FDR Delivers His Fourth Inaugural Address

Having been elected to an unprecedented fourth term, on January 20, 1945, a visibly ailing President Roosevelt delivered his inaugural address from the White House balcony to the American people who had just endured three years of war.

The liberation of Rome and the D-Day landings at Normandy had occurred the previous spring and, at the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration, the Allies had already liberated virtually all of France, most of Belgium, and part of southern Netherlands. In Poland, the Soviets had taken Warsaw and Krakow and laid siege to the Hungarian capital of Budapest. The German army was in full retreat and President Roosevelt turned his war-weary nation’s attention to the future and their role in ensuring a just, honorable, and lasting peace. Criticizing isolationists, he reminded the American people: “We have learned that we cannot live alone, at peace; that our own well-being is dependent on the well-being of other nations, far away…. We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community.”