Mother had a copy of a painting she kept in her Thanksgiving dinner file folder. Right after Halloween she took down our elementary school finger-painted masterpieces and used four magnets to hold the print on the refrigerator door. With it came with the admonishment: Do NOT touch.
The painting had long been Mother’s inspiration for a perfect Thanksgiving dinner: a wonderful turkey, all the trimmings (sides, as they are called now) and desserts for a very extended family.
For the most part, all went according to plan. When it did not, Thanksgiving was far more memorable. At the end of a very long day, after the China went back into the cabinet and the Olds counted the silverware to make sure all pieces were present and accounted for, Mother would take down the print and return it to the file folder for another year.
The painting? Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom from Want.” For my parents, like almost everyone in their generation, it was all the more poignant because they lived through much want during the Great Depression. After a decade of it, the painting emphasized abundance.
At his State of the Union message in January 1941, President Roosevelt explained that all people, everywhere in the world, deserved four basic freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
By then, much of the world had been at war since August 1939, and even earlier in the Far East when the Japanese invaded Manchuria and China, and Africa when Italy invaded Ethiopia. Those living in occupied lands or under a dictatorship did not have those freedoms.
Roosevelt intended to persuade Americans to drop their isolationist beliefs that we had no business in what was happening in the rest of the world. At the same time, he understood that America was not ready to go to war. He wanted Americans to understand that these were the freedoms to which all people, everywhere, not just Americans, were entitled.
His words were well received, except for objections raised by the political foes who thought the President was attempted to expand his New Deal policies.
In 1942, the Saturday Evening Post magazine commissioned Rockwell to do the Four Freedom paintings. Not long after, his preliminary sketches were approved.
“Freedom of Speech” depicted a young man in a work jacket standing up at a public meeting to talk to the crowd. “Freedom of Worship” showed five pious people at a worship service. The fourth painting, “Freedom from Fear,” depicted parents tucking their child into bed, while the father held a newspaper with headlines about war overseas.
About that third painting, the one we associate with Thanksgiving, “Freedom from Want” shows a family about ready to have a special holiday meal, and all eyes are on the feast. It was an idealistic painting, and modern art critics have pointed out that by today’s standards it is politically incorrect, even racist.
The series took seven months for Rockwell to complete, in part because his health was not good, and despite the best efforts of his doctors, he lost weight and was exhausted.
The artist knew that to make a clear message that would reflect Roosevelt’s high ideals and touch the hearts and minds of his audience, everything had to be perfect. Not even the President knew Rockwell was jeopardizing his health to finish the paintings.
He said the quartet was the hardest emotional and intellectual work he had done. The four paintings appeared on covers of the Post, one each week, from late February through early March 1943.
The timing was perfect because the American military had suffered several setbacks, and the paintings were a visual boost to the national morale. Civilian and soldier alike looked at these paintings and understood this is what we were fighting for.
By the time peace was declared in the summer of 1945, millions of copies of the “Four Freedoms” paintings had been printed, and they were used on a series of war bonds. Today, they are in the Norman Rockwell Art Museum, whose gift shop manager claims the reproductions are as popular as ever.
These are far more than beautiful paintings or iconic artworks in a remote and obscure museum. They represent the core values of our social contract with one another. They are the articulation of the hopes and desires of every human being since the dawn of humanity.
Just as our earliest ancestors wanted them to be their reality, nothing has changed. We still want them to be our reality. Many of us would be willing to sacrifice our lives in return for the hope that our children and grandchildren would be able to live in freedom.
When my sister and I were in elementary school, on Thanksgiving morning we were exiled off to our bedrooms with instructions to write our list of reasons we were grateful. It was a challenge at first, but once we got started we printed our lists at a good clip. We included almost everything — our dog Sam, my pony, teachers, music lessons and more. My sister did much the same thing.
I think of that writing assignment as we approach another Thanksgiving Day. Looking over the past year, some things were great, one was horribly awful, and a lot were a “meh” — not great but not terrible. Maybe that’s how you see things in your life too.
Then we realize that we survived and got through it. There is much for which to be thankful.
But now, in front of us, is the unknown. What happens later today or tomorrow or the tomorrows after that? Will those Four Freedoms still be present, or might something dreadful happen? We don’t know.
When we are uncertain of the present or future, it is tempting to look to the past as the good old days. Perhaps the best popular cultural example came in the opening of the old TV show “All in the Family,” where Archie and Edith are at their piano, singing “Those were the Days.”
It includes the line “What we need is a man like Herbert Hoover again.” Seriously? Anyone who was living in the early 1930s probably had a very different opinion about life being so wonderful and perfect.
Today and this coming Thanksgiving Day will probably be the “Good Old Days” in a few years. Our task is to make them great days right now. We do it through gratitude for what we have.
We instinctively know those Four Freedoms are important to us as a nation and as individuals. We also know to maintain and pass them down to the following generation, our work is cut out for us.
We can do it of course, just as the GI’s and their families did it when the paint was still wet on Rockwell’s painting.
