Donald Trump’s “America First” presidency is abandoning any claim of a US mission to defend or spread “freedom” around the world. He also seems not to care much about it at home. His quarrels with the media and the judiciary boil down to a claim that his executive power should overrule all constitutional obstacles. For this to become the theme of his presidency so early on suggests that either he or American democracy is heading for disaster.
Norman Rockwell’s paintings The Four Freedoms are a reminder of exactly what is at stake. The Norman Rockwell Museum is sending these four iconic images of American freedom on tour. Under any other president it would look like propaganda. Under this one it seems subversive.
No other artist has ever tried to do anything so corny as define American democracy and illuminate its key values. But these paintings, which include Rockwell’s silvery vision of an idyllic Thanksgiving feast, illustrate in precise detail the “four freedoms” worth fighting for. That definition was made by President Franklin D Roosevelt as he urged America to stand up against nazism.
In his State of the Union address on 6 January 1941, Roosevelt warned against a threat to the very survival of the United States: “I address you, the members of the 77th Congress, at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union. I use the word ‘unprecedented’ because at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.”
Roosevelt was speaking almost exactly 11 months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 that forced America into the second world war – yet his State of the Union address is clearly a war leader’s speech. Calling for massive rearmament and unequivocal support for countries fighting fascism, Roosevelt argues that democracy itself is in peril: “Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world – assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.”
He goes further, and sets out the four great freedoms that will triumph once the dictators are defeated – the freedoms Rockwell illustrates in his paintings for the Saturday Evening Post. They are directly based on Roosevelt’s 1941 speech, but there is a difference. By the time they were executed in 1943 the US had joined the war. So, as befits wartime art, Rockwell’s paintings are intensely patriotic slices of American apple pie. You would never guess they illustrate a utopian, internationalist speech in which Roosevelt foresaw a new democratic age spanning the globe.
In Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech (1943) a working-class man stands up in the audience at a town hall meeting to make his passionate point. Everyone listens. He is free to say what he believes. Or in Roosevelt’s definition of the four freedoms: “The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world.” Roosevelt was urging Americans to fight for the freedom of speech that nazism was extinguishing in Europe. Rockwell’s painting urges the same, rooting that freedom in a small-town American scene straight out of a Frank Capra film.
Roosevelt’s second “is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world”. Rockwell illustrates this with a painting of people of different sects and faiths, including Protestant, Catholic and Jewish, all praying side by side.
Freedom from Want is Rockwell’s renowned Thanksgiving scene, with glad faces bathed in a very American light of freedom. Yet, far from being just bullish nationalism, it too illustrates a very Rooseveltian ideal of economic justice: “The third is freedom from want – which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.”
Roosevelt, in other words, wanted to export his New Deal, to spread prosperity worldwide. He clearly envisaged a world where the tariff barriers and economic nationalism of the 1930s gave way to healthy global trade.
In Freedom from Fear, Rockwell shows a couple tucking up their children in bed for the night. Roosevelt promised a world without war or the threat of war: “The fourth is freedom from fear – which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour – anywhere in the world.”
Rockwell takes Roosevelt’s speech and turns its manifesto for global democracy into four homely and moving everyday moments. Their appeal is visceral: to parents wanting their children to be safe, to people happy to get a good meal after the privations of the Great Depression. His warm realist style allows him to lodge Roosevelt’s ideals in the hearts of his audience. Yet to do this, he narrows the message. He is the artist of small-town America, and he translates Roosevelt’s internationalism into that cosier language. Rockwell makes the four freedoms look innately American.
Oddly enough, that weakness has become a strength. For it is Rockwell’s American freedoms that are in danger. Trump’s agenda seems to demand a direct clash with American liberalism and American liberties. Either he will destroy American freedom or it will destroy him. Look at Rockwell’s paintings. Will these freedoms endure?