Four Freedoms Speech: Introduction (Sentences 1-3) Summary

Signing On

  • FDR opens his speech by directly addressing his audience: the vice president, the speaker of the house, and Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate).
  • And then he makes it unmistakably, 100 percent clear to whom he's speaking by addressing Congress a second time in two sentences.
  • He also deems the current moment in time (January 1941) unparalleled in the history of the United States because the country is under threat from foreign nations in a way that is unlike any threat it has encountered before.
  • Yikes.