No doubt, Norman Rockwell’s extraordinarily popular and famous paintings known as the “Four Freedoms” would be part of the battle waged in the media during the 2024 presidential election campaign.
The paintings appeared on social media in 2020 in support of leftist and rightist causes, and now two years later, they’ve become ubiquitous on social platforms.
The four paintings by Rockwell were inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of Union address. In his speech, the president argued that what was at stake was the defense of four universal freedoms that Americans take for granted: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Although Roosevelt’s words and thoughts were inspirational, they were too abstract to a large segment of the population. Rockwell, a well-known illustrator for magazines, proposed to transform them into images that a large populace could understand.
First, he offered to undertake the task in collaboration with two government agencies but was rejected. Finally, the editor of The Saturday Evening Post was the one who saw the potential of the paintings and commissioned Rockwell to create them.
Rockwell’s interpretation of Roosevelt’s’ speech appeared on the magazine covers, and the images soon were everywhere.
According to contemporary press reports, “The government put them on postage stamps, displayed them in an exhibition as part of its nationwide war-bond drive and printed them on posters that helped raise $133 million for the war effort.”
Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the deputy director and chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of the “Four Freedoms” paintings, is quoted saying: “Rockwell’s oeuvre was intended to distill and quickly spread a mass message. Many Americans did not register what the meaning of those freedoms truly were and found Roosevelt’s speech abstract. What Rockwell wanted to do was to envision them in a way that a large populace could understand.”
In fact, Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” had an extraordinary appeal on a mass of people living behind the Iron Curtain. Even during the darkest days of the Cold War and Stalinist terror, the images of the painting surfaced.
Significantly, many of the history books used in schools in Eastern Europe featured Rockwell’s images, although they were interpreted according to the Communist doctrine.
Thus, I was familiar with the “Four Freedoms” paintings long before my arrival to America in 1958 as a refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia.
Once my wife and I settled in Lake Placid, New York, visiting the Norman Rockwell Museum was high on our list.
Always on the look-out for a good story, we checked into the iconic Red Lion Inn. I was told Rockwell often dined there and used the features of local residents in his illustrations.
A local man informed me, confidentially, that some of the people portrayed in the “Four Freedoms” paintings were actually Stockbridge residents, although Rockwell moved and settled in Stockbridge decades after the paintings were created.
During my several visits to Stockbridge and the Rockwell Museum, I failed to stumble into an “exclusive” story that would have added to the Rockwell legend.
However, the “Four Freedoms” paintings remain the images to me that best describe America as the “Shining City on the Hill.”
Frank Shatz is a Williamsburg resident. He is the author of “Reports from a Distant Place,” the compilation of his selected columns. The book is available at the Bruton Parish Shop and Amazon.com.
