On Oct. 5, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered one of the most memorable foreign policy speeches in U.S. history. He hadn’t planned to use his time in Chicago to talk about world crisis. He was actually there to dedicate the opening of a new bridge over the Chicago River that connected the northern and southern halves of Outer Drive (later known as Lake Shore Drive) for the first time. And for the people of Chicago, the opening of the Outer Link Bridge was a much bigger deal than war brewing abroad.
This article is adapted from Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security by Andrew Preston (Belknap Press, 336 pp., $29.95, May 2025).
Yet Roosevelt’s speech in Chicago ended up laying out the ideological basis for a revolution in U.S. strategic thought. That day, Roosevelt started to weave together the ideas of social economic welfare and national self-defense into the new doctrine that would soon be known as “national security.”
Under this new concept, the basic idea of national defense shifted radically, from a narrow definition of territorial self-defense to a much more expansive one based on a heightened awareness that distant threats could eventually harm the basic safety of the United States in a variety of ways—ideologically and economically, as well as physically.
Pushed by Roosevelt and the internationalists who supported him, starting in the late 1930s, Americans began to envision national defense as the protection of their general place in the world and, ultimately, their way of life. Security became ideological as well as territorial, normative as well as physical, global and not just continental. It became, as it still is today, all encompassing—and in a sense, this idea began in Chicago.
Roosevelt and other administration officials visit a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the 1930s.Corbis Historical/via Getty Images
In the fall of 1937, the state of the nation and the state of the world appeared to be moving in opposite directions. At home, despite a sharp downturn that began earlier that year, the New Deal had seemed to tame the Depression. Though the economy hadn’t yet fully recovered, there was a sense that the worst of the crisis was over. Overseas, however, conditions were deteriorating. In Europe, Nazi Germany was rearming, Italy had conquered Ethiopia, and Spain’s democracy was under siege, while in Asia, the Japanese army had just invaded China.
The escalation of the world crisis troubled Roosevelt, but as much as he would have liked to do something about it, he was constrained by public opinion at home. Few Americans sympathized with Germany or Japan; fewer still wanted the United States to intervene to stop them. But Japan’s assault on China spurred Roosevelt into action.
In August 1937, Japanese tactics in the Battle of Shanghai—the deliberate targeting of Chinese civilians and little impunity for the city’s European and U.S. imperial enclaves—shocked Americans. The Japanese faced determined resistance, and their siege dragged on through September and into October. At that point, Roosevelt was on a national speaking tour, and he used the stop in Chicago to address the crisis in China.
Chicago’s Outer Link Bridge had been in the works for years, but by the time Roosevelt entered the White House in 1933, it was stalling, along with most of the city’s other locally funded infrastructure projects. But Roosevelt’s election, and the coming of the New Deal, changed things. The Public Works Administration, headed by Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, himself a Chicagoan, filled the funding gap and ensured that the bridge would be completed.
For the throngs of people to see it opened, the bridge captured the very essence of Roosevelt’s promise to the American people: The New Deal didn’t simply use countercyclical measures to prime the pump and revive the old economy—it did so in ways that improved the daily lives of ordinary Americans.
Roosevelt visits Yellowstone during a tour of the Western states on Sept. 27, 1937.Bettmann Archive/via Getty Images
In fact, the reason Roosevelt was on a speaking tour of western states that autumn, beginning in Wyoming and ending in Illinois, was to celebrate the planning achievements of the New Deal. He had taken a similar tour in 1934, when the New Deal was facing its first serious bout of criticism. With the recent recession putting the country once again in a similar frame of mind, it was natural for him to return to some of those New Deal works projects that were “doing a national good”—such as the massive hydroelectric dams at Bonneville, Oregon, and Grand Coulee, Washington—and whose construction he had inaugurated only a few years earlier.
As Roosevelt made his way east to Chicago in late September 1937, over a grueling 10 days of rallies, speeches, and meetings in every northern state from Washington to Minnesota, he gave an impassioned, sometimes defiant, defense of the New Deal.
The liberalism that sat at the heart of social democracy provided Roosevelt with the opening to his Chicago speech as well as his segue to the world crisis. On his western swing, he had “seen the happiness and security and peace which covers our wide land,” and while he took pride in the New Deal’s part in bringing security to the American people, he also couldn’t help but contrast it with other parts of the world. In earlier eras, Americans could observe foreign crises with detachment, but, he said, “under modern conditions” they “must, for the sake of their own future, give thought to the rest of the world.”
In unusually strong terms, using language he normally reserved for domestic opponents of the New Deal, Roosevelt condemned the “reign of terror” that was plaguing the world. In an interdependent age of transcontinental military technologies and mass totalitarian movements, “let no one imagine that America will escape, that America may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilization.” The world was now in “a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.”
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In the speech’s most memorable passage, Roosevelt compared war to a virus and warned that an “epidemic of world lawlessness is spreading.” When disease raged out of control, the normal government response was to impose a “quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.” It was now time, Roosevelt concluded, to quarantine aggressive states such as Japan before they spread the virus of war and conquest to the international community itself. During a previous global conflict, President Woodrow Wilson’s analogy to the uncontrollable forces of war had been fire. Roosevelt’s was disease.
“There is a solidarity and interdependence about the modern world,” Roosevelt told the crowds in Chicago, which made it “impossible for any nation completely to isolate itself from upheavals in the rest of the world.” Contrary to the judgment of historians, then, the speech’s foreign policy focus was hardly “unrelated” to the dedication of the bridge, and nor had Roosevelt “abruptly changed the subject.” It was precisely on point.
The Outer Drive Bridge in Chicago, circa 1960.Don Honick/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images
Whatever its cultural and ideological origins, the quarantine speech in October 1937 was met with mixed reception and did little to change the existing foreign policy of strict neutrality; some members of Congress even called the speech an impeachable offense, and neither the Germans nor the Japanese took it seriously.
But it did lay down the political and ideological foundations on which Roosevelt only a few years later launched a revolution in U.S. war and diplomacy that would expand the first line of U.S. defense geographically, conceptually, and politically.
This vision of government, expressed at an actual bridge in Chicago, marked a metaphorical bridge between an old order and the new: from old concepts of limited state intervention in national economics and international relations to new concepts of an activist, often unrestrained role for the state in managing the domestic economy and world order. In national security terms, the New Deal was the forerunner to the Cold War consensus, while quarantine was the forerunner to containment.
And what of the Outer Link Bridge? During World War II, which proved to be the making of “national security,” Chicagoans stood on it to watch the “ships of war, built in the many shipyards of the Great Lakes, enter the Chicago for passage down the Mississippi to the Gulf” before sailing to do battle in the Atlantic or the Pacific. Later, during the Cold War, city leaders in Chicago officially rechristened it with an entirely appropriate name: the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Bridge.
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