Welcome to the Words Matter Library.

On the eve of what should be Donald Trump's second state of the Union address, we wanted

to revisit some of history's great state of the unions.

And all of these historic addresses that you're about to hear are available and audible.

If you want to go back and listen to the full address and absorb and appreciate the

history, we'll start with FDR's 1941 state of the Union.

FDR, the 32nd president, he was about to begin his third term and he delivered the

address to a joint session of Congress at around 2 p.m., which I find interesting because

we're so used to in modern history, these addresses occur in at night.

And I've been listening to Doris Kern's Good Winds book, No Ordinary Time, Franklin

and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Homefront in World War II, and the brilliant Doris Kern's Good

Winds provided some important context for the timeline and what was happening in 1941

as FDR delivered this seminal state of the Union address.

The Great Depression had really exhausted the country.

It was at about a dozen years at that point.

And Americans were tenuously recovering, but also still struggling.

And they doubted the wisdom of overseas intervention against Nazi Germany.

So in FDR's state of the Union, he presented his Lin-Lease program and argued that America

had a role in the world and a moral responsibility to aid our British ally against Nazi aggression.

And I went back and did some reading on the history of this address.

And his advisor and speechwriter Samuel Rosenman, he said that FDR actually was incredibly

involved in every phase of the speech writing process and even coined the four freedoms

...