This is the registration option for IN-PERSON attendance at the July 9 session, which takes place at the Lebanon Opera House, Lebanon, NH. This event is open seating; your ticket will not correspond to an assigned seat.

FDR’s Four Freedoms: Foundation of Modern American Liberalism and Global Liberal Internationalism

Ronald Edsforth, Former Distinguished Senior Lecturer in History (1993-2014), Dartmouth College

In January 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt’s extraordinary State of the Union Address proclaimed his intention to secure and expand democracy at home and promote democracy everywhere in a world then threatened by fascism and imperialist aggression. The Four Freedoms FDR defined in that speech—Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, and Freedom from fear—quickly became philosophical and rhetorical foundations for extending his domestic New Deal and using American power to promote global democratic development. They also became justifications for making the United States a global “super power “ that required a massive standing army, navy, and air forces; a worldwide network of military bases, a permanent military-industrial-university complex, and an ever-growing arsenal of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, all of which diverted resources and brainpower away from domestic democratic reforms while promoting fear of communism abroad and at home. This lecture includes discussion of these complications, as well as a review of the sources of FDR ideas about human rights and liberal internationalism, and a look at contemporary public responses to the Four Freedoms speech. 

Ronald Edsforth is a Research Associate in History at Dartmouth. He retired in 2019 after 26 years of teaching at the College. As a Distinguished Senior Lecturer in History Ron offered courses in American political and economic history, American foreign policy, and global peace history. He also led a revival of the College’s interdisciplinary War and Peace Studies Program, serving as its first coordinator from 1998-2004. In 2006 Ron helped to establish the Globalization Studies concentration in Dartmouth’s Masters in Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS) program. He served as Chair of Globalization Studies in MALS from 2006 to 2016.

Prior to his arrival at Dartmouth, Ron taught American history at Michigan State University, University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Skidmore College, MIT, and Hamilton College. For two decades his research focused on the economic development and political culture of the United States since 1900. He published a series of books about the significance of the automobile industry in the making of America’s extraordinary consumer culture and its transformation of the country’s politics: Class Conflict and Cultural Consensus (Rutgers University Press, 1989); and two edited volumes, Popular Culture and Political Change in Modern America (SUNY Press, 1991), and Autowork (SUNY Press 1995). In the 1990s Ron was the chief historian for the PBS documentary series: America on Wheels (1996) and a major contributor to another PBS film, Divided Highways: A History of the Interstate Highways (1997). In 2000 Blackwell published The New Deal: America’s Response to the Great Depression.

In this century, Ron’s scholarly work developed in concert with the new peace history and globalization history courses he was teaching. Ron published essays and presented scholarly papers on neo-liberal capitalism and the global proliferation of nonviolent revolution. In 2014 Ron accepted an invitation to be the General Editor of a six volume global peace history, A Cultural History of Peace Antiquity to the Modern Age. In 2020 Bloomsbury published this collection of original essays by 55 scholars from 13 different countries. Its Volume 6, A Cultural History of Peace in the Modern Age since 1920, includes Ron’s overview of peace history since 1920 and a co-authored essay “Representations of Peace” that reflects his recognition of the significance of new media in our globalizing world. Although delayed by the pandemic, Ron is now completing research for of a book of essays on the early history of Save the Children.