You can have your Martha Stewart Thanksgiving(tm) with the Aleppo pepper-rubbed roast turkey if you wish, but give me the good, old-fashioned, Norman Rockwell version any day. Rockwell’s classic painting (detail above, full picture here) of Grandma lugging in the gigantic bird on a platter as the patriarch awaits his carving duties and the surrounding adults and kids drool in anticipation will always be the quintessential image of Thanksgiving to me. And, yet, when Rockwell painted that iconic scene, it was March 1943—months away from Thanksgiving. The painting, titled Freedom from Want belongs to a series of works Rockwell titled the Four Freedoms after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address in which FDR outlined what he saw as the four essential freedoms that all people in the world should enjoy. When you look for the roots of the Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving, you won’t find it in the stuffing or the cranberries (and certainly not in an Aleppo pepper rub)—they’re in the simple idea of human, not just American, freedom.

In that State of the Union address FDR gave seventy years ago, he announced the following:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

Spoken in the days before America’s entry into World War II, as the Great Depression still lingered, while we were assisting Britain in their fight, and were coming to the realization that joining the fray was just a matter of time, these words rang out across America and the world. FDR’s idealist, perhaps even naïve streak shines through in his belief that those freedoms were “attainable in our own time and generation” as an antidote to the tyranny of the Axis powers. (This section of the address comes right after a call for higher taxes that sounds like political suicide today.) Freedom from fear is the one we think of from that time—a codicil to Roosevelt’s earlier axiom that “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” It’s also the one freedom we’ve been striving for in our time, this endless “Age of Terror” and its accompanying wars.