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![Painting: Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" (1943), oil on canvas — a lean young workman in a suede jacket and blue plaid shirt stands to speak at a town meeting, chin raised, while seated older men in suits and ties look up at him; a folded blue booklet juts from his pocket. Signed top right "NORMAN ROCKWELL"; the blue pamphlet held at bottom centre reads "ANNUAL REPORT of the TOWN of [MONT]", i.e. a Vermont town report.
The picture starts with FDR’s January 1941 State of the Union, which named four freedoms worth fighting for. Rockwell wanted to illustrate them but could not find a handle on the abstraction until he attended a town meeting in Arlington, Vermont, where a neighbour — Jim Edgerton — stood and argued against a new school building that everyone else wanted. The others heard him out. That was the picture.
He used Arlington neighbours as models. The standing man is Carl Hess, a local garage owner. Rockwell put himself at the far left edge. He repainted the canvas four times, fighting the composition; the final solution was to drop the viewer’s eye below the speaker, so we look up at him along with the crowd, and to leave the background empty and dark so nothing competes.
The Office of War Information turned Rockwell down when he offered the series. The Saturday Evening Post ran them instead, one a week from 20 February 1943, each paired with an essay. The Treasury then reversed the government’s position and built the Second War Loan Drive around the paintings: a sixteen-city touring show that drew over a million visitors and sold on the order of $130 million in bonds. Millions of poster reprints followed.
Everyone in that room is white and the scene is a New England idyll, at a moment when Black Americans were running the Double V campaign against fascism abroad and segregation at home. Later artists — Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur’s 2018 restaging among them — have reshot the series precisely to widen who gets to stand up.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:huocg7zsbthk54vjai56wd27/bafkreiclxzc7bbno6rokdv56ni56pxwwfvbzl4lueiitwceqps65p2jmb4)