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The Four Freedoms War Bond Show
In April 1943, one month after their appearance in the Saturday Evening Post, Rockwell's original paintings began a sixteen-city Four Freedoms War Bond Show tour to publicize the Second War Loan Drive. The U.S. Treasury Department, realizing their potential to generate revenue through the sale of war bonds and to boost public morale, partnered with the Post to sponsor the tour.
Starting in Washington, DC, and gradually working its way around to points west, the exhibition featured hundreds of other artworks, posters, pamphlets, and manuscripts. Each stop vied to offer the biggest thrills and the most notable celebrity appearances, and volunteers were at the ready to would sell war bonds to an avid public. At the Boston stop, local organizers brought in the original models from Rockwell's paintings. In Buffalo, visitors purchased enough war bonds to sponsor four new fighter-bombers, each named after one of the Freedoms. Portland, Oregon, used "over 1,000 column inches of newspaper publicity" to attract more than one hundred thousand bond purchasers to that city's stop on the tour. From June 16 to 26, 1943, the exhibition was on view at New York's Rockefeller Center, and overall, became the rallying point of a massive national outpouring of patriotic enthusiasm.
Rockwell himself ended up being part of the tour, but only for the first stop. He appeared at Hecht's department store in downtown Washington, DC, but found that he had no appetite for the nonstop routine of signing autographs, meeting celebrities, and talking to reporters. Asked to continue with the exhibition, Rockwell allowed the protective Post editor Ben Hibbs to say, "No, Norman's going to stay home and do Post covers." Despite that, the tour did extremely well, raising $132 million in war bond sales and reached 1.2 million war-weary viewers. As important was the elevation of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms in the public consciousness, and their embrace as democratic ideals worth fighting for. |