The four freedoms refer to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's January 1941 Four Freedoms State of the Union address in which he identified essential human rights that should be universally protected. The theme was incorporated into the Atlantic Charter, and became part of the charter of the United Nations. To put it another way, FDR's speech was known for "identifying the objectives of the war and revealing his hopeful view of the postwar world".
The speech helped to awaken Congress and the nation to the dire war calling, articulate ideological aims of the necessary armed conflict and appeal to the universal American belief of freedom. Domestically, the Four Freedoms were not something Roosevelt was able to achieve through simple legislation, although they provided a theme for American military participation in the war.
"In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb." ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
