State of The Union Address - Historic Speeches

Historic Speeches

• President James Monroe first stated the Monroe Doctrine during his seventh annual State of the Union Address to Congress on December 2, 1823. It became a defining moment in the foreign policy of the United States and one of its longest-standing tenets, and would be invoked by many U.S. statesmen and several U.S. presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan.
• The Four Freedoms were goals first articulated by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. In an address known as the Four Freedoms speech he proposed four fundamental freedoms that people "everywhere in the world" ought to enjoy: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear
• During his State of the Union Address on January 11, 1944, FDR proposed the Second Bill of Rights. Roosevelt's argument was that the "political rights" guaranteed by the constitution and the Bill of Rights had "proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness."
• During his State of the Union address on January 8, 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson introduced legislation that would come to be know as the "War on Poverty." This legislation was proposed by Johnson in response to a national poverty rate of around nineteen percent. The speech led the United States Congress to pass the Economic Opportunity Act, which established the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to administer the local application of federal funds targeted against poverty.

• In his 2002 State of the Union Address President George W. Bush identified North Korea, Iran and Iraq as representing significant threats to the United States. He said, "States like these and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." In this speech he would outline the objectives for the War on Terror.