Happy Thanksgiving!
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post]
I wish all of you a wonderful Thanksgiving. Here’s some corny American pictorial propaganda in honor of the occasion, one of my favorite holidays:
This painting was not originally created for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was part of Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” series of 1941. Inspired by a post-Pearl Harbor speech of FDR’s about the war effort and why we were fighting, and designed to help sell war bonds, this particular one illustrated “Freedom from Want.”
So on this Thanksgiving Day I’ll reiterate the sentiment: may we all have freedom—of religion, of speech, from want, from fear.
For many years we had big Thanksgiving dinners but we are down to two this year. The kids are all having their festivities in various places.
Have a pleasant and peaceful holiday, everyone.
Interesting painting. It’s very photographic. Note the man in the lower corner is looking at the camera.
It is amazing to me that much of the WWII funding was accomplished through voluntary war bonds. Imagine how that would go today.
Speaking of propaganda, a couple years ago I went through Frank Capra’s 7(?) WWII propaganda films called “Why We Fight.” At least one is on Netflix, the chapter “The Battle of Russia” which was nominated for an Academy Award.
We had our first substantial rain storm of the season on the central CA coast last night. We are grateful.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is one of the many unique features of America. It requires only the giving of thanks to a Higher Power for the goodness of our lives. Even grief is not an inherently “bad” thing, though it is a suffering, because without love there could be no grief.
I always admired Rockwell’s paintings, even as a teenager decades ago, though the artistes sneered at him for being “commercial” which of course they were not. They wanted money for their dreck though, always.
Since his death, his original creations have skyrocketed in price.
See this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/05/arts/design/rockwell-painting-sells-for-46-million.html
I did a mock-up of this painting, my husband and I serving the turkey, surrounded by the nine members of our family. It was lots of fun posing them all and manipulating the photos to fit the template.
We will be together this year on Saturday for our Thanksgiving feast while in-laws enjoy our kids and grandkids today. So, the two of us are alone, thankful that we have had each other for the past 50 years, and our three dogs to entertain us today.
May each of you enjoy the company of loved ones at this and the holidays to come.
I just take Rockwell’s paintings as they are presented; and that is sufficient. If it were propaganda, it was of a gentle nature.
Tommyjay, during WWII, Savings Stamps were sold in school for ten cents each as I recall. When you accumulated a book full of stamps, around $18-20 worth, you traded it in for a “War bond” worth $25 at maturity. (My wife cashed several war bonds in the ’60s to finance a weekend trip. No credit cards then.) Kids also collected newspaper, scrap iron, and kitchen grease and turned those in to help the war effort. We didn’t understand all that the war was about, but we knew our country had been attacked, and that Fathers, older brothers or cousins, and neighbors were fighting–and some dying–for us. So, we needed to do what we could. I guess we were much less sophisticated than the current generation.
Like so much else, Thanksgiving seems to have lost much of its meaning. (Earlier in the week, both of my grand daughters hosted what they called “Friends Giving” dinners for friends or team mates. Were they intentionally avoiding the traditional term? I don’t know.) Still, many families use it as a reason to gather together with children often traveling home from wherever they have meandered. So, many of us can be thankful for that.
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Oldflyer,
“Propaganda” is not appropriately applied to Rockwell any more than it is to Hieronymus Bosch, Picasso or Chagall.
Find a better word. “If” does not mitigate!
Happy Thanksgiving, Neo
And God Bless you for your intellectual grace and all the work (and it is work) you do to keep your fascinating “salon” going. The “Four Freedoms” were a subtle politico-intellectual propaganda tour d’force. The fatal word is “from.” There is no freedom from fear, nor freedom from want. For a very long time, we as a nation have been blessed to have free men and women willing to risk their freedom and their lives to protect us from fear, or alleviate our fears. We have been blessed, too, with men and women free to use their wit and genius and entrepreneurial spirit to free us from want. Those are blessings of freedom for which I am ever grateful. But I am ever uneasy when I consider how ready we seem to cede our freedom bit by bit in exchange for an imagined deliverance from danger or the slightest lack of those things to which we now feel entitled. I am always thankful for this site where we can reasonably discuss the many complexities of our freedoms and our governance and the whole “sweet, sour; adazzle, dim” mystery of the world around us.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Hope you have good food, drinks and some company someplace warm and safe.
And here’s to family members who wish death on Trump and his family (my sibling), and who believe documentaries stating that Trump is a racist and hates Jews (my dad) on such a day. They keep it amusing and interesting. So much for that stereotypical racist uncle everyone seems to have. I almost believe such a person is a myth.
I was a little boy during World War II and there is a photo of me at about age 5 wearing a little suit and on the suit are a group of medals that were sent to me by one of my cousin’s squadron mates in B 17s. He was shot down before I got the medals.
We have lots to be thankful for.
Ralph Kinney Bennett:
Thank you.
Yes, it seems that as a society we’ve gone from the context of FDR’s Four Feedoms in which it was understood that we’d be needing to fight to defend them, and today when so many think they should never even have to be confronted with anything upsetting, and are willing to compromise others’ freedom of speech to make sure of it.
Happy Thanksgiving! (My big America is Great comment is on the prior post)
Americans have so much to be grateful for — and all others often have many things to be grateful for, too, PLUS being grateful that America, the most powerful country in the world since WW II (now over 70 years), has been so benign and so successful spread the ideas and desires for Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, and Property.
I pray that more Americans give thanks for American protection of Private Property, the most difficult key requirement for creation of a Great World.
Capra did orientation films for occupation troops in Germany and Japan. They’re interesting and the approach is markedly different. Available on youtube.
Also available are the annual celebrations of Carentan and Ste. Mere Eglise. Those folks are grateful and the celebrations are still going on. Very involved productions.
Happy Thanksgiving. It has been a wonderful day with nearly all my immediate family present. It was very cold outside, low to mid teens, but the food and company were spectacular. I am truly blessed. All the best to you.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. May we all live long and prosper!
And in particular, thanks to Neo for this stimulating and convivial on-line gathering place. And to her commentariat for their contributions toward making it so. :>)))
Whether art is propaganda depends on whether it was intended to propagate an idea, not its quality.
Mary,
I am not sure I understand your comment and would appreciate expansion.
All art sends a message.
Wait…all government bonds are “voluntary”, to the person buying the debt. Is there anything that distinguishes war bonds from other forms of deficit spending.
I’m pretty sure people would prefer that today to the alternatives: raising taxes or cutting spending. I mean we’re deficit spending right now to the tune of 1 trillion bucks a year for no reason whatsoever…no war, no recession, no liquidity trap.
So I assume we must have gone deficit spending during the Iraq and Afghan wars. Maybe there were no “war bonds” per se, but what’s the difference? Either way, we borrow money to cover our costs.
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I second Ralph Kinney Bennett’s comment – I am thankful for Neo and this blog, including the community of commenters.
Re: Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms and Rockwell’s famous paintings, see this:
https://rockwellfourfreedoms.org/
My wife and I saw this traveling exhibit at The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, MI last month. It’s outstanding.
Yes, freedom FROM want and fear are not the same as freedom OF worship and speech. However, at the time (early 1940s) the context was different. Roosevelt was explaining to the public why the United States needed to be involved in World War II. He was explaining what we needed to fight for. It took a lot of explaining. Rockwell’s paintings (which were Rockwell’s own initiative) were part of the effort to sell Roosevelt’s ideas.
Rockwell’s freedom of speech painting was the only one of the four paintings to be based on an actual incident – a Vermont town meeting that Rockwell witnessed. One of Rockwell’s neighbors had a viewpiont that no one else in the room supported. Yet he was allowed to speak his mind, and everyone else listened respectfully. Alas, Vermont (my state) is at risk of becoming a very different place today, if the Charles Murray incident at Middlebury College in March 2017 becomes the norm.
Again I am thankful for Neo and her “salon” here, practicing respectful free speech in a world that is becoming increasingly intolerant, and providing a platform for viewpoints that are under increasing attack but are needed more than ever.
A comment about timing…
Roosevelt introduced his “Four Freedoms” at the end of his annual speech to Congress (what we now call the State of the Union Address) on January 6, 1941. That was 11 months before Pearl Harbor. He was trying to prepare the American public for war long before Pearl Harbor. Rockwell painted his famous paintings in 1942, after Pearl Harbor. The paintings were published in the Saturday Evening Post in early 1943, and subsequently used to sell war bonds.
So I assume we must have gone deficit spending during the Iraq and Afghan wars. Maybe there were no “war bonds” per se, but what’s the difference?
The difference is economics, a discipline that might seem obscure to some. During the Second World War, there was a terrible risk of inflation. Many items that would be normally available for sale were rationed. Lots of people who had been mired in the Depression (We can talk about Roosevelt’s role another time), and now had jobs and a pretty good income but there was not much to buy.
I can remember my parents using “red points,” ration coupons for meat. The sale of war bonds soaked up a lot of money that might have gone to feed inflation. It was a patriotic thing to do but it was also making it obvious to people that we were borrowing money to fight the war.
Lyndon Johnson made the decision in 1963, after he became president, to fight the war in Vietnam and, at the same time, to pass the legislation that keeps us in deficit spending, The Great Society. At the time, it was referred to as avoiding the decision between “guns and butter” by doing both. Johnson was the worst president in our history and we live with the consequences of his mistakes and will for decades.
I expect it will end in some sort of bankruptcy of the country. Obama doubled the national debt by doing some similar things.
In reply to Manju’s “So I assume we must have gone deficit spending during the Iraq and Afghan wars. Maybe there were no “war bonds” per se, but what’s the difference? Either way, we borrow money to cover our costs”, I have a bit to say.
There is an enormous, profound difference between WWII funding and the present.
War bonds then were bought by American individuals to a substantial extent. The Federal government’s financial obligations were modest then: Social Security was in its infancy, and the other massive entitlements that now compose a huge majority of the Federal budget did not then exist (Medicare, Medicaid, HUD and its housing programs, tax credits to the poor, various anti-poverty programs, etc.)
Obama raised the national debt more than all prior presidents combined, from $8 trillion to $16 trillion. Most of that was not, repeat, not spent on our military. Obama seriously downsized all military services. We are unable now to engage in two regional conflicts simultaneously as a result. The Navy has fewer ships than in the 1930s; a large part of Air Force planes are in maintenance, not airworthy.
Since LBJ the US has spent >$20 trillion on the “war against poverty”, yet the % that is officially in poverty is unchanged.
The entitlement programs will march on without legislative modification; it will take new laws! What remains is the so-called “discretionary” sector of the federal budget, and that includes all defense spending. As all interest rates rise courtesy of the Federal Reserve Bank, Federal interest payments will make increases in other discretionary categories such as Defense impossible.
The US cannot default on debt per the Constitution, so we have a nation-eating problem on our hands.
BTW, the US does not really ‘borrow’ money in the usual sense. The Federal Reserve prints money which it lends to the US Treasury. Keystrokes! Instant money!
But LBJ reduced the national debt. See here: Debt as a % of the GDP .
They way yo are talking, Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ, and Clinton should be your heros. But I suspect they are not. Why?
@Manju:But LBJ reduced the national debt. Debt as a % of the GDP
You contradict yourself from one sentence to the next. Debt being a lower % of GDP is not the same as reducing debt. It means only that the debt increases less than GDP increased.
Saying “LBJ reduced the debt because debt as a % of GDP got lower” is like saying that you “reduced your credit card debt” every time you get a salary increase. No, you decreased your debt-to-income ratio, not your debt. To reduce your debt you would have to pay more on your debts in a year than your new borrowing. LBJ, in other words would have had to be running surpluses. That never happened from 1960 – 1968. Only in 1969 was there a surplus.