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| FDR delivering his Proclamation, over the heads of doubting Congress, to a world wide audience |
All too often, annual State of the Union Addresses struggle to be worth the cost of the paper they were printed on.
But FDR’s famous Four Freedoms address was not one of them.
He outlined four freedoms, not all of them controversial - not even to today’s red meat Republicans.
Freedom of speech and Freedom of worship - why that’s even in the Constitution, for heaven’s sake !
Freedom from fear - still a little controversial in 1941, as it meant that the acceptance that the protection of America, in the age of the bomber and the submarine, now must extend far beyond America’s coastal waters; ie a blow to the US tradition of non-intervention in (the few) foreign wars (it didn't start itself).
Freedom from want : now that was controversial indeed.
FDR said the democracy offered humanity the right, the freedom to expect economic opportunity (GOP cheers) employment and social security (GOP sneers, but quietly) and - wait for it - ‘adequate health care’ (a loud chorus of GOP protests).
That is where my book on the hidden Allied conflict between Penicillin-As-A-Weapon-Of-War and Penicillin-For-All comes in.
For the Allies made a dozen more proclamations to bolster the Four Freedoms war aims speech between 1941 and 1945 : the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Declaration merely the best remembered.
But how well did they live up to those glowing promises, as governments and as general population ?
In a phrase : not so good.
But the Genie of the milk of human kindness was out of the bottle and it became obvious it would be very hard to put it back in : too many innocent gullible civilians took the war leaders at their word.
One was a terminally ill doctor, Nova Scotian born Martin Henry Dawson.
Dawson fought hard - and successfully - against the Allied Powers-to-be and their determination to use wartime Penicillin only as a weapon of war and even then only after its commercial bonanza was tied down in US and UK hands by patents on its chemical synthesis and with the signing of a rare (and almost unknown, even to historians) international treaty between the US and the UK dividing the post war world in two profitable penicillin zones.
The US, like Nazi Germany, was a raft of competing agencies and, luckily for humanity, a few of the more New Deal-minded among them bought into Dawson’s vision of Penicillin-For-All and indeed raised it to a Fourth Level for ‘Winning the Peace’.
Thanks to largely to Dawson, Pfizer was making more penicillin in its one plant alone than the Allies could use on the battlefield and on Civy Street and American could afford to give penicillin away to potential Allies among the two dozen Neutrals still sitting on their hands in late 1944.
Penicillin (seen - incorrectly- as a product thrown up by WWII) quickly moved beyond this Penicillin Diplomacy to become the one reason this horrible war was seen as worth fighting and dying for : a bright disease-free future where kids of all nations might have a real hope of growing up to adulthood.
FDR’s USA still hasn’t accepted his Fourth Freedom : freedom from fear of disease, but the rest of the world, by and large, has : a vision made concrete by all those shipments of wartime Penicillin-For-All...
