Good Granite Ledge

To the U.S. people, the Office of War Information presented a little pamphlet--anonymous but bearing the unmistakeable cool steel touch of Elmer Davis' pen--explaining the four freedoms, which Franklin Roosevelt laid down 19 months ago, as something to live by and fight for:

"Nothing is for sale at bargain prices, nor will the house be built in three days with cheap labor. The declaration of the four freedoms is not a promise of a gift which the people will receive: it is a declaration of a design which the people themselves may execute."

Freedom of Speech. "Free government is the most realistic kind of goverment for it not only assumes that a man has something on his mind, but concedes his right to say it. It permits him to talk-- not without fear of contradiction, but without fear of punishment.

"The first condition [of free speech] is that the individual have something to say. Literacy is a prerequisite of free speech, and gives it point. Denied education, denied information, suppressed or enslaved, people grow sluggish; their opinions are hardly worth the high privilege of release. Similarly, those who live in terror or in destitution, even though no specific control is placed upon their speech, are as good as gagged. There can be no people's rule unless there is talk... words, ideas in a never-ending stream, from the enduring wisdom of the great and the good to puniest thought troubling the feeblest brain. All are listened to, all add up to something and we call it the rule of the people."

Freedom of Religion. "It was not their stomachs but their immortal souls which brought the first settlers to America's shores, and they prayed before they ate . . . . The democratic guarantee of freedom of worship is not in the nature of a grant -- it is in the nature of an admission. It is th state admitting that the spirit soars in illimitable regions beyond the collectors of customs.

"Today the struggle of man's spirit is against new and curious shackles...a seven days' wonder, a new child of tyranny--a political religion in which the leader of the state becomes, himself, an object of worship and reverence. This Nazi freak must fail, if only because men are not clods, because the spirit does live."

Freedom from Want. "The proposal that want be abolished from this world would be pretentious, or even ridiculous, were it not for two important recent discovers: that men now possess the technical ability to produce in great abundance the necessities of daily life, a revolutionary and quite unprecedented condition on earth; and that one man's hunger is every man's hunger. . . . A hungry man in Cambodia is a threat to the well-fed of Duluth.

"Freedom from want [is] freedom from mass unemployment, plus freedom from penury for those unable to work. We state these things as 'rights'--not because the world owes any man a living, but because unless man succeeds in filling these primary needs, his only development is backward and downward, his only growth malignant, and his last resource war.

"Freedom from want is neither a conjurer's trick nor a madman's dream. The earth has never known it, nor anything approaching it. But free men do not accept the defeatist notion that it never will."

Freedom from Fear. "Aggressive war, sudden armed attack, secret police, these must be forever circumvented. . . . Force can be eliminated as a means of political action only if it be opposed with an equal or greater force--which is economic and moral and is backed by police power.

"The first move to free people from fear is to achieve a peaceable world which has been deprived of its power to destroy itself. This can only be accomplished by disarming the aggressors and keeping them disarmed. Last time they were disarmed, but they were not prevented from rearming. This time they will be disarmed in truth."

These doctrines, said Elmer Davis' OWI, form the "good granite ledge on which the United Nations propose to raise their new world after victory."

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