Four Freedoms, the

Four kinds of liberty essential to human dignity as defined by President Franklin D Roosevelt in his State of the Union message to Congress of 6 January 1941: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

At a time when Western Europe lay under Nazi domination and 11 months before the USA's official entry into World War II, Roosevelt alerted Congress and the nation to the necessity of war by presenting a vision in which the US ideal of individual liberty was extended throughout the world. Roosevelt urged support of the democracies fighting to defend freedom, and two months later Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act. Later that year, the Four Freedoms were incorporated into the Atlantic Charter specifying Allied war aims, which was in turn incorporated by reference into the Declaration of the United Nations.

The Four Freedoms were criticized by some contemporaries as being too vague to serve as a guide for practical statesmanship; others claimed that the Roosevelt administration had avoided any reference to religious freedom out of deference to the Soviet Union, which had just entered the war against Germany. In the United Nations Declaration of 1 January 1942, signed by Britain, the Soviet Union, the USA, and the other Allies, freedom of religion was specifically mentioned, along with the remaining freedoms. In practice, the Four Freedoms proved valuable primarily as a wartime slogan.