Freedom of Speech

On January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered to the U.S. Congress a speech that became known as the Four Freedoms Speech. In this visionary address, he looked forward to a world founded on four essential human freedoms: the freedom of speech, the freedom to worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.

These Four Freedoms, which are celebrated yearly to this day in Middelburg and Hyde Park alternately, were in 1948, enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, due to the tireless work of Eleanor Roosevelt.    

Over the next few months, I want to explore in this column all four freedoms, as the values underlying these are at their core shared between the United States and the Netherlands. 

Roosevelt chose these words months after it had become clear that a second global conflict had broken out where autocracy and tyranny had provoked open, armed conflict on an unprecedented scale, only 23 years after the Great War. 

These freedoms had been born from four fears, but FDR decided to phrase these positively, 
as guiding principles for the progress of humankind. Roosevelt did see negative freedom and positive freedom.

Why did he position the freedom of speech and expression as the first of the four? And why did he emphatically proclaim this freedom to apply “everywhere in the world”?