The Story of American Freedom

The Four Freedoms were goals expressed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, just before America entered World War II. Foner explains that Roosevelt “linked the defense of American traditions with a widespread longing for a better future in what became the official statement of the war’s purposes” (221). The respective freedoms included freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Free Labor was an ideology of the Antebellum and Civil War Eras that sought to distinguish paid work in the North from slave production in the South. In Chapter 3, Foner argues, “The contrast between the slave bound to an owner and the free worker able to leave his job was more than mere rhetoric: it defined a central reality of social life” (67).

The Gilded Age was the name given to the era of American history at the end of the 19th century, in the years extending roughly from the end of the Civil War to 1900. Coined by the writer Mark Twain, the term refers to the fact that serious societal problems were hidden beneath a gold gilding. The primary characteristic of the era was rapid economic growth and the