FDR may have prescribed only fearing fear itself as a solution for fear, but the solution for all fears including fear itself is sleep (at least according to Norman Rockwell).

Freedom from Fear is the last painting in Rockwell’s Four Freedoms series which illustrated the four freedoms expressed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in his State of the Union Address in 1941, as the threat to democracy was spreading throughout Europe and the possible involvement of the United States entering the war.  As a precursor to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the legacy of the four freedoms is central to American political philosophy. The first tenet of Christianity is the belief that Jesus’ sacrificial death resulted in the potential for eternal salvation, freeing humanity from sin. Likewise, FDR’s freedom from fear has been specified in the consequent UN resolution to be the freedom from aggression via the reduction of armaments, aka the collective transgressions of the world.

The series was published in the Saturday Evening Post along with an accompanying essay of the same title. The essayist for Freedom from Fear was Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benet, who coincidentally died on the day of its publication. Benet defines freedom from fear as freedom from the worst fears–starving to death, being a slave, being “stamped into the dust” for being a certain kind of man, unprovoked attack, and ghastly death. He writes, “All over the world, they can be free from fear. And we know they are not yet free.” Benet mirrors FDR’s sentiments that highlighted the worldwide relevance of the four freedoms by describing the insurance of freedom as part of the responsibility of free nations all over the world. 

Rockwell’s painting provided a similar message, though it located the four freedoms in the American experience rather than the international focus of FDR and Benet. By recontextualizing each freedom in the American narrative by creating scenes that they could visualize in their everyday lives, Rockwell intended to persuade citizens to support the war effort. The series was so culturally specific that they were barely comprehensible even to America’s allies, provoking resentment particularly over the abundant Thanksgiving meal pictured in Freedom from Want.

In Freedom from Fear, the child embodies the American naivete towards the war through an image located in the domestic sphere. Not caring much for the image, Rockwell said, “Freedom from Fear was based on a rather smug idea, painted during the bombing of London, it was supposed to say: ‘Thank God we can put out children to bed with a feeling of security, knowing they will not be killed in the night’.” The partially-obscured headline of the newspaper referencing the London bombing is the only reference that Rockwell made to international affairs in the entire series. The title of the newspaper, the Bennington Banner, reads “Bombings Ki...Horror Hit”, referring to the Biltz, the German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom. Sleeping peacefully, the children possess the sense of security described by Benet as opposed to the father. The father holds the newspaper and his glasses to indicate that he has just finished reading the Bennington Banner in his hand, wearing an expression of worry. The children’s sleep is a result of their state of unawareness about the events of the world, which their father has purposefully kept from them.

Like the rest of his series, the models he based his figures off consisted of his neighbors in Arlington, Vermont: Jim Martin, Dorothy Lawrence, and the children of his carpenter, Walter Squires. The Bennington Banner also produced a prop newspaper for him to use at his request.