Roosevelt organizations

THE FRANKLIN AND ELEANOR ROOSEVELT INSTITUTE AND THE ROOSEVELT STICHTING

 

The Four Freedoms Medals are presented each year to men and women whose achievements have demonstrated a commitment to those principles which President Roosevelt proclaimed in his historic speech to Congress on January 6, 1941, as essential to democracy: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. The Roosevelt Institute has awarded the Freedoms Medals to some of the most distinguished Americans of our time, including Harry S. Truman, General George C. Marshall, John F. Kennedy, Adlai E. Stevenson, W. Averell Harriman, George F. Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, J. William Fulbright, Elie Wiesel, Arthur Miller, and Jimmy Carter.

 

The International Four Freedoms Awards ceremony, which is held in Middelburg, the Netherlands, in even-numbered years, began in 1982, the centennial of President Roosevelt’s birth and bicentennial of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Netherlands. In odd-numbered years the awards are presented to Americans in Hyde Park, New York.

 

The Roosevelt Stichting is a private foundation established to organize the Four Freedoms Awards ceremony in Middelburg in cooperation with the Roosevelt Institute.

 

The work of the Roosevelt Institute represents a continuing dedication to the faith Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt so superbly embodied — faith in human freedom, in social purpose, in the inexhaustible strength of democracy, and in the abiding capacity of man to control the world he has created.

 

In cooperation with the Theodore Roosevelt Association and the Government of Zeeland, the Dutch province from which the Roosevelts emigrated to the New World in the 17th century, the Roosevelt Institute encourages the study of American history abroad through its support of the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, the Netherlands, which opened in September 1986, as a living memorial to Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The RSC is a research and conference center for European scholars and teachers of American studies and is expected to become, in the words of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “the central European repository of the basic documents essential to the public history of the United States in the 20th century.”