Shaping a Child: Rockwell's Four Freedoms

I grew up with Norman Rockwell's Saturday Evening Post magazine covers.

I was in second grade in 1943 when his Four Freedoms illustrations appeared on the sequential covers of the Saturday Evening Post in the February and March editions. So deep were the impressions his artistry left upon me that even today I cannot entirely separate Rockwell's impressions of people and places from the real people and places where I have actually met and worked and played with them.

The doctors of my youth looked as Rockwell portrayed them. So did their offices. My school-teachers looked like Rockwell's. Workmen looked like that. My grandmother and uncles and cousins, who gathered around Thanksgiving and Christmas and Sunday dinners, looked like that. The places we gathered even sounded the same way Rockwell's pictures evoke voices and background noises.

I have several large books featuring his Post covers, book-illustrations, and commissioned works. Leafing through the pages is a strange, almost spooky experience. I was born in the early-thirties, raised and schooled primarily in the forties and fifties, and undertook my first teaching job the end of that decade.

What makes Rockwell's art so captivating for me is that it's difficult for me to determine if I really experienced people and places as he portrays them -- or if, in fact, his art developed such expectations within me that I came to see my life -- at least in part -- as Rockwell saw life in middle-America for nearly six decades.

Permit me one example, please: I was married in June, 1957. Rockwell's Post cover Marriage License appeared in June, 1955. I seem to remember the office of the County Clerk almost exactly as Rockwell captures the one in this illustration. The pot-bellied stove, the roll-top desk and the tall open window beside it with its tired potted geranium, the bored clerk, and the hopeful young couple all appear as I remember my own experience. How could that be?

I suppose that could be because Rockwell somehow captured so thoroughly the essence of the middle decades of the Twentieth Century I experienced. I remember my elementary and high-school experiences as he rendered them. I remember dating and courtship experiences as he presents them. I leaf through my books of his illustrations, smile warmly, and muse to myself: Yep! Yes, indeed: that's how it was. . . . Then quickly look again, and ask myself: Or is that as I wished or imagined it to be. . . . I can't really place a question mark after this fragment. I simply don't know. Strange phenomenon. What has my life really been?

I know -- or perhaps only deeply feel that my life has been good. I know and feel that I've loved enough of my life -- indeed, most of it -- because my losses have been so few. And because so many of my dreams have been largely fulfilled. Even in the midst of my grieving -- which goes on and on in intermittent phases -- I remember my good-life fondly. It could be I'm not really an incurable Romantic. Could be I'm essentially Rockwellian. By which I mean Norman Rockwell, through his art, has taught me to select from my experiences those basically rich and lasting aspects of human experience.

What this says about my own sense of personal reality, I cannot be absolutely certain. In some long forgotten source I read or heard the words:

"Nearly everything happens to anyone
who lives long enough.

Life is how we choose to respond. . . ."

My best hope is that Rockwell saw clearly and accurately portrayed what he saw. Yet, how did he know what to paint? Which moments express what is most deeply human? His work is full of what I might call touchstone moments. He gets me every time. Perhaps his greatest genius is his capacity to select -- and precisely portray -- the most meaningful moments of human existence. Is that Realism? Are such moments REAL. I can only hope so.

What do his pictures mean? He doesn't seem to express meaning with his work. Rather, his work evokes feelings. His special genius is that his work taps into the deep sensitivities of the best human experience -- its concerns and generosities, its values and loves, its most-hopeful expectations. Here's my interpretation of his art at its sappiest-best: Rockwell makes me want to be better.

Perhaps, more accurately, Rockwell's art makes me want to feel better -- to respond to life's challenges in more courageous, more uplifting ways.

Rockwell doesn't preach to me. He doesn't try to persuade me. He just shows me a touchstone moment. And I respond from within myself: Yes, that's good. And I know I want my life to be more like that moment. And because he characteristically portrays moments of quiet challenge and triumph, I want to lift myself from sadness.

This is no small gift to me in my time of grieving.


Rockwell's portrayal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms is another example that has strongly affected my sense of what is best about the American experience. FDR presented these freedoms in his Annual Message to Congress on June 6, 1941. He said he wanted these freedoms for everyone (as he said) everywhere in the world:

Freedom of Speech and Expression.

Freedom of every person to worship God in his own way.

Freedom from want: which he related to economic
understandings securing every nation a healthy,
productive and peaceful life.

Freedom from fear: which he related to arms reduction,
so that no nation could commit aggression against another.

Six months after his speech, we were drawn into World War II. I suppose it's true to say that these Four Freedoms characterized what was at stake in that world conflagration. I suppose it is also true to say there has not been a day ever since, when these same freedoms were not at hazard someplace in the world.

In 1942, Norman Rockwell was commissioned to produce his artistic renderings of these freedoms. His renditions -- which appeared first in the Post in February and March of 1943 -- remain iconic. Find them on the internet. Each strikes with deep emotional impact:

Freedom of Speech: a rough-hewn craftsman
in simple dress, stands in some small assembly
speaking his mind. Around him we see interested
people listening to his words. Thus does Rockwell
expand on FDR's theme: the right to speak
and be heard.

Freedom of Worship: a small rectangle of six or
seven heads appears lifted from a large congregation
of people praying. They have in common a deeply reflective
mood and clasped hands. They are neither foreign nor American.
They are devout human beings.

Freedom from fear: a father and mother tuck their
two young children into bed. The man could perhaps
be a grandfather. (Where is the father?) In his hand
he holds a folded newspaper. The headline reads:
BOMBING KI. . .
HORROR HI. . .
But in this American home there is relative peace.

Freedom from Want: Three generations of a family
sit around the table at a celebration feast. Gramma places
a huge turkey before Grampa who we know will soon
carve and serve. It's a festive scene. We can hear the
joyous exchanges among family members. One young man
peeks out of the right-lower corner of the picture at us.
He seems to be welcoming us to the table.

I urge you to google these pictures. Enter Norman Rockwell, Four Freedoms. Numerous articles will appear. See the pictures for yourself. If they please you as they do me, I will be pleased to know

that despite the differences between us,
we are still American.
We are generous human beings.