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FOURR E V I S I T I N G T H E

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By Donald M. Bishop

PHOTO: The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, located on an island in New York's East River, opened in 2012

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Why look back at The Four Freedoms? First, in my classes at Marine Corps University, I’ve discovered that the current generation of Marines have never heard of them. Of Norman Rockwell’s four famous paintings, they have seen only one – the family at Thanksgiving – and they don’t know they were part of a series. Second – when Americans must articulate “what we’re for” (rather than “what we’re against”) – whether in the war on terrorism or in a future of great power competi-tion – it’s worthwhile to examine whether the Four Freedoms still usefully express American values.

President Roosevelt’s InsightIn our own time, each annual State of the Union Address is months in the making. Speechwriters prepare drafts that are reviewed by the President’s inner circle. Cabinet secretaries and agency heads provide input. Word choices in the speech may be focus grouped. There are many personal reviews of drafts by the President.

In 1941, however, these Four Freedoms were not formulated by a White House speechwriting staff or the President’s brain trust. President Roosevelt dictated them personally late in the evening of New Year’s Day, 1941.

FDR may have borrowed the “four freedoms” frame from the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the Constitution in 1937. The sesquicentennial celebrated the four freedoms listed in the First Amendment – freedom of “Speech,” “Press,” “Religion,” and “Assembly.” At the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, New York, four huge sculptures by Leo Friedlander represented these four First Amendment freedoms in a central square. Just a few years later, however, President Roosevelt’s list was a different one. He named and explained them in twelve sentences at the end of the address.

In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own

way – everywhere in the world. 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.

"Thanks, Grandpa, for coming to my game."

"I enjoyed it too, Jack. We men in our eighties don't get out as often as we wish. Seeing you score a run was something. But you know, I noticed something else today.

"When you were at the plate, it carried me back to watching my older brother in the batter's box. You held the bat like he did. You have the same stance and the same swing. When you hit the ball, I felt a tug in my heart, you so reminded me of him."

"Do you mean my great uncle Jack, the one who was killed in the war?"

"Yes, his last high school games were in the spring of 1944. I was twelve. He joined the Marines right afterwards. It broke all our hearts when he was killed on Okinawa — the last great battle.

"I've kept the medals they sent my parents afterward. Here's his Purple Heart. The one with the yellow ribbon has a single campaign star — for Okinawa. And this World War II Victory Medal always gets me thinking.

"We knew what we were fighting against – Hitler's Germany and imperial Japan. Against aggression and surprise attacks. But this medal also tells us what we were fighting for. Look at the back side of the medal. What's it say?

"Freedom of speech and religion. Freedom from want and fear."

"Yes, we called them the Four Freedoms. Have you seen the paintings?"

In his State of the Union Address of January 6, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress for authority to provide Lend-Lease assistance to the United Kingdom. To strengthen his appeal, FDR traced a vision of “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.”

“The Four Freedoms” eventually became shorthand for the war aims of the Allies in their struggle with fascism. The power of The Four Freedoms did not, however, rest on the President’s words alone. They were elaborated in speeches, articles, sermons, books, music, and paintings, and a private-public campaign brought them to millions at home and abroad.

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Modern political warfare now includes both cyber and information operations. At MCU, Bren Chair of Strategic Communications Donald Bishop focuses his teaching and presentations on the “information” or “influence” dimension of conflict – disinformation,

propaganda, persuasion, hybrid warfare – now enabled by the internet and social media. And he emphasizes that Americans, as they confront violent extremism and other

threats, must know and be confident of the American values they defend.

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The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide 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 neighbor – anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called ‘new order’ of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. To that new order we oppose the greater conception – the moral order.

A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear. Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

Presidents launch many slogans while campaigning and governing. Most prove ephemeral. The Four Freedoms, as we shall see, took hold in the public mind, and during the global conflict they became shorthand for the war aims of the Allies.

They helped shape the “certain common principles” of the Atlantic Charter, issued by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill on August 14, 1941.

After President Roosevelt first articulated them, other Americans spontaneously fleshed out The Four Freedoms in magazine articles, essays, sermons, books, and art. In February 1943, the Postal Service printed nearly 1.3 billion one-cent Four Freedoms stamps, and another was issued after the President’s death in 1945.

President Roosevelt commissioned a Four Freedoms monu-ment by sculptor Walter Russell. Unveiled in 1943 in Madison Square Garden, it can now be seen in Madison, Florida. Four Freedoms murals were painted in Burbank, California (by Hugo Ballin) and Newark, New Jersey (by Michael Lenson). Irving Berlin’s “Song of Freedom” was sung by Bing Crosby in the 1942 film Holiday Inn. Composer Robert Russell Bennett wrote a “Four Freedoms Symphony” the next year. A special Four Freedoms honor flag was flown at parades and public ceremonies.

"But Grandpa, did President Roosevelt mean that people in every nation, not just ours, were owed freedom of speech and freedom to worship? Shouldn't we only care about our own country?"

"FDR meant what he said – 'everywhere in the world.' It's beyond our power to change every nation that violates those freedoms, for sure. But I think Americans must always stand fast for these principles and, at the least, call out those nations – like China and North Korea and the Islamic State – which violate them."

"And what about 'freedom from want'? Do Americans have to feed the world?"

"Look again at what President Roosevelt said, Jack. He said there should be 'economic understandings.' Free trade rather

than tariffs, for instance, allows people in each nation to earn livelihoods when they provide goods and services to whomever needs them. Fair trade without subsidies and rigged exchange rates is another 'economic understanding' that has to be part of the free trade package. Trade goes a long way to eliminate 'want.' Protecting patents, copyrights, and trademarks on an international basis also allows each nation to keep the rewards of its own work and productivity.

"Not to mention, Jack, that America has generously shared its knowledge of crops and agriculture and animal husbandry. Across the world, American agricultural science has allowed fewer farmers to keep pace with growing pop-ulations. Yes, there's hunger in the world, but it's almost always caused by the dislocations of war and tyranny, not because farmers or herders or ranchers can't produce."

Norman Rockwell portrays the Four FreedomsIn Vermont after the attack on Pearl Harbor, an American artist known for his magazine covers and posters was possessed by a desire to “take the Four Freedoms out of the noble language and put them in terms everybody can understand.” The result was Norman Rockwell’s four famous paintings.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Rockwell had become famous as a magazine illustrator. His magazine covers are still collected and studied both as art and as Americana.

Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” showed an ordinary work-ingman speaking at a Vermont town meeting, while his better off neighbors (the ones wearing neckties) listen respectfully.

In “Freedom from Fear,” a couple looks down on their sleeping children. The rag doll on the floor and the bed that’s too large for the small attic room show the family’s modest circumstances. The father’s newspaper tells the story; the headline reads “bombings” and “terror.”

“Freedom to Worship” provided a collage of worshippers. There’s no overt mark of the religion of the characters in the center of the painting, but they no doubt represent the majority Protestant denominations. Significantly, the figure shown partially in the upper left of the painting is African American. Previously, only whites could be portrayed in paintings commissioned by the publisher, and the figure’s breakthrough inclusion here represents another stream of American Christianity. The woman on the left, with the braid over her hair, holding a rosary, is Catholic, perhaps an immigrant. In the lower right, the man wears a songkok, a Muslim prayer cap popular in Southeast Asia.

The final painting, “Freedom from Want,” portrayed an American family on Thanksgiving. In my experience teaching Marines, this is the only one of the four paintings they have seen before.

Rockwell failed to find a sponsor for his project among the wartime agencies in Washington, but the Curtis Publishing Company agreed to run the paintings in four consecutive issues of The Saturday Evening Post in February and March of 1943.

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On its own initiative, the magazine commissioned four essays to accompany the paintings.

"You should find copies of the four essays on the internet, Jack. They were written by four of that day's literary giants.

"In what he called a 'parable' to illustrate Freedom of Speech, Booth Tarkington imagined young Hitler and young Mussolini meeting in a mountain chalet, confessing to each other their will to power, unafraid to use 'the purge' to gain it.

"Carlos Bulosan wrote the essay on Freedom from Want. It contrasted the President's high ideal against the reality of hunger during the Depression and in the war. Since Bulsosan was an immigrant from the Philippines, you can feel in the essay his desire for acceptance of new Americans. He gave me a lot to think about.

"Stephen Vincent Benet – there's a big name in American literature, did you know that the whole 'Planet of the Apes' movie series was inspired by one Benet story? His Four Freedoms essay spoke of humankind's long aspiration for Freedom from Fear, with 'saints and martyrs and prophets – and the common people' making their contributions over the centuries.

"And you must read Will Durant's essay on 'Freedom to Worship.' One sentence really jumped out at me the first time I read it. Speaking of the dictators, he wrote a 'good man who is not great is a hundred times more precious than a great man who is not good.' Think about the world's capitals when you read that.

"Here's another Durant quote. He said that 'freedom of body and soul, of movement and enterprise, of thought and utterance, of faith and worship, of hope and charity' are the 'most precious gifts in the orbit of life.' 'If our sons and brothers accomplish this … it will be an achievement beside which all the triumphs of Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon will be a little thing.' Talk about words to live by!

The paintings made publishing history. More than 25,000 readers purchased sets, suitable for framing, from the magazine.

So deeply did the paintings affect the American public that Rockwell received 60,000 letters offering thanks, reflections, and suggestions.

The paintings became American icons – recognized as instantly as the Rosenthal photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” or the video images of the falling twin towers on September 11, 2001.

It was the paintings that became the core of a major opinion campaign launched in wartime. The Treasury Department and The Saturday Evening Post sponsored a Four Freedoms War Bond Show, exhibiting the paintings around the nation. The opening of the tour at Hecht’s department store in Washington was broadcast nationwide, with Lowell Thomas as master of ceremonies and Justice William O. Douglas as the main speaker. Each person who bought a War Bond received a set of Four Freedoms prints. The campaign raised $130 million ($1.92 billion in 2019 dollars).

The Office of War Information (OWI) belatedly realized the power of the project it had once dismissed and printed another 2.5 million copies, accompanied by a long OWI essay. It began:

Beyond the war lies the peace. Both sides have sketched the outlines of the new world toward which they strain. The leaders of the Axis countries have published their design for all to read. They promise a world in which the conquered peoples will live out their lives in the service of their masters.

The United Nations, now engaged in a common cause, have also published their design, and have committed certain common aims to writing. * * * The freedoms we are fighting for, we who are free: the freedoms for which the men and women in the concentration camps and prisons and in the dark streets of the subjugated countries wait, are four in number.

Note how both the President and the Office of War Information placed the freedoms ahead of the atrocities that violated them. This surely helped frame many awful events for ordinary people in the United States and abroad. Until war came, most were coping with the down home problems of the Depression. When international events intruded on their lives, the Four Freedoms gave Americans and the allies four lenses to interpret what they learned.

Norman Rockwell's Four Famous paintings (left to right) Freedom from Fear, Freedom from Want, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion.

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Thus Nazi book burnings and executions of political oppo-nents violated Freedom of Speech. There was no Freedom from Fear when bombs fell in London and Chungking. When Americans saw films of hungry Chinese refugees, they felt more keenly their own Freedom from Want. And as the death camps were liberated and Hitler’s “Final Solution” became known, Americans knew the meaning of Freedom to Worship.

So powerful were Rockwell’s portrayals and so extensive was the campaign that The Four Freedoms were written into the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. Writing in Foreign Affairs, G. John Ikenberry said the FDR speech “is widely seen as a landmark statement of American foreign policy.” Vasily Gatov recently wrote in The American Interest that during the Cold War the United States’ “‘personality’ was based around the concept of freedom,” and the Four Freedoms were the “roots of this freedom narrative.”

Looking back, looking aheadFor decades critics have judged Rockwell as a mere “illustrator” rather than an artist. As times, tastes, and moods changed, many dismissed him and his portrayals of America in the decades from the 1920s to the 1950s as sentimental, smug, and sterile. Many of his images have become overfamiliar.

As the American population has become more diverse, we now notice that the subjects in Rockwell’s works before the 1960s were almost all white.

The attractiveness and accessibility of the Rockwell paint-ings have, moreover, outshined the other creative work – the sculptures, music, and paintings by other gifted artists – that also helped give the Four Freedoms such a public resonance.

A re-evaluation is, however, underway, finding many clas-sical elements in the composition of his paintings and lauding Rockwell’s ability to portray the American spirit. One Rockwell painting, “Saying Grace” sold at auction in 2013 for $46 million. At the time the sale set a record for a single American

painting. Both Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas are major collectors of Rockwell’s work. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is the permanent home of the Four Freedoms paintings, but the Museum frequently loans them for exhibit elsewhere.

The contours and reach of American freedoms are currently being debated, and some challenge their received meanings. Don’t some Americans fear the police, or gun owners? Should there be limits on hate speech? Does religious freedom allow some individuals to be exempt from general laws and rul-ings? Should the nation do more to reduce “want” among Americans? Do new social insights and the public contention over American freedoms mean America has changed since the Second World War?

I think rather that a continuity of American ideals – the “why we fight,” perhaps – joins, rather than divides, World War II and the current conflict. Here and there the Four Freedoms and the Norman Rockwell paintings seem to hearken back to a passed yesteryear. But deeper contemplation shows how well they endure.

The totalitarian evils addressed by the Four Freedoms are still recognizable 75 years later. Then, the aircraft were Heinkels and Bettys. Now they are hijacked airliners and ICBMs. President Roosevelt spoke of “the quick lime in the ditch.” The military defeat of ISIS has allowed the unearthing of the ditches and the victims. The many creative people who fleshed out President Roosevelt’s expression of free values still speak to us in a new century.

"Thanks for showing me the medal and the paintings, Grandpa. Maybe I can write something for history class."

"Jack, I had to give away many things that filled our old house before I moved to the apartment after your grand-mother died. But I was sure to keep my wedding ring, my father's watch, and my brother Jack's medals.

"Seeing you on the diamond today, I'm giving these medals to you. I can already tell you will become a fine man, like my brother was. These are the most precious things I own, and I want you to have and keep them.

"The medals are to remember your Uncle Jack, a Marine who gave his life. And now the Four Freedoms are for you to preserve for the next generation." ■

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ABOUT THE AUTHORDonald Bishop is the Donald L. Bren Chair of Strategic Communications at Marine Corps University, one of the chairs funded by the Foundation. He served in the Air Force in Vietnam, but his career — 31 years — was in the U.S. Foreign Service, working as a Public Diplomacy officer at embassies and consulates overseas. In 2007, the State Department detailed him to the Pentagon as the Foreign Policy Advisor to Commandant James Conway. At MCU, his elective and lectures focus on informational power, information conflict, disinformation, and influence.

"I had many privileged glimpses into the human condition, but I never once saw human beings flee the freedom of speech; I never saw families on the run from the free practice of religion in the public square; and as a young Marine, I never picked anybody out of a raft on the ocean desperate to escape a free press."

JAMES MATTIS, MAY 15, 2018