Episode 70: Norman Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech (1943)
Tamar: Could you introduce yourself?
Bernie: I'm your dad. Your proud dad.
Tamar: Who are you also?
Bernie: My name is Bernard Avishai and I teach at Dartmouth and write periodically.
Tamar: So describe what we had going down to the basement on the walls of the house that I grew up in.
Bernie: If I remember correctly, we had the Rockwell paintings, reproductions of the Four Freedoms that Roosevelt had spoken about. And obviously Rockwell was very impressed by. But you don't want me to describe them now, do you?
Tamar: You can describe them.
Bernie: Well, I remember there was this one guy standing, looking very earnest, in a very weatherbeaten leather jacket. Speaking his mind in a local public forum with very wizened face with lines in it. It was very, very touching and moving portrait. I only discovered later what he was defending, but never mind. And then there was a kind of collage of various religions, which always struck me as being very lovely and warm and inviting, but also a little kitschy. And then there was a woman serving a turkey on Thanksgiving, which I didn't particularly like, because it looked like she was holding something much lighter than what she was actually holding. I didn't think a woman of that age could be holding a turkey that was about 80 pounds.
Tamar: Well, she has a lot of people to feed.
Bernie: And I don't remember the fourth one.
Tamar: It was the the parents tucking in the kids that was always my favorite.
Bernie: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Well, that I should not have forgotten. It was freedom from fear.
Tamar: So, where are you right now?
Bernie: I'm sitting in my office in Jerusalem.
Tamar: And where were you born?
Bernie: I was born in Montreal.
Tamar: So why does this American scene speak to you so much?
Bernie: Well, I became an American. I became an American in ‘92. I think of America as an ideal. I think Rockwell did, too.
Tamar: The ideal of what?
Bernie: [00:02:42] The ideal of individual rights, of individual idiosyncrasy, of tolerance. And as a Jew coming to America particularly, it always felt to me like a place very much worth defending. So Rockwell was, you know, a kind of spokesman for what I cared about. He has such a strong sense of community, Rockwell. He really does. I don't think it's an accident. He lived in a small town and chose to. He could have lived anywhere. But he really is in love with small town America. And so am I. I mean, when I'm in the States, as you know, we live in Wilmot, New Hampshire. I just love being in a small town.
Tamar: Yeah. Remind me, when is the Wilmot Town Hall open? I always thought it was like. It was like Wednesday afternoons between 1 and 4. That was like, the only time you could actually, you know, address your sewer concerns.
Bernie: No, she's she's there more now.
Tamar: She? Just one person?
Bernie: Yeah. Miss Lamson. She's wonderful.
Tamar: But, you know, we we lived in Boston. Why have those pictures up in our house?
Bernie: Because I believed in the world he was depicting. This was like the beginning of the Reagan administration, if I'm not mistaken. And I just love the idea of educating you all on the values of sort of the social democracy that the New Deal represented, that everyone should be given an opportunity to develop themselves to their full. And an acknowledgement that different people are born with different circumstances. You will have that opportunity and it doesn't matter to whom you were born. Your your zip code is not your destiny.
Tamar: So a question then for you is that… and I don't want to spoil for everybody who's about to find out what this man, who is representing freedom of speech to Norman Rockwell, is actually arguing for. When you found out, did it change at all, your appreciation for him being held up as the gold standard of what it is to fight for what you believe in individually?
Bernie: Not at all. In a perverse way, it kind of strengthened it for me because I felt like now I'm sort of celebrating the defense of the speech of someone with whom I disagree. And also there's a quiet dignity to his face that I just love. It doesn't really matter. I know many people in New Hampshire who who disagree with me, but there's a kind of dignity to small town spaces and dignity to the way in which they conduct themselves in a neighborly way That I really appreciate. I know that if my car broke down, I'd call him hey, Joe. I'd. You'd be like, the first person I'd come to call, and he'd. And he'd be there in, like, 30 seconds. So, you know, I think I think that's part of why I love that picture.
Tamar: Thanks, Dad.
I went to my summer camp for 14 years total, starting from age 7 until I was a unit director. And for every one of those years, whenever we had hot dogs for lunch, Dick, my beloved camp director, would pick up the hot dog, make his way to the ever-present peanut butter and jelly station – this was of course the olden days, before peanut butter was, you know, spreadable death for kids – and he would make a big, beautiful show of slathering it on his dog. Delicious, he’d say. I personally could never bring myself to try it, and the camp was always divided between people gagging on one side and proselytizing on the other.
I like to think of this as my first entree into heated public discourse. People love to have strong opinions and they love to take a side. Whether it’s about condiments on wieners or pineapple on pizza or hard versus soft taco shells or Taylor Swift or tariffs. We on the internet call it freedom of speech, and so did Norman Rockwell. You’d have to think that if Dick wasn’t now in his mid-80s and largely above such things, he’d have the perfect meme to make his statement. Peanut butter and jelly on a hot dog is good, actually.
The meme in question is, of course, this painting from 1943 by Norman Rockwell, which is actually titled “Freedom of Speech,” and you’ve probably seen it image everywhere. The chiseled, earnest, 1940s manly man, sporting a literal blue collar and wearing a suede jacket I’m pretty sure my grandpa actually owned, who looks like a cross between Dr. Chilton from Disney’s Pollyanna (I’m very proud of that pull) and Abraham Lincoln, standing up above a crowd and speaking his mind to a rapt audience. Whatever he’s saying, it matters. People are listening. And you can understand why it’s gotten the second life it has on the internet, today, why it’s been appropriated to make authoritative, even defiant claims about taco shells. This man has the motherfucking floor. And there’s so much going on here in the 2020s that lends him authority, maybe too much authority, and so much in 1942, when this moment in a town meeting in Arlington, Vermont actually took place, that challenges it. He’s a blue-collar white man with dirt under his fingernails, surrounded by men wearing white shirts and ties and unreadable expressions. He’s the underdog and the hero and the pariah. He still is today. But more on that later.
Norman Rockwell, it’s pretty safe to say, has a reputation. He’s known for legible, nostalgic narratives about the mid-century American middle class. And for the longest time he was dinged for this. Too simplistic, too sentimental. Too white. But his perceived lack of nuance, as we’re about to see, in itself lacks nuance. Because no artist who dares to take on postwar America does it straightforwardly, no matter how it might read that way at first glance. “I was showing the America I knew and observed,” Rockwell wrote, “to others who might not have noticed.” There is a lot brewing beneath the surface of his work that puts its finger on our complexities as a society, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, both in the 1940s and 50s and today. Or, put in the parlance of 2025: for all of its idealized white bread nostalgia, Norman Rockwell’s photorealistic capturing of midcentury America is pretty sophisticated, actually.
First a little background: Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894. He always wanted to be an artist; he enrolled in art school at the age of 14, where he ended up studying illustration, and was hired as the art director of Boys’ Life magazine, the official publication of the Boy Scouts of America, at the age of 19. In 1916, at the age of 22, he painted his first cover for the Saturday Evening Post, the publication that would end up defining his career – over the next 47 years, his work appeared on the cover 321 more times. The Saturday Evening Post, which still exists, by the way, was considered the essential publication of the American middle class. It’s now published only 6 times a year, to a relatively modest low six-figure circulation, but from 1897 to 1963, it was available every Saturday like clockwork, reaching over two million homes a week, publishing fiction and non-fiction stories, articles, and editorials, and, of course, illustrations. It never hid its conservative bent – its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, wanted to magazine to reflect his own values: traditional, conventional, middle-class, and patriotic. And so Rockwell’s covers and illustrations, by far the most iconic parts of the magazine to this day, carried a whiff of those values too: largely white, traditional families engaged in nostalgic small-town American activities.
But like any good illustrator, or artist, there’s a bit of a wink implied, or at least a nod to the fact that when these idealized lives are being lived, it’s always in relation to something else, something worse. He illustrated through the Great Depression, through WWII, through Korea and the Civil Rights Movement – painful, bloody, traumatic moments in American history. No one was under any misapprehension that life is all watering holes and Thanksgiving dinners. And so it seemed, instead, that Rockwell’s response was to fine tune the art of nostalgia, and maybe even redefine it.
And let’s talk about nostalgia for a minute. It evokes naivete, the idea of blindly, childishly hoping for something better so as not to face the hard reality of a moment. But I’m always reminded of Mad Men, and Don Draper’s soulful, sad definition of nostalgia in his infamous Kodak slide projector pitch:
Don Draper [Mad Men]: My first job I was in-house at a fur company with this old pro copywriter, a Greek named Teddy. And Teddy told me the most important idea in advertising is new creates an itch. You simply put your product in there as a kind of calamine lotion.
But he also talked about a deeper bond with the product. Nostalgia. It's delicate. But potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound. It's a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.
The pain from an old wound. It’s so good. It’s certainly how I wade around in it, ask anyone who knows me. Nostalgia can speak to a full understanding of the hard realities of the world, and the entirely understandable retreat into comforting memories, or to aspirations for a better future. When it comes to Rockwell’s images, we’re never entirely sure if we’re dealing with a society that is naively utopian, or seeking an escape from a world no one wanted to face, or an escape from a world people were facing and just needed escape from, or maybe, more bluntly, the sense of what it’s all for. All this turmoil, both at home and abroad, has to be worth it, right? There’s a lunch counter or a watering hole or a thanksgiving turkey about to be carved, waiting for us on the other side. There has to be.
And how better to depict the nuances of that watering hole, to smell the turkey, than through photorealism, a medium about as specific and unambiguous as you can get? Photorealism, as we talked about in episode 26, has long been dismissed as kitsch, as inconsequential fluff, simply meant to appease a conservative middle-class audience, uneducated in the ways of the bohemians. But the thing is, yes, it did do that, brilliantly. They were absolutely appeased. They invited these images into their homes, every week. Which all the more increases the effectiveness and potency of the wink, again, as Don Draper would say. People could relate to these images, which meant relating to every complicated way of thinking about nostalgia that we just discussed, even if they didn’t realize it in the moment. I mean, think about the art this was being compared to, the work coming out of New York around the same time, produced by the quote unquote art world in the 1940s and 50s. Abstraction, Abstract Expressionism, the stuff that we, as a quote unquote respectable art podcast, have spent way more time talking about than the kind of illustration you’d see in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post. Imagine how Jackson Pollock or Helen Frankenthaler’s work would have landed for the average middle class American. What in God’s name are these spatters and stains, how is this art, how does it relate to me, to my family, to my own suburban struggles? Now imagine replacing the tired old adage of “my seven-year-old could do this” with these virtuosic Rockwell renderings, paintings that barely betray a brushstroke, of your actual seven-year-old sitting at a lunch counter buddying up to a police officer, or marching along in the Boy Scouts. Which would be more appealing? Which would you be more willing to listen to? Which image would have the motherfucking floor?
And so these images had a real power. Not just as a kind of rah rah American propaganda but as poignancy. As a finger on the pulse of society, what people wanted to be, and aspired to be. And there is a progressive seam that runs through that idea, which is all the more effective if your audience is largely conservative. So when you switch up your message a bit, or dip a toe into the political discourse, it’s going to be even more meaningful, and meaningfully received. And this is what happened when Norman Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms paintings, and depicted, in his mind, the iconic archetype of Freedom of Speech. But first a break.
FDR [State of the Union]: Members of the 77th Congress, I address you, the members of this new Congress, at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.
On January 6, 1941, three years into World War Two and eleven months before America entered it, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave the State of the Union. In it he described what he called the Four Freedoms, which he felt were the fundamental rights for all the citizens of the world to enjoy:
FDR [State of the Union]: 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. The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way. The third is freedom from want. The fourth is freedom from fear.
The freedoms of – Speech and Worship – are fairly self-explanatory, while the freedoms from are a little more subjective. Freedom from want referred to an adequate standard of living – food, clothing, housing, basically everything on the ground level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Freedom from fear was about war, particularly disarmament, particularly during wartime, and the idea that everyone should be able to sleep at night without worrying about bombs falling from the sky.
Rockwell was asked to illustrate each of these four freedoms by the Saturday Evening Post, both to run alongside articles responding to FDR’s speech, and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, as a way of promoting U.S. war bonds. The interpretations for the illustrations were at his discretion, and you can imagine how tricky it would be to capture these sprawling ideas in one static, archetypal image. How do you depict freedom from want, or freedom of speech, in a way that someone can glance at it and think, bam, that’s it. You nailed it. That’s my individual freedom as a global citizen. Predictably, it took a few tries to get them right.
And it’s interesting to see the route that Rockwell took with each. Freedom from Want tells a particularly idealized, syrupy narrative: a big white Thanksgiving table full of white people from all generations, where the eldest are setting down a giant turkey to carve – the turkey my dad says she’d never be able to hold, especially at that angle, which kind of speaks to the fantasy nature of the whole scene. There’s hardly a sense that anyone here lives in a more complex world outside the walls of this dining room, that there’s hardship in the world, or even around that table (like, sure), or that they could want for anything, which is of course the point. But it’s an uncomplicated one – truly nostalgia at its most naive, and Rockwell’s stated least favorite of the four.
Freedom of worship is far less narrative and much more symbolic. It’s a sea of profiles, like a pile of coins, again depicting all ages and here, a few more races. The figures are meant to represent the spectrum of American religion, that is, all the way from Judeo to Christian – look, as redditors say, there was an attempt – and Rockwell, and fun fact apparently Walt Disney too, felt that this was one of his most successful of the series. At the top is the inscription “Each according to the dictates of his own conscience,” which was most likely sourced from Joseph Smith’s Mormon Thirteen Articles of Faith, so there’s another explicitly American religion folded in. And what’s most interesting to me isn’t this final version, but the other versions that Rockwell felt didn’t quite capture it. He tried his hand at a more narrative interpretation of Freedom of Worship, originally envisioning it taking place in a barber shop, the great equalizer, with individuals clearly representing different religions shooting the breeze together: a protestant barber shaving a Jew while a black Baptist and a Catholic priest waited for their turns. While much more narratively dynamic, Rockwell didn’t like the idea of his figures falling into stereotypes. Furthermore, it may have spoken more to the idea of religious tolerance, but everyone is meeting in the middle, putting their differences aside, rather than being engaged in their differences, in the actual freedom to worship differently. The version that would ultimately be the final version, the sea of profiles, is instead a calm moment of individual faith and reflection, each in his or her own world. It almost turns the painting into a devotional object itself.
Freedom from fear is a personal favorite of mine, maybe it was the one I passed regularly at home that I related to, when I was able to feel the comfort of being tucked in – and maybe because I’m the parent now, able to give my own kids that sense of comfort. It’s always moved me, this the idea that we all should aspire to be both the kids being sweetly tucked in by our parents, and the parents able to provide their children this comfort, completely oblivious to the dangers of the world even as they’re advertised in the headline on dad’s newspaper. It’s a beautiful aspiration that feels hard-won – truly responding to the pain of a wound. To the hope that awaits us on the other side.
And then there’s freedom of speech. Here’s a narrative worth really diving into. Rockwell was in the thick of it, trying to figure out how to best articulate the “noble language” of FDR’s Four Freedoms, trying, like all artists do, to come up with the idea. And then, in his words, “one night as I was tossing in bed, I suddenly remembered how my next-door neighbor, Jim Edgerton, had stood up at Town Meeting and said something everybody else disagreed with. But they let him have his say. No one had shouted him down. My God, I thought, that’s it! There it is. Freedom of Speech. I’ll illustrate the Four Freedoms using my Vermont neighbors as models. I’ll express these noble ideas in simple, everyday scenes that everybody can understand."
More specifically, what happened was that on November 9, 1940, the Memorial School in Rockwell’s town of Arlington, Vermont, burned down. In 1942, a town meeting raised the issue of building a replacement school with taxpayer funds, and invited discussion and approval. Jim Edgerton, forever immortalized in Rockwell’s painting, was a lone dissenter. Not because he didn’t support rebuilding the school, but because he was a farmer who had had been hit hard by the collapse of milk prices during the Great Depression, and more recently had lost an entire herd of dairy cows to disease. He argued that this proposal placed an undue burden on the taxpayers. In the words of his son Buddy, Edgerton “held everyone’s full attention as he passionately outlined his minority position. Finishing with thanks and a nod of his head, he sat down; and then the townspeople voted to build the new school.”
To Rockwell, nothing could have better illustrated freedom of speech: the hard-fought, completely legitimate minority position boldly spoken, even with no hope of persuading the room, yet still, respectfully considered. Like with Freedom of Worship, Rockwell tried the picture from a few different angles – Edgerton smaller, the room bigger, but ended up landing on this one, where the man whose opinion would be dismissed still captures the space, everyone looking up. He’s handsome, Jimmy Steward-esque and imminently respectable in his blue checked collar – and it should be said, this wasn’t a rendering of the real Jim Edgerton, but Rockwell’s neighbor, Carl Hess, who cut a much more striking square jaw. This figure is idealized in much the same ways that all Rockwell characters are, but in doing so, Rockwell legitimizes the larger idea being represented. Respect the lone dissenter, even if his argument is ultimately unpersuasive. Grant him the same consideration. Celebrate his bravery by painting him as though the Lincoln Memorial has stood up, put on my grandpa’s suede leather jacket, and pleaded his case in a small-town meeting about the appropriation of public school funds. In a civilized, liberal society, everyone is entitled to that motherfucking floor. I mean, truly, what is the point of freedom of speech otherwise?
And this brings us to the painting’s afterlife, its legacy. On a small scale, it’s worth noting that in a happy twist of fate, Jim Edgerton managed to secure employment on the construction crew of the very school he was argued against constructing, and was eventually promoted to head carpenter, which helped to stabilize his family’s finances and shoulder the burden of the school’s rebuilding.
But on a larger, more recent scale, the meme. According to Know Your Meme, the painting started to be altered in 2008, but only really went viral in its current, unaltered state in 2020, when it began to be used to express opinions that were considered controversial or going against the mainstream. This is where we see stunning and brave support for hard taco shells. A lot of it is just meant to be funny – the last gasp of the irreverent internet of the twenty-teens – God, how I miss it – advocating for the aforementioned pineapple on pizza or Tokyo Drift as the best of the Fast and the Furious franchise. But 2020 was obviously a turning point when it came to the role Twitter played as a digital box upon which to grandstand and gather your mob, where one person can have the motherfucking floor in the digital town square and expect his or her opinion to be valid, or validated, or even worthy of anyone’s attention. This is, after all, what freedom of speech is all about - I mean that sincerely. But there’s a deep irony in the couching that opinion in the costume of a white, middle aged man who will always be given deference, except when he’s told to sit down and let others speak for once. Except except that he’s got this blue collar, he’s working class, a historically marginalized voice for whom the white collars in the room have been taught to listen to and fight for. Except when what they’re saying aren’t the correct opinions according to the majority of the Twitter-using community. The underdog, the hero, and the pariah, painted by an artist now dismissed as both rendering and pandering to the most unsympathetic of American life – idealized white conservatives – and holding them up as a beacon, as time to be nostalgic for. It’s quite a feat for a single meme, you have to admit. My new personal favorite is the one that takes this whole hopeless, problematic tangle and neatly encapsulates it in a single, recursive tweet from 2023: the template, Rockwell’s Freedom of Speech, with the caption “Norman Rockwell paintings suck.”
But we know they don’t. The plain truth of it is that the meme would be powerless if they actually did. And we know that Rockwell was never so unsubtle and so unsophisticated to think the painting, and its politics, were only ever surface deep, only meant to pat white people on the head and promise them the simple pleasures of a simple America. And not just because he himself became quite unsubtle in his politics later on in his career, particularly as he delved into civil rights in the 1960s, and his infamous painting “The Problem We All Live With” from 1964, depicting Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old black girl burdened with the task of desegregating her all-white school, her white dress and ribbons providing a startling contrast against her rich brown skin, surrounded by four deputy U.S. marshals who escort her against a wall emblazoned with the n-word and the spatter from a tomato – I daresay, the only spatter in art that Americans in the ‘60s could easily understand. The very title Rockwell chose solidifies how brilliantly he knew his audience, how deeply his work doesn’t suck. Racial inequality is the problem we all live with, not just the people directly marginalized, but all of us. All the subscribers to the Saturday Evening Post, all the people who plunge into watering holes and eat at lunch counters and surround an idyllic Thanksgiving table. And thanks to Rockwell, all of them can be accessed, in the intimacy of their homes, and straight into their underbellies softened by the nostalgia of over 300 covers and countless more illustrations of the American experience. The pain from this wound is fresh, rendered in all its photorealistic clarity. It can’t succumb to nostalgic if it’s happening now.
And this is all thanks to Norman Rockwell’s, and our, freedom of speech. The freedom to tell these stories about ourselves and watch them age, evolve, grow irrelevant, grow problematic, stay relevant, stay problematic. It turns out that our freedom of speech is a pretty complicated thing, actually. But how lucky we are to be able to stand up and say that.
CREDITS:
The Lonely Palette is written and produced by me, Tamar Avishai, with production help from Debbie Blicher.
To see all the images, and memes, and tweets from this episode, and to find out everything else about the show, how to support it, sign up for our newsletter, become a patron, and more, go to thelonelypalette.com. You can also follow the show on Instagram @thelonelypalette, and reach out any time with ideas for upcoming shows. And if you’re a business looking to sponsor a show enjoyed by an active and engaged audience like yourself, email us a sponsorships @thelonelypalette.com. We’d love to hear from you.
The Lonely Palette is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a fiercely independent collective of mind-expanding, thoughtful podcasts, which I’ve actually just taken the helm of as its new president! I’m super excited. One you might want to especially catch up, if you ever were or still are a subscriber to the Saturday Evening Post, is Print is Dead, Long Live Print, a brilliant interview podcast that delves deep into the guts of the magazine world, the stories of whose demise has been greatly exaggerated, at least to hear these luminaries tell it. A recent episode I particularly loved was with New York Times Magazine editor Jake Silverstein – if you want to experience the richness of the American experience, see it through his eyes. Listen at Hub Spoke Audio.org, magazeum.co, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time.