A community-based exploration of American values from the past and today.
Events, discussions, and exhibits using the art of Norman Rockwell, Maggie Meiners, and other artists to bridge social and political divides in small towns.
Who Said It?
Click here to find out the people behind the quotes in our insert in the Ottawa (IL) Times, News Tribune, and Bureau Country Republican newspapers.
You are so…
Got a piece of paper and something to write with? Click here for a fun little exercise that only takes a few minutes!
And Make America Again!!!
And Make America Again!!!
About “Revisiting Rockwell”
Maggie Meiners is an artist whose work revolves around self-critique. Heavily influenced by image culture and how it personally affects her, Meiners uses photography, stock imagery, film stills, cultural artifacts, and magazines to tackle subjects such as identity, gender, and social status. In short, she explores the effect of popular images on her own mind.
As a child, she was interested in Norman Rockwell’s covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a newspaper he considered to be “the greatest show window in America.” His paintings capture his observations of early to mid-20th-century life in America, and the general, and often humorous, stories told by his paintings remain as American as ever.
Her project, Revisiting Rockwell, attempts to bring Rockwell’s original works into the 21st century by weaving into each photograph the social issues and elements more suggestive of today.
What are the Four Freedoms?
On January 6, 1941, just 11 months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed Congress in his State of the Union address. Deriding threats to national unity and growing tyranny throughout the world, Roosevelt spoke of peace. In this speech, he outlined these particularly important human rights:
Freedom of Speech
Freedom of Worship
Freedom from Want
Freedom from Fear
These are values that we still stand by today, but the cultural views toward these freedoms have changed greatly over the 80 years since FDR first brought them to public consciousness.
A poster made in a federal art project.
“American Family Values” Popularized
Although President Roosevelt’s speech has been celebrated in the years since he first gave it, at the time, there was very little public response. According to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum, “The ideas enunciated in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms were the foundational principles that evolved into the Atlantic Charter declared by Winston Churchill and FDR in August 1941; The United Nations Declaration of January 1, 1942 … and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 through the work of Eleanor Roosevelt.” Still, it wasn’t until various artists, Norman Rockwell chief among them, began to elaborate on the themes expressed in The Four Freedoms through song, paintings, and poetry, that they began to take hold in the public’s imagination.
In early 1943, Rockwell wrestled with the idea of how best to depict the abstract ideas President Roosevelt described in The Four Freedoms. After drafting up some examples, Rockwell took his sketches to Washington D.C. to the Office of War Information with the idea that the sketches could be made into propaganda posters. Amazingly, the U.S. government’s propaganda department was initially disinterested in the art. Thankfully, The Saturday Evening Post had no illusions about the potential success of the art and urged Rockwell to complete the paintings.
Seven months later, Rockwell’s images ran in four consecutive issues of the magazine in February and March 1943. The paintings proved to be a hit with the public, and The Saturday Evening Post received 25,000 requests to reprint the images. In a letter to the Saturday Evening Post, President Roosevelt himself wrote, “I am grateful for the reproductions of Norman Rockwell’s paintings illustrating The Four Freedoms. He has done a superb job in bringing home the plain, everyday truths behind them.”
Princeton Library’s Role in the WWII War Bond Effort
The Princeton Public Library holds an extensive collection of Saturday Evening Post magazines with Norman Rockwell art and war bond posters from World War II, including an original Norman Rockwell Freedom from Want war bond poster mailed to the library in 1943. The library in Princeton, IL was one of twenty libraries in the State of Illinois to receive an original war bond poster of one of The Four Freedoms.
Midwest Partners’ Project Coordinator Jessica Gray interviews Curator and Reference Librarian Margaret Martinkus in the Local History Room at the Princeton Public Library, Princeton, IL.