Nelson A. Pryor: Guest Columnist
Unveiled June 14, 1944.
At the end of May, the New York Historical Society will celebrate President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Jan. 6, 1941, Four Freedoms speech to Congress, which was given as a reason to enter into the war.
Right now, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Ma., has organized a traveling exhibition, entitled “Enduring ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms,” to exhibit the four Freedoms images.
To celebrate the 75th anniversary of Rockwell’s indelible works, Smithsonian, the magazine, will also celebrate with its own showings.
A Big Idea
FDR showed leadership in selling a war, which was the purpose behind the Four Freedoms, to a reluctant America. He had highlighted that Americans, and thus the world, needed to retain: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear.
The March 2018 Smithsonian, said: “The public response? Crickets. Congress barely applauded. The next day most newspapers didn’t even mention the ‘Four Freedom.’” Those who were still talking about the phrase in the weeks and months that followed did so to lambaste its “hollow, empty sound.”
Selling the War!
Then Norman Rockwell picked up his paintbrush. He took his sketches to Washington City, the March 15, 2018, New York Times, 12 F, said.
Getting no satisfaction there, on his trip home, he stopped in the offices of The Saturday Evening Post, in Philadelphia, and the editor Ben Hibbs snapped them up. He ran them in four sequential issues in February and March 1943; the federal government later turned the images into posters, raising $132 Million dollars for the war effort.
The artistic response to the Four Freedoms ideals includes paintings, drawings, sculpture, prints, and stamps, by the artists who heeded Roosevelt’s call. “Rockwell’s Four Freedoms,” tells the story of the painter’s vision of our freedoms, guaranteed by our Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Roosevelt’s spin doctors had always been perplexed that some wartime sound bites caught on while others did not. Though lacking the poetry of “a day that will live in infamy,” the “Four Freedoms” was carefully crafted, employing catchy alliteration and enumeration, the classic rhetorical device of dividing a big idea into numbered parts.
Overcame the Bureaucrats
Thank goodness for persistence and old time get up and go. Only after the Saturday Evening Post, published the pictures did the Washington propagandists catch on. The Office of War Information, by now being infiltrated by image-savvy, “Mad Men”-style advertising executives, arranged a 1943-’44 national tour for the paintings. Millions of reprints appeared everywhere-inside taxicabs, on milk bottles and stuffed inside Americans’ monthly bank statements, for starters. When the traveling paintings reached a new city, parades shook the streets
“Rockwell,” says Stephanie Plunkett, curator at the Norman Rockwell Museum, “felt what people needed was some understanding of how these ideals applied to their own lives. He wanted to show what we had to protect, and what we were fighting for.”
Madison-”Our Last Salute.”
That war generation’s days are numbered. In their day and their generation, they served and honored our country. Our Four Freedoms Monument, in downtown Confederate Memorial Park, was unveiled on June 14, 1944. Let’s celebrate what this community did almost 75 years ago.
It would be a fine gesture to that generation to have a community gathering for such a celebration, for those remaining WW II vets. What an opportunity! It is to them that our freedoms are still here.