Third Inaugural Address

Summary

Franklin D. Roosevelt's third inaugural, delivered at the Capitol on 20 January 1941, opened the first third term in American history. Most of Europe lay under Axis control, Britain fought on without allies in the West, and Congress was about to debate Lend-Lease. The United States was not at war, and the address never names Germany, Italy, or Japan. Instead it asks what a nation is and whether democracy can survive. Roosevelt begins with a three-part history. In Washington's day the people's task was to create the nation; in Lincoln's day, to preserve it "from disruption from within"; "in this day," to save it "from disruption from without." He then answers those who believed tyranny was "the surging wave of the future" and freedom "an ebbing tide." The Depression years proved them wrong: the country acted boldly within the Constitution's "three-way framework," and the Bill of Rights and free elections survived. "Democracy is not dying." The center of the speech is a likeness between a nation and a person. A nation has a body to be fed and housed, a mind to be informed, and something deeper, "the spirit--the faith of America," born among plain people who came "to find freedom more freely" and written into Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address. Echoing Paul on faith, hope, and love, Roosevelt concludes that "of the three, the greatest is the spirit," since a nation might keep its body and mind and still perish if its spirit were killed. Along the way he warns that the Republic "cannot forever tolerate either undeserved poverty or self-serving wealth." He closes by quoting Washington's first inaugural on "the sacred fire of liberty" staked on the American experiment, names the preservation of that spirit as the justification for every sacrifice of national defense, and ends: "We do not retreat."

Top Lessons

• A people's task in each generation

  The triad of Washington, Lincoln, and "this day" makes each generation responsible for a different labor toward the same nation. Roosevelt uses it to tell a country not yet at war that its moment of testing had already come.

• Fatalism as the enemy

  Roosevelt treats the belief that freedom is "an ebbing tide" as more dangerous than any army, because it produces "the real peril of inaction." A nation's life, he says, is measured not by years but by "its will to live."

• The spirit greater than body and mind

  Borrowing the cadence of 1 Corinthians 13, Roosevelt ranks the spirit above the body and the mind of the nation. He identifies that spirit with a faith in freedom carried by immigrants and written into founding documents, a civic faith that students should distinguish from Christian faith while noting the echo.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Presidential inaugurals concern constitutional politics and national crisis; they have no medical content for this library's lens.