A liberal's call to real liberty: how FDR redefined freedom and changed America.

• Author: Marvit, Moshe Z.
• Position: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great - Book review

The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great

by Harvey J. Kaye

Simon & Schuster, 304 pp.

While I was reading Harvey J. Kaye's The Fight for the Four Freedoms, for this assignment, my ninety-two-year-old great-uncle, Jim Fischer, died. He came of age during the Great Depression, joined the Army when called to fight in World War II, and worked in an armament plant in Pittsburgh after he was discharged. Jim also worked at times as a milkman and a welder. Similarly, my aunt Chris, Jim's wife, worked in an armament plant during the war, and later she ran a neighborhood children's clothing shop for many decades. Jim and Chris were born into poverty during the Depression; Chris recalled vividly how, when she was a child, her family was kicked out of company housing in the middle of the night after her father and his fellow miners mounted a strike for better working conditions. She often told stories of how, as children, she and her siblings and friends helped heat their family homes by stealing pieces of coal from trains stopped at stations dotting Pittsburgh's rivers. This was not theft, she explained, it was justice. That coal belonged to everyone, and everyone had a right to a warm home.

It was clear that the Depression and the war never left my great-aunt and -uncle; throughout their lives, it continued to animate their views about work, community, justice, and service. One can't help but be filled with admiration for how they lived and what they sacrificed, and their stories are fairly typical of Americans who came of age during the Depression and served during World War II. For that they've collectively been dubbed-to use that hoary phrase--"the greatest generation." In his new book, historian Kaye seeks to reexamine the generation's greatness, by looking not only at what they sacrificed, but also at what they built--and he describes how, through that process, that cohort radically redefined America.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the concept of the Four Freedoms several weeks after he won an unprecedented third term as president. In a speech on January 6,1941, he declared,

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression.... The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.... The third is freedom from want.... The fourth is freedom from fear.... That is no...