Thoughts on Democracy, July 4 2008

During the summer of 1942, the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell embarked on a series of paintings that would come to be known as "The Four Freedoms." Inspired by an impassioned speech President Roosevelt had made a year earlier, this quartet of images — freedom from want, from fear, freedom of speech and of worship — were published in The Saturday Evening Post the following winter, and remain among Rockwell's most celebrated works. They were also highly effective as a means of social impact. The Office of War Information distributed thousands as posters, and a 16-city tour of the paintings was seen by 1.2 million people, raising over $130 million dollars in war bonds. Writing in The New Yorker a few years later, one critic noted that as a series, these paintings were received by the American public with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than any other paintings in the history of American art.

Obviously, "The Four Freedoms" were not just art — they were propaganda in a time of war...

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