When President Franklin D. Roosevelt took to the airwaves for another installment of his “fireside chats”, it was with the purpose of not only to inform but to prepare the country for war. War was indeed approaching America, and everyone from the president to the people could feel it. So far most of the action was limited to the land war in Europe, but the White House worried Germany would seek naval bases in the North Atlantic, some within a bomber’s reach of the East Coast.

On this day, May 27, in 1941, in response to the Axis Powers goals of “world domination,” as he called it, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a state of unlimited national emergency. The public address followed a formal declaration for “Military, Naval, Air and Civilian Defenses Be Put on the Basis of Readiness to Repel Any and All Acts or Threats of Aggression Directed Toward any Part of the Western Hemisphere.”

Roosevelt dedicated part of his address to isolationists, creating a nightmare scenario of German-occupied North America, with freedoms abolished, the free market dismantled, and children brainwashed by propaganda. The only thing keeping Germany from achieving its objective of world conquest was the brave resistance of Britain, whose spirit FDR urged America to follow: “Our freedom has shown its ability to survive war, but our freedom would never survive surrender. ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’”