Four Freedoms Park Opens in NYC, Honors FDR’s Famous Speech
Four Freedoms Park, honoring the famous speech on the four freedoms by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his State of the Union address on January 6, 1941, opened to the public on this day in New York City.
The Four Freedoms remarks were a passage President Roosevelt added to his annual State of the Union address. on January 6, 1941, FDR’s four freedoms were Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Only the first two (Speech and Worship) are actually part of the Bill of Rights, but Roosevelt included the other two as human rights.
FDR’s affirmation of the Four Freedoms struck a responsive chord among Americans, as it celebrated America’s commitment to individual rights in a world that was marked to totalitarianism –in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union, and a military-dominated Japan– and already at war in Europe and Asia.
The Four Freedoms were popularized by four illustrations by the noted artist Norman Rockwell, which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (then one of the leading magazines in the U.S), and then in a widely circulated set of posters during World War II.
Four Freedoms Park is located on Roosevelt Island, located between Manhattan and Long Island in New York City. The design of the monuments were done by the noted architect Louis I. Kahn, who died 1974.
Other monuments to the Four Freedoms are in Cleveland, Ohio; Evansville, Indiana; and Madison, Florida.
Visit Four Freedoms Park in New York City:
http://www.fdrfourfreedomspark.org/Learn more: Stuart Murray, Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms (1993)
Learn about the 100 Year fight for free speech in America: Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, The Free Speech Century (2018)