On Thanksgiving weekend, 75 years after Norman Rockwell took brush to canvas to create his famous Four Freedoms paintings, they sprang to life again – in song.
With dissonance and syncopated rhythms embodying the diverging voices of democracy, a chorus at the Norman Rockwell Museum here sang a verse from “Freedom of Speech”: “You know that We the People agree to disagree/ and that’s Okay, we like it that way!/ A little bit of chaos creates the space for a healthy democracy…”
Inspired by a 1941 speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the paintings – which also include “Freedom of Worship,” “Freedom from Want,” and “Freedom from Fear” – were originally published in The Saturday Evening Post and then used to promote the purchase of war bonds during World War II.
