Top Photo: Sewing the edge of an American flag at the Annin Flag Company, Verona, New Jersey, March 1943. Photo: Marjory Collins, Library of Congress.  LC-USW3-018529-D

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an Independence Day address on July 4, 1941, five months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

During the broadcast, Roosevelt warned that “the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship,” adding: “When we repeat the great pledge to our country and to our flag, it must be our deep conviction that we pledge as well our work, our will, and, if it be necessary, our very lives.” 

From his perspective in the White House, democracy was under attack overseas and at home in mid-1941. In Europe and Asia, the onslaught of Nazi Germany and its Axis allies continued. In April and May, Crete, Greece, and Yugoslavia fell. In June, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. In east Asia, Japan’s war with China continued, and Japanese forces occupied northern French Indochina.

While the policy of Lend-Lease to support those democratic countries fighting aggression became law in March 1941, German submarines in the North Atlantic threatened to nullify the output of the American arsenal of democracy.

Many Americans believed that the country would eventually join the war against Nazi Germany. At the same time, Roosevelt faced growing criticism from the America First Committee (AFC), an antiwar organization claiming as many as 850,000 members. Rather than get involved in a war as the United States had done in 1917, committee flyers urged that this time, “Let’s Stay OUT of Europe’s War and Make AMERICA Safe for Democracy.”

The AFC’s criticism grew harsher through the spring and into the summer of 1941. After joining the committee in April 1941, aviator Charles Lindbergh soon became its most prominent voice. His increasingly strident critique brought new members to the antiwar group and to its mass rallies. 

Fourth of July Declaration by the President, 1941. National Archives at College Park. NAID: 514323

On June 20, 1941, Lindbergh addressed a crowd of 30,000 in Los Angeles in what was hailed as a “Peace and Preparedness Mass Meeting.” Lindbergh criticized Roosevelt's administration's actions that he believed were leading America into the war. Dismissing the president’s assessment of danger to America, Lindbergh declared that the United States was in such a strong position that it was virtually impregnable. But a few months later, a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor essentially ended public discourse over America's isolationism, and the AFC was dissolved within days.

Video credit: Special thanks to FDR Library for audio broadcast of the July 4, 1941 address and images of the President’s speech notes.

Below is a transcript of the broadcast:

In 1776, on the fourth day of July, the Representatives of the several States in Congress assembled, declaring our independence, asserted that a decent respect for the opinion of mankind required that they should declare the reasons for their action. In this new crisis, we have a like duty.

In 1776 we waged war in behalf of the great principle that Government should derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. In other words, representation chosen in free elections. In the century and a half that followed, this cause of human freedom swept across the world.

But now, in our generation—in the past few years—a new resistance, in the form of several new practices of tyranny, has been making such headway that the fundamentals of 1776 are being struck down abroad, and definitely they are threatened here.

It is, indeed, a fallacy, based on no logic at all, for any Americans to suggest that the rule of force can defeat human freedom in all the other parts of the world and permit it to survive in the United States alone. But it has been that childlike fantasy itself- that misdirected faith—which has led Nation after Nation to go about their peaceful tasks, relying on the thought, and even the promise, that they and their lives and their government would be allowed to live when the juggernaut of force came their way.

It is simple—I could almost say simple-minded—for us Americans to wave the flag, to reassert our belief in the cause of freedom-and to let it go at that.

Yet, all of us who lie awake at night—all of us who study and study again, know full well that in these days we cannot save freedom with pitchforks and muskets alone, after a dictator combination has gained control of the rest of the world.

We know too that we cannot save freedom in our own midst, in our own land, if all around us—our neighbor Nations—have lost their freedom.

That is why we are engaged in a serious, in a mighty, in a unified action in the cause of the defense of the hemisphere and the freedom of the seas. We need not the loyalty and unity alone, we need speed and efficiency and toil and an end to backbiting, and an end to the sabotage that runs far deeper than the blowing up of munitions plants.

I tell the American people solemnly that the United States will never survive as a happy and fertile oasis of liberty surrounded by a cruel desert of dictatorship.

And so it is that when we repeat the great pledge to our country and to our flag, it must be our deep conviction that we pledge as well our work, our will and, if it be necessary, our very lives.