Roosevelt's corrected typescript of the speech suggests his strategies, and a close examination of the document affords teachers the opportunity to study the ways rhetoric works-- the repetition of phrases, the careful attention to the length of the sentences and the phrases, the struggle to embody complex ideas in accessible language.

Rockwell's paintings were similar in their intent: they were meant for a broad audience, meant to be seen and understood when looked at from a distance as they stood out from the other publications at a newsstand-- they were, after all, cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post.

They also had a different function. Roosevelt prepared the nation for war, and sought to evoke unanimity of purpose and resolve; Rockwell sought to remind Americans of the reasons for the sacrifices they were making. As Rockwell put it, he wanted to make a picture that was "bigger than a war poster, make some statement about why the country was fighting the war." He was seeking, he said, to "take the Four Freedoms out of the noble language and put them in terms everybody can understand."

From the first, Rockwell planned his pictures to serve as government posters. When the final versions appeared, they found currency in a wide variety of venues-- as magazine illustrations, as rewards for purchasers of War Bonds (government bonds citizens could buy that would help to fund the war effort), and as posters with specific intents in mind. As the sequence of images in The Paintings Evolve makes clear, Rockwell's work was a great success. Everyday citizens had posed for the pictures; not just the paintings but the people in them went on War Bonds tours and promotions, as did Rockwell himself. And Americans flocked to see these prototypical Americans, to get autographs on the posters, and while they were there, they bought War Bonds. The paintings appeared in huge spaces populated by throngs of people-- railway stations, subway stations, public spaces-- in reproductions that loomed above the citizenry, converted to government propaganda by the addition of similarly huge logos and slogans.

While most Americans loved the pieces, and wrote their thanks to Rockwell, a few found them inadequate to their high purpose. A number of writers commented with puzzlement about the racial and ethnic makeup of Rockwell's subjects. Some letters were almost humorously obsessional in their critiques, as in one from a theatre director in the summer-stock vacation spot of Cape May, New Jersey:

Roderick Stephens, an African-American activist and head of the Bronx (New York) Inter-Racial Conference, sought to persuade Rockwell to make a similar set of images that might explain the underlying tensions resulting in the wartime race riots that were erupting. Rockwell would in fact turn to that subject much later, in the 1960s, when he made memorable images of the Civil Rights movement, including most notably The Problem We All Live With of 1964, which embodied the African-American freedom fighters in the form of a small, upright, white-dressed girl with her notebook and ruler, surrounded by the headless bodies of US Marshals escorting her past the racists whose rage Rockwell embodied in a single rotten tomato exploded bloodily against the wall behind the girl.

Rockwell's images did, finally, provide a remarkable balance between the monochromatic hectoring of wartime posters and propaganda, and the high-minded ideals that most Americans hoped lay behind the wartime effort.

Bibliography