On July 4, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt celebrated American Independence Day with a radio address that praised democracy while warning against the dangers of authoritarianism. Dictatorships were plentiful at the time, from Adolf Hitler in Germany and Benito Mussolini, a.k.a. Il Duce, in Italy to Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union. Gen. Francisco Franco had prevailed in the Spanish Civil War, setting up a fascist regime in Madrid.
Only five months after FDR’s Independence Day 1941 speech, Pearl Harbor was attacked.
The conservative website The Bulwark honored FDR’s address 82 years later by publishing it in article form on July 4, 2023. And by doing so, the conservative website is sending out a warning that democracy is stillunder attack.
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FDR told listeners, “In 1776, we waged war in behalf of the great principle that government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed — in other words, representation chosen in free elections. In the century and a half that followed, this cause of human freedom swept across the world. But now, in our generation — in the past few years — a new resistance, in the form of several new practices of tyranny, has been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad. And definitely, they are threatened here.”
The architect of the New Deal was referring to the authoritarians of 1941. But FDR’s warning could easily apply to the 2023, which finds democracy under attack in parts of Europe, Asia and Latin American as well as in the U.S. The Bulwark, in fact, has published countless articles describing ongoing efforts by the MAGA movement to undermine U.S. democracy — and noting MAGA’s affinity for authoritarians like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“It is simple — I could almost say simpleminded — for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in the cause of freedom, and to let it go at that,” FDR said during his address. “Yet, all of us who lie awake at night — all of us who study and study again — know full well that in these days, we cannot save freedom with pitchforks and muskets alone, after a dictator combination has gained control of the rest of the world. We know that we cannot save freedom in our own midst, in our own land, if all around us — our neighbor nations — have lost their freedom…. I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.”
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President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s July 4, 1941 speech is available in article form on The Bulwark’s website at this link.
Image: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration via Wikimedia