Throughout "On the Adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights," Eleanor Roosevelt mentions freedom quite a bit—and not in a way that encourages a large group of people to start chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!"

(That would have been in poor taste at the United Nations.)

However, her use of the word becomes significant in talking about the ideological conflicts the Soviet Union had with some of the articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

We've probably beaten the idea into you by now, but the United Nations was made up of 58 member states that all drafted the declaration together. It wasn't easy to do with all those governmental and philosophical differences—especially considering "freedom" didn't have a single definition because of those differences.

For Roosevelt, the literal meaning was less important than the understanding that a lack of the basic freedom to essentially exist as a human led Hitler and the Nazis to kill 11 million people during the Holocaust. The delegation didn't need to necessarily agree on a single definition in order to approve the declaration. Instead, they needed to recognize that while they had the right to disagree on how to run their governments, basic freedom wasn't up for negotiation.