Tuesday, Sept. 27, 2011
THEN
Sept. 27, 1938, United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) writes a second letter to German Chancellor Adolf Hitler appealing for a peaceful resolution as Hitler threatens to invade the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. In a response to FDR’s urging to engage in peaceful negotiations with Czechoslovakia, Hitler expresses his deep dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles, which had ended World War I and given the Sudetenland to the state of Czechoslovakia. Hitler believes the territory belongs to Germany. Although Hitler assures FDR that he intends to avoid another large-scale war in Europe, in the end Hitler ignores FDR’s appeals and invades Czechoslovakia in March 1939, which leads to World War II.
NOW
Today, after 40 years under construction, a memorial for FDR on the East River in New York Island is finally nearing completion. The design for the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, which will cover approximately five acres at the southern tip of the island, was one of the final designs by architect Louis I. Kahn. New York City’s economic woes shelved the project indefinitely in the ’70s. But interest in the FDR memorial was reignited when a 2005 exhibit of Kahn’s design for it garnered public attention. The memorial is slated to open in the fall of 2012. The name for the park is inspired by Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union Speech in which he named four freedoms—the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom of religion, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear—all of which were later incorporated into the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.
