freedom from want

“Daddy stood for equal justice, human rights and freedom from want and fear. Just as President Biden does today.”

Inside their folders, the students found souvenir postcards, restaurant stickers and this quote from the essay “Freedom from Want” by Filipino novelist and poet Carlos Bulosan:

Franklin D. Roosevelt, in one of his most important speeches, committed himself to “the four freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

It figured prominently in a famous speech delivered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1941, as the world faced the onslaught of Nazi Germany, in which he described the essential liberties that America stood for in what became known as the “Four Freedoms Speech”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

Organized through industrial unions, workers have the power to shape their collective economic fate and, in turn, use the administrative capacity of the state to secure their economic footing and provide freedom from want and from dependency on the arbitrary power of private employers.