American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell (34 page)

The painting, notes the art critic Robert Hughes, has a “Puritan tone confirmed by the glasses of plain water on the table.”
15
But Rockwell eventually came to see
Freedom from Want
as just the opposite. He believed he had erred on the side of overabundance, making the turkey too big. In the fifties, the painting would be criticized overseas as an example of American consumer gluttony.

With this painting, Rockwell achieved a new level of descriptive realism. Yet the painting doesn’t feel congested or fussy; it is open and airy in the center. Extensive passages of white paint nicely frame the individual faces. The dinner plates, the freshly ironed linen tablecloth, the woman’s apron, the diaphanous curtains—these various white objects make the painting one of the most ambitious plays of white-against-white since Whistler’s
Symphony in White, No. 1
.

*   *   *

Freedom from Fear
, the last of the four pictures, is the most anecdotal. It invites you into an upstairs bedroom with a low, slanting roof, and is usually described as a painting about a mother and father putting the kids to bed. Actually, the boy and girl are already asleep—they share a narrow bed, their heads heavy on their pillows, and their parents are looking in on them before they turn in for the night. And, as any parent knows, watching children sleep can elicit a powerful, almost primitive sense of well-being. Here, the mother bends forward and delicately lifts the edge of a bedsheet with both hands, to better cover the children. (It echoes the painting he had done during his first marriage of a mother covering a daughter.) Her husband appears in shirt sleeves and suspenders, standing by her side, a classic Rockwell onlooker, a viewer surrogate, passively observing the scene as you observe him observing. You suspect that he has spent the evening reading the newspaper, in a comfortable chair in the living room, because he’s holding his wire-rimmed glasses and a folded copy of the
Bennington Banner
, whose partially visible headline (
BOMBINGS KI … HORROR HIT
) refers to the bombing of London. The scene has some of the feeling of a French interior, with lovely haut-art touches. Note the light visible in the hall outside the bedroom, coming up the stairs from an unknown source on the first floor (a lamp?) and thinning as it goes. The blanket is a lyrical object, a fuzzy, soft-edge rectangle of white that amounts to its own abstract painting.

Freedom from Fear
, 1942
(Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts)

*   *   *

By the end of December, after nearly seven months of continuous labor, the quartet of paintings was finally finished. “He was broke because he spent so much time on the Four Freedoms,” Schaeffer recalled. Rockwell put them on display for a few days at the West Arlington Grange, before having them crated and shipped to Philadelphia. Each one was sizable, about four feet tall and three feet wide, big enough to fill the space above a fireplace.

The
Post
, in the meantime, was already at work on “one of the greatest promotional campaigns since the coming of Burma-Shave.”
16
The publicity for the four paintings began prior to their publication. President Roosevelt was solicited by the magazine to write a letter of praise, and he actually agreed to do it. “I think you have done a superb job in bringing home to the plain, everyday citizen the plain, everyday truths behind the Four Freedoms,” he wrote in a letter to Rockwell dated February 10.
17

The White House gave a draft of the letter to Forrest Davis, a
Post
reporter in the Washington bureau. The president said he was leaving it up to the magazine to revise the letter and produce an “official” version to thank the
Post
for publishing the
Four Freedoms
. So the
Post
wrote a thank-you letter to itself, signed by President Roosevelt.
18

It also enlisted the promotional skills of Eleanor Roosevelt, who, on February 21, could be heard in a national radio broadcast, commenting in her strong, careful voice about freedom of speech. In advertisements for the event, the
Post
left it unclear whether she would be speaking about her husband’s text-only “Freedom of Speech,” or Rockwell’s painted interpretation of it, perhaps hoping they would blur into one.

The
Four Freedoms
were published in four consecutive issues of the
Post
, starting on February 20. Each painting appeared on page 13, in a “full color bleed” (running off the edge of the page, without borders), in the words of the art editor. The opposite page (page 12) carried a short text by a famous writer who had been asked by the
Post
to airily ponder the meaning of basic freedoms. The novelist Booth Tarkington wrote the first piece, an unaccountably awful short story in which the young Hitler appears as a character. The next week, the historian Will Durant supplied a genuinely eloquent meditation on religious freedom.
Freedom from Want
came with an essay from the young Filipino poet, Carlos Bulosan, whose inclusion represented a welcome if transparent attempt on the part of the magazine to appear more ethnically diverse than it was. The poet Stephen Vincent Benét furnished the essay for
Freedom from Fear
, which ran in the issue of March 13, and died of a heart attack, at age forty-four, on that very day.

*   *   *

As the
Post
had anticipated, Rockwell’s
Four Freedoms
were a huge sensation. Susan Sontag once noted that “sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than a verbal slogan.”
19
An image allows you to linger, to look at it again and again, until it acquires a defining power. And, for many Americans, World War II made sense precisely because they had the chance to linger with reproductions of Rockwell’s four paintings. To be sure, his work did not attempt to explain the battles or the bloodshed, the dead and injured, the obliteration of towns. But the war wasn’t just about killing the enemy. It was also about saving a way of life.

The
Post
boasted that Rockwell’s paintings elicited some sixty thousand letters from readers. Countless others responded to them with feelings that were never recorded, or never even verbalized, sitting in their living rooms or their kitchens as they studied the pictures in the
Post
and felt a little jolt of recognition from seeing their own lives somehow mirrored in them. The paintings tapped into a world that seemed recognizable and real. Most everyone knew what it was like to attend a town meeting or say a prayer, to observe Thanksgiving or look in on sleeping children.

Most of the mail pouring in was positive, and gifts arrived from people Rockwell had never met. Among them was the president of the Pioneer Suspender Company in Philadelphia. He sent Rockwell three pairs of galluses and noted that he especially admired
Freedom from Fear
, in which the father standing by the bedside of his children is shown in shirt sleeves and a clearly recognizable pair of Pioneer suspenders. “Of course he has freedom from fear,” said the letter accompanying the gift. “His trousers are held up by a pair of our suspenders.”
20

At least one admirer tried to buy the original paintings. Hiram C. Bloomingdale, a vice president of his family’s department store in New York, wrote to Rockwell to obtain a price. The artist replied that the paintings were not available at the moment, politely adding he would let him know should the situation ever change.
21

*   *   *

In what was surely the greatest marketing coup in its history, the
Post
was able to sustain the buzz generated by Rockwell’s paintings long after they were published. The March 13 issue, in which the final painting appeared, included a triumphant editor’s note: the Office of War Information, which had initially declined to consider the paintings, had just agreed to print 2.5 million poster images of them.
22

Moreover, the four originals would be the stellar centerpiece of a traveling war-bond sales campaign that the
Post
had pulled together in conjunction with the U.S. Treasury Department. In those days, Americans were expected to pay for their wars, and President Roosevelt was counting on the sale of bonds to bring in the enormous sum of $1 billion a month.

In some ways, it is surprising that President Roosevelt and his loyal friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the treasury, agreed to cooperate on a project that would mingle the financial well-being of the country with that of the
Post.
Morgenthau, a quiet, bespectacled man who was often accused of being cold and suspicious, made enemies easily. He had good reason to dislike the
Post
, whose editorial page had railed against the New Deal and criticized his tax policies as an exercise in socialism. “I wouldn’t cross the street for them,” Morgenthau said of the
Post
.
23

But the Treasury was about to embark on a new bond campaign, and Morgenthau’s interest in the
Post
was nakedly transactional. With its three million-plus subscribers, the
Post
could be useful in getting the word out. Tellingly, Morgenthau had boasted in 1942 that sponsors of the bond program had made it possible for the Treasury to avoid spending “one penny on paid advertising in newspapers and magazines.”
24

Despite the scant funds for magazine advertising, the U.S. Treasury did have a budget for promotional films, and in April 1943, a five-minute newsreel called “Four Freedoms” began playing in theaters across the country. The OWI had arranged to send a film crew to Rockwell’s studio in Vermont. Most of the footage shows him at his easel, fake painting. In one shot, the eleven models for
Freedom from Want
gather around a dining room table, as if reenacting the scene in the painting, even though no such scene had ever occurred and some of the models had never met one another until the Paramount News crew showed up.

*   *   *

On April 1, 1943, Mary Rockwell left home by herself and flew across the country to attend her sister’s wedding in Southern California. She would be gone for three weeks, staying with her parents, who had since moved from her girlhood home in Alhambra to smaller house in nearby Pasadena. It had been thirteen years since her own April wedding, in the garden in Alhambra. Looking back, she saw how bold she had been then, marrying an older artist she had just met, a man who, it was now clear, seemed to want nothing but to work.

She returned home to Vermont in time to accompany Rockwell to Washington for the “World Premier of the Four Freedoms War Bond Show,” as it was called with a grandiosity worthy of P. T. Barnum. A reception was held on a Monday evening, April 26, at the Hecht Co., the city’s premier department store, and visitors who rode the elevator to the fourth floor found, in place of the usual home furnishings—the upholstered club chairs, seven-piece dinette sets, and innerspring mattresses—a so-called Victory Center outfitted with more original artwork than anyone had ever seen gathered in one spot.
25
Rockwell’s four paintings were hung behind a gilded rope, amid an ocean of a thousand-odd works, cartoons, illustrations, and even typed story manuscripts lent by a generation of contributors to the
Post
.

All of official Washington, it seemed, turned out for the opening on that Monday night. The invitations, which were issued by the Treasury, listed about two dozen “patronesses” including Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. Henry Wallace, Mrs. Hugo Black, and Mrs. Harold Ickes—Washington’s most celebrated spouses, except for poor Frances Perkins, the pioneering secretary of labor, who got stuck on the wives-only list in an era when men had no idea where to put accomplished women.
26
William O. Douglas, who had been on the Supreme Court for four years, was the main speaker and his comments were broadcast by radio. They were not exactly art related, as the page-one headline in the next morning’s
Washington Post
indicated:
DOUGLAS CALLS JAPS DEGENERATE AS
4
FREEDOMS EXHIBIT OPENS.
27

Rockwell did not mention the ceremony in his autobiography, perhaps because it did not elicit warm memories. A department store reception with the tone of an anti-Japanese rally is hardly an ideal setting for the contemplation of works of art. Besides, Morgenthau made a point of being out of town that day, in Grand Rapids, Iowa, speaking to a group called We, the People. Members of his staff quietly took note of his absence, and commented among themselves that his antipathy toward the
Post
remained unabated. Stepping in for his boss, Daniel Bell, undersecretary of the Treasury, presented a citation to Rockwell.

The next morning the exhibit opened to the public and was mobbed from the start. Rockwell was chaperoned back to Hecht’s to help with publicity. He gave a brief talk at eleven and again at three.
28
In the hours between, he autographed reproductions of
Freedom of Speech
for shoppers who waited in line for their turn. Those who purchased a bond—prices started at $18.75, for a bond that would be worth $25 when it matured in a decade—received a free set of reproductions. In a news photograph taken that day, Rockwell looks a bit harried as he sits behind a table, wedged into a corner with tall house plants whose leaves are practically poking him in the head.