughout the world the Four Freedoms have come to represent something which gives meaning and importance to the sacrifices which the human race is now making, but these freedoms are by no means universally accepted as worthy aims for nations at war. Indeed, a not inconsiderable number of people regard the Four Freedoms as actually evil, an effort to deceive people into imagining that they will never again have to take thought for the morrow, since government will provide everything for them.

Few people object to the first two freedoms mentioned by President Roosevelt in his message of January 6, 1941. Freedoms of Speech and Religion are familiar to Americans and are already guaranteed to them. Some people wondered whether the President’s phrase “everywhere in the world” meant that the United States would be called on to fight until such liberties as we enjoy became the right of millions in Asia, Russia, and Eastern Europe. But what the President said was that we “look forward to a world” in which these freedoms are taken for granted. In as much as we Americans have prided ourselves on looking forward to such a free world ever since we became free ourselves, it is difficult to see that Mr. Roosevelt said anything very alarming when he led the world to hope that Freedoms of Speech and Religion might someday be the possession of men everywhere.

The real controversy, of course, rages about the other two freedoms: Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear. The assumption by those who are alarmed at their inclusion in a body of doctrine is that they imply that men are to be guaranteed not merely against “want” in the literal sense, but against lacking anything they happen to desire at any given moment. Freedom from Fear, these critics affect to believe, implies that the Government is fraudulently promising to remove all the hazards of life which men have feared in the past.

If we believed that either Freedom from Want or Freedom from Fear meant that the New Deal was promising to pass a miracle which would end the necessity of individual work or foresight, reward the lazy and incompetent as richly as the able and conscientious, and set up a “welfare state,” we should be as dubious about the Four Freedoms as are some of our correspondents. Some New Dealers may misconstrue these freedoms, but there is little ground for such an interpretation. After all, “economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants” are as nearly realizable as “the full dinner pail” or “a chicken in every pot”— phrases seldom associated with radical welfare schemes. In fact, such understandings have been the professed goal of American statesmen for many years.

As to Freedom from Fear, it seems to us to contain no meaning more revolutionary than that suggested by Norman Rockwell’s touching artistic interpretation, in the picture of the parents regarding the untroubled sleep of their children. Mr. Roosevelt expressed Freedom from Fear as translatable into “a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point…that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor.” Nothing about guarantees against fear of measles, graying hair or the consequences of laziness or incompetence.

If there is genuine confusion about the meaning of the Four Freedoms, some of it is doubtless explained by failure to note that Mr. Roosevelt, in listing these objectives, used the expression, “we look forward to a world.” Well, so do the rest of us look forward to a world in which men shall respect the right of others to their own opinions; a world in which better use shall be made of the machinery of production, so that lack of necessities which are so easily produced shall be the lot of nobody who can and will contribute his labor; a world organized politically, so that men need not fear the horrors of destruction by weapons of war.

Few of us expect such a world to be attained all at once, by fiat of the executive or by mere use of phrases. But all of us are permitted to hope, in the midst of an unprecedently cruel and destructive war, that the peoples of the world will eventually understand their problems sufficiently to solve some of them. Thus interpreted, the Four Freedoms represent pretty well what men have always hoped for—political liberty, a better standard of living and an end to war. We should think all Americans could get together on such an expression of human aspiration.

Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms The Saturday Evening Post