Both selections on these pages are from famous speeches made by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the Axis Powers spread war around the world.
   In the first speech, late in 1940, FDR calls on Americans to help the Allies by supplying weapons to help them defend themselves.  America, he declared, could avoid having to send soldiers into war by serving the Allied cause as an "Arsenal of Democracy."
   The second speech was made the month after the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor, which ended any hope that America could sit on the sidelines.  The speech is important because it spells out the objectives of America in the war.  The freedoms that FDR speaks about became known as "The Four Freedoms."  Roosevelt also used the speech to explain in powerful words the moral purpose that united the Allies against the Axis powers. 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, president during World War Two.  He died in 1945, just months before the surrender of Germany and Japan.

A World War Two era battleship.  Battleships played important roles in the war in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

   President Franklin Roosevelt says that ignoring the war in Europe would eventually leave America "living at the point of a gun."  The Nazis, he says, consider all other races as inferior, and would always be tempted by the wealth of the American hemisphere. 
   Negotiating with the Nazis would accomplish nothing, Roosevelt says, because attacks in the previous two years by Germany proved that the price of peace with the Nazis  was "total surrender." 
   FDR reminds his listeners that the Nazis were already putting people in concentration camps, and would try to impose tyranny on the human race. 

Group Discussion, p. 7 - 32:

   FDR gives this summary of what the three Axis nations want:

   Japan - wants to subjugate all the peoples of the Far East and the islands of the Pacific.
   Italy - wants to dominate North Africa and the area around the Mediterranean, including part of France.
   Germany - wants to dominate the whole earth.

   Roosevelt declares that America is entering the war to stop the aggression of the Axis nations, to liberate the nations already conquered, and establish certain key freedoms everywhere in the world.
   FDR makes it clear that to achieve victory, the U.S. would need to vastly increase its output of weapons and supplies of all kinds.  The superiority of the Allies must be "overwhelming."

   The president declares that a fundamental moral principle is at stake in the war.  FDR says that Americans are fighting to uphold a deep belief, "the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God."  He traces that principle to a line in the Book of Genesis in the Bible.  The same principle, of course, also finds expression in America's Declaration of Independence.
   The Axis nations, Roosevelt says, want to destroy that principle and create a "a world in their own image, a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom."  The war, he suggests, will determine which of those two very different concepts of human life would survive into the future.