Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms: Images that Inspire a Nation Review

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(More customer reviews)Nearly every Norman Rockwell coffee table book includes his famous "Four Freedoms" paintings. Most tell the basic story behind the works -- how the artist was inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt's State of the Union speech of 1941, how he sought without success to find sponsorship by a government agency, and how the paintings were originally published in four issues of Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943. This generously illustrated volume by Stuart Murray and James McCabe tells a much more complete -- and much more fascinating -- story.
The two authors begin with President Roosevelt and the genesis of the Four Freedoms speech and the Atlantic Charter. They trace the creative process that resulted in Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech," "Freedom of Worship," "Freedom from Want," and "Freedom from Fear."
Beyond the paintings themselves, Murray and McCabe break new ground. They describe in detail how the paintings were published (first in the magazine and then by the Office of War Information) and how they toured the nation. The first exhibition was in Hecht's Department Store in Washington, with Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas speaking. The paintings and posters sold many war bonds, and the two authors well describe the organization and spirit of wartime bond marketing.
Looking beyond the artist, Murray and McCabe describe the enthusiastic reception of the paintings by the American public, quoting reviews, commentaries, and letters written by ordinary Americans. Rockwell had correctly sensed that Americans wanted more than words to understand the war aims of the United States and the United Nations. His great gift to the American people was to first visualize the rich ideals that President Roosevelt had described, and then to render them on canvas in an accessible way.
This book has valuable appendices. It is the only volume I have seen that includes the essays and stories that accompanied the paintings in four issues of the Saturday Evening Post. They complemented the paintings, and although they bear the marks of their decade, they are still powerful.
In the short story ("parable") that accompanied "Freedom of Speech," Booth Tarkington imagined that the young artist Adolph Hitler and the young journalist Benito Mussolini met "in a small chalet on the mountain road from Verona to Innsbruck." In a conversation they admitted their will to power, and the need for a "purge." Tarkington well understood fascism.
Stephen Vincent Benet's essay on "Freedom from Fear" traced the increasing connectedness of the world's nations (what we now call "globalization," evident even then) and how it can strengthen or weaken human freedoms. He portrayed the halting, slow, and difficult advance of freedom in the face of fear, signified in 1943 by aerial bombardment.
The essay by Carlos Bulosan -- an immigrant from the Philippines, then an itinerant worker on the West Coast who had to be tracked down by the Post's editors -- on "Freedom from Want" is a moving call for social justice. Its strong New Deal sound reminds this reader of Henry Fonda's peroration at the end of "The Grapes of Wrath."
The powerful and stirring essay by Will Durant that accompanied "Freedom to Worship" described how religion strengthens American society. He rightly criticized German, Japanese, and Italian fascism for their opposition to faith. The leaders of the Axis powers, he wrote, "leave their people no religion but war, and no God but the state."
The book also includes the long, thoughtful, and challenging essay that accompanied the separate printing of the paintings by the Office of War Information. Less memorable and less lasting are five essays specially commissioned for this book by John Frohnmayer, Theodore H. Evans, James MacGregor Burns, Brian Urquhart, and William J. vanden Heuvel.
The United States is once again at war. Terrorists on one side, the men and women in our armed forces on the other -- both know that America's freedoms are somehow at the heart of the conflict. This book can prompt our generation to consider how the "Four Freedoms" and other American ideals bear on the struggle.
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