The Four Freedoms were published in four consecutive issues of the Post, starting on February 20. Each painting appeared on page 13, in a “full color bleed” (running off the edge of the page, without borders), in the words of the art editor. The opposite page (page 12) carried a short text by a famous writer who had been asked by the Post to airily ponder the meaning of basic freedoms. The novelist Booth Tarkington wrote the first piece, an unaccountably awful short story in which the young Hitler appears as a character. The next week, the historian Will Durant supplied a genuinely eloquent meditation on religious freedom. Freedom from Want came with an essay from the young Filipino poet, Carlos Bulosan, whose inclusion represented a welcome if transparent attempt on the part of the magazine to appear more ethnically diverse than it was. The poet Stephen Vincent Benét furnished the essay for Freedom from Fear, which ran in the issue of March 13, and died of a heart attack, at age forty-four, on that very day.
* * *
As the Post had anticipated, Rockwell’s Four Freedoms were a huge sensation. Susan Sontag once noted that “sentiment is more likely to crystallize around a photograph than a verbal slogan.”19 An image allows you to linger, to look at it again and again, until it acquires a defining power. And, for many Americans, World War II made sense precisely because they had the chance to linger with reproductions of Rockwell’s four paintings. To be sure, his work did not attempt to explain the battles or the bloodshed, the dead and injured, the obliteration of towns. But the war wasn’t just about killing the enemy. It was also about saving a way of life.
The Post boasted that Rockwell’s paintings elicited some sixty thousand letters from readers. Countless others responded to them with feelings that were never recorded, or never even verbalized, sitting in their living rooms or their kitchens as they studied the pictures in the Post and felt a little jolt of recognition from seeing their own lives somehow mirrored in them. The paintings tapped into a world that seemed recognizable and real. Most everyone knew what it was like to attend a town meeting or say a prayer, to observe Thanksgiving or look in on sleeping children.
Most of the mail pouring in was positive, and gifts arrived from people Rockwell had never met. Among them was the president of the Pioneer Suspender Company in Philadelphia. He sent Rockwell three pairs of galluses and noted that he especially admired Freedom from Fear, in which the father standing by the bedside of his children is shown in shirt sleeves and a clearly recognizable pair of Pioneer suspenders. “Of course he has freedom from fear,” said the letter accompanying the gift. “His trousers are held up by a pair of our suspenders.”20
At least one admirer tried to buy the original paintings. Hiram C. Bloomingdale, a vice president of his family’s department store in New York, wrote to Rockwell to obtain a price. The artist replied that the paintings were not available at the moment, politely adding he would let him know should the situation ever change.21
* * *
In what was surely the greatest marketing coup in its history, the Post was able to sustain the buzz generated by Rockwell’s paintings long after they were published. The March 13 issue, in which the final painting appeared, included a triumphant editor’s note: the Office of War Information, which had initially declined to consider the paintings, had just agreed to print 2.5 million poster images of them.22
Moreover, the four originals would be the stellar centerpiece of a traveling war-bond sales campaign that the Post had pulled together in conjunction with the U.S. Treasury Department. In those days, Americans were expected to pay for their wars, and President Roosevelt was counting on the sale of bonds to bring in the enormous sum of $1 billion a month.
In some ways, it is surprising that President Roosevelt and his loyal friend Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the secretary of the treasury, agreed to cooperate on a project that would mingle the financial well-being of the country with that of the Post. Morgenthau, a quiet, bespectacled man who was often accused of being cold and suspicious, made enemies easily. He had good reason to dislike the Post, whose editorial page had railed against the New Deal and criticized his tax policies as an exercise in socialism. “I wouldn’t cross the street for them,” Morgenthau said of the Post.23
But the Treasury was about to embark on a new bond campaign, and Morgenthau’s interest in the Post was nakedly transactional. With its three million-plus subscribers, the Post could be useful in getting the word out. Tellingly, Morgenthau had boasted in 1942 that sponsors of the bond program had made it possible for the Treasury to avoid spending “one penny on paid advertising in newspapers and magazines.”24
Despite the scant funds for magazine advertising, the U.S. Treasury did have a budget for promotional films, and in April 1943, a five-minute newsreel called “Four Freedoms” began playing in theaters across the country. The OWI had arranged to send a film crew to Rockwell’s studio in Vermont. Most of the footage shows him at his easel, fake painting. In one shot, the eleven models for Freedom from Want gather around a dining room table, as if reenacting the scene in the painting, even though no such scene had ever occurred and some of the models had never met one another until the Paramount News crew showed up.
* * *
On April 1, 1943, Mary Rockwell left home by herself and flew across the country to attend her sister’s wedding in Southern California. She would be gone for three weeks, staying with her parents, who had since moved from her girlhood home in Alhambra to smaller house in nearby Pasadena. It had been thirteen years since her own April wedding, in the garden in Alhambra. Looking back, she saw how bold she had been then, marrying an older artist she had just met, a man who, it was now clear, seemed to want nothing but to work.
She returned home to Vermont in time to accompany Rockwell to Washington for the “World Premier of the Four Freedoms War Bond Show,” as it was called with a grandiosity worthy of P. T. Barnum. A reception was held on a Monday evening, April 26, at the Hecht Co., the city’s premier department store, and visitors who rode the elevator to the fourth floor found, in place of the usual home furnishings—the upholstered club chairs, seven-piece dinette sets, and innerspring mattresses—a so-called Victory Center outfitted with more original artwork than anyone had ever seen gathered in one spot.25 Rockwell’s four paintings were hung behind a gilded rope, amid an ocean of a thousand-odd works, cartoons, illustrations, and even typed story manuscripts lent by a generation of contributors to the Post.
All of official Washington, it seemed, turned out for the opening on that Monday night. The invitations, which were issued by the Treasury, listed about two dozen “patronesses” including Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. Henry Wallace, Mrs. Hugo Black, and Mrs. Harold Ickes—Washington’s most celebrated spouses, except for poor Frances Perkins, the pioneering secretary of labor, who got stuck on the wives-only list in an era when men had no idea where to put accomplished women.26 William O. Douglas, who had been on the Supreme Court for four years, was the main speaker and his comments were broadcast by radio. They were not exactly art related, as the page-one headline in the next morning’s Washington Post indicated: DOUGLAS CALLS JAPS DEGENERATE AS 4 FREEDOMS EXHIBIT OPENS.27
Rockwell did not mention the ceremony in his autobiography, perhaps because it did not elicit warm memories. A department store reception with the tone of an anti-Japanese rally is hardly an ideal setting for the contemplation of works of art. Besides, Morgenthau made a point of being out of town that day, in Grand Rapids, Iowa, speaking to a group called We, the People. Members of his staff quietly took note of his absence, and commented among themselves that his antipathy toward the Post remained unabated. Stepping in for his boss, Daniel Bell, undersecretary of the Treasury, presented a citation to Rockwell.
The next morning the exhibit opened to the public and was mobbed from the start. Rockwell was chaperoned back to Hecht’s to help with publicity. He gave a brief talk at eleven and again at three.28 In the hours between, he autographed reproductions of Freedom of Speech for shoppers who waited in line for their turn. Those
who purchased a bond—prices started at $18.75, for a bond that would be worth $25 when it matured in a decade—received a free set of reproductions. In a news photograph taken that day, Rockwell looks a bit harried as he sits behind a table, wedged into a corner with tall house plants whose leaves are practically poking him in the head.
He had been invited by the government to travel with the war bond show, in a caravan that would go to Philadelphia and Boston and cities fanning out across the country in the next ten months. He declined, an easy decision. On May 4, after a little more than a week in Washington, he returned to Vermont. The show at Hecht’s would close four days later on May 8, with local officials boasting that the sale of bonds had reached the $1 million mark, far surpassing the city’s quota for that period.
* * *
It was spring and he was glad to be back in his studio, his red-painted barn, with cool, pellucid mountain air streaming in through the open door. He had hired a carpenter to install a tall, two-story window that admitted the sort of light he favored (northern, shadowless). As always, he refused to paint by electric light, which played tricks with the colors on a canvas, made them harsh, lit up a picture like a Christmas tree.
When he wasn’t painting, it seemed, he was cleaning. He found it soothing to sweep the wide-plank floor of his studio and wash his brushes in a metal sink he had installed expressly for this purpose. He swept four or five times a day and tidied up at the sink just as frequently.
He was well aware that he was compulsive about cleanliness. He went through dozens of paint rags every day, using them for wiping his brushes and his palettes. He insisted on diaper cloth, claiming it was “more absorbent” than regular cotton. He ordered it by the yard and it arrived by mail, on a two-foot-wide bolt. His correspondence from this period refers to a product called Birdseye Diaper Cloth, which he purchased from the textile company where his father had worked. His children later recalled the sight of him sitting at the kitchen table on more nights than anyone would believe, tearing the cloth into six-inch-square swatches and then carefully picking off the linty fluff around the edges.29
Samuel Beckett once said, “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.”30 The mess, he implies, is a given. The mess is the content of art, the stuff of life. But what form does art assume if an artist is not at peace with the mess of art, keeps sweeping it away, refuses to let it show? Rockwell’s life is a reminder that a squeaky clean surface can contain its own unknowable depths.
In the week after returning from Washington, Rockwell finished work on a past-due painting called Patriots on Parade, for which his gardener had posed. A native of Vermont, Thaddeus Wheaton was then fifty-six and an obliging model, with an ability to hold a facial expression for several hours. When he put on a waistcoat and a stovepipe hat, you could not ask for a better Abraham Lincoln, of whom Rockwell would paint many likenesses.31
He had the canvas crated and shipped off on a Friday evening, May 14, 1943. He never forgot the date, because in the morning, when he went outside and gazed out over his property, his studio was no longer there.
* * *
On that Friday evening, Rockwell and Mead Schaeffer had gone into town to hear a lecture at the high school. They were well-acquainted with the guest speaker, Lee Wulff, an artist who trained in Paris and had a second career as an authority on salmon fishing. He wrote handbooks and designed hair-wing dry flies and lived on the banks of the Batten Kill, across the state line in Shushan, New York. After the lecture, the three men returned to Rockwell’s studio and talked until the party broke up at half past eleven.
In the middle of the night, Rockwell was abruptly awakened by ten-year-old Tommy, who was banging on his bedroom door, hollering. The boy had seen leaping flames out his window. Rockwell picked up the phone to call for help, but the line was dead; apparently, the wires had burned. As Mr. Wheaton came hurrying out of his bedroom, Rockwell asked him to drive to the nearest neighbor, a half mile away, and use their phone to call the fire department.32 By the time Fire Chief Safford responded to the call, the studio was a ball of flames, lighting up the pitch-black countryside around it. By dawn, the chimney was all that was left of it.
Several years would pass before Rockwell publicly acknowledged the cause of the fire. Initially, newspapers stated: cause unknown. In an interview with The Boston Globe, Rockwell declined to speculate and Mr. Wheaton, who was with him at the interview, said, “It’s a mystery.”33 Neighbors wondered if the fire had been caused by squirrels chewing on electrical wires.
In 1945 The New Yorker reported that Rockwell believed the fire “started from a pipe he had left near some curtains when he went to bed.”34 In his autobiography, he adjusted the story, suggesting that lit ashes had fallen out of his pipe and onto the cushion of a built-in window seat when he bent over to turn off the lights that night. “It was my fault,” he wrote, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. The ashes fell. He did not see them.
He lost about thirty original paintings and hundreds of preparatory sketches. He was no less upset by the incineration of some two hundred costumes he had stored in the upstairs loft of his studio, a handpicked collection of vintage costumes and (near) contemporary hats and clothing he had bought off the backs of strangers. He lost brushes in all sizes, countless tubes of pigment, his palette table, his easel, his Balopticon projector, all of which would have to be replaced. And then there was his reference library—books, hundreds of art books with good-quality full-page reproductions, books he had lugged home from Paris and elsewhere. “All my brains,” he lamented in a letter to Clyde Forsythe, describing his art books.35
On May 17, a Monday, just a few days after the fire, Rockwell and Mary said goodbye to their children and left home for a week. They were headed to Washington, where he was eager to redo a series of sketches destroyed in the fire. He had done them on his last trip to the capital, in the White House waiting room, and still needed them for a forthcoming article called, “So You Want to See the President!”36
My Studio Burns, 1943, relayed news of a catastrophe as so many charming vignettes.
As the train rattled south, Rockwell sat and sketched with his customary mulish silence. He had to turn the fire into an amusing story, if not for himself, then at least for the readers of the Post. He did a wonderful drawing, My Studio Burns, that features a wide cast: a horrified Mr. Wheaton glancing out the window, volunteer firefighters rescuing bicycles from the barn, neighborly onlookers, the artist’s three sons, who appear in their pajamas, alternately gathered in front of the window or displaying faces spotted with measles.
* * *
On their way to Washington, Rockwell and Mary stopped in New York for a few days, to replace supplies destroyed by the fire. Receipts indicate that he went to Saks and bought a hat and five pairs of socks. He also visited Brentano’s book store, on Fifth Avenue, where he purchased fourteen art books. It had always been his habit to thumb through art books during the day, leaving two or three propped open on the floor, near his easel. It was one reliably positive thing he could do when he felt depleted and devoid of ideas. Among the books he bought that day were monographs on Pieter Bruegel, Manet, and Matisse. He had lost so much, his entire studio. But he could not be rendered ineffective or inactive if at least he had a hat and socks and art books.
At that point, the Four Freedoms War Bond Show had just opened in Philadelphia, at Strawbridge & Clothier, drawing huge crowds. As the show continued to travel that summer and fall, Rockwell’s reputation changed in substance. Once known as the Boy Illustrator, he now became enshrined as America’s leading Painter-Patriot. He had succeeded in his greatest desire, in making illustration matter. In the eyes of millions of Americans, his scenes set in the New England village where he lived amounted to an inspired defense of national values, a pictorial rebuke to fascists the world over. When his fellow Americans thought of Rockwell they thought of the man they had seen in the newsreel: a friendly and relaxed Vermonter. Th
ey thought of someone he did not know.
SIXTEEN
“SLOWLY FELL THE PICKET FENCE”
(JUNE 1943 TO SUMMER 1947)
Many people erroneously believe that Rosie the Riveter was created by Rockwell. It is true he turned her into a household name, but there were other Rosies before his. She made her first public appearance in a song composed in New York in the autumn of 1942 by John Jacob Loeb, with lyrics by Redd Evans.1 The Four Vagabonds, an African-American vocal harmony group that had just emerged as a radio sensation, released a recording of the song on Bluebird Records in February 1943. The song begins:
All day long, whether rain or shine
She’s part of the assembly line
She’s making history, working for victory
Rosie, brrrrrrrrr, the riveter
Rosie was a symbol, of course, of the millions of women who took on factory jobs during the war years, while the men were away. Many of the slots were for riveters in aircraft factories and Rosie gained currency along with such now-forgotten characters as Winnie the Welder and Glenda the Glue Spreader. Rockwell began his cover in response to a government campaign. The War Advertising Council, a subdivision of the Office of War Information, was charged with persuading newspapers and magazines to run stories that would help recruit women for defense work. Rockwell’s editors requested that he produce a special cover about Rosie for the Memorial Day issue, which appeared on May 29, 1943.
The result was wild: a comically muscular redhead posed against a backdrop of red and white stripes, sitting on a crate eating her lunch, her riveting gun laid across her lap, her right penny loafer resting on a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf as if to crush it. It was an incredibly inventive interpretation of a potentially clichéd theme. For help, Rockwell turned to the Hebrew prophet Isaiah as Michelangelo had depicted him on the Sistine Chapel ceiling circa 1509. Isaiah didn’t have a lunch box or buttons from the Red Cross, but he sits in the same twisting pose as Rosie, with the same dramatic torque.
American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell Page 24
