essay freedom from want

December 21, 2017

Norman Rockwell

Carlos Bulosan’s ‘Freedom from Want’

In 1943, the Post commissioned Filipino novelist and poet Carlos Bulosan to craft this essay to accompany Norman Rockwell’s ‘Freedom from Want.’

Carlos Bulosan

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In 1943, the  Post  commissioned four writers to craft an essay to accompany each of Norman Rockwell’s  Four Freedoms  paintings, which had quickly come to represent America’s moral imperative during World War II. You can  read the other three essays here .

Freedom from Want

Originally published March 6, 1943

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If you want to know what we are, look upon the farms or upon the hard pavements of the city. You usually see us working or waiting for work, and you think you know us, but our outward guise is more deceptive than our history.

Our history has many strands of fear and hope, that snarl and converge at several points in time and space. We clear the forest and the mountains of the land. We cross the river and the wind. We harness wild beast and living steel. We celebrate labor, wisdom, peace of the soul.

When our crops are burned or plowed under, we are angry and confused. Sometimes we ask if this is the real America. Sometimes we watch our long shadows and doubt the future. But we have learned to emulate our ideals from these trials. We know there were men who came and stayed to build America. We know they came because there is something in America that they needed, and which needed them.

We march on, though sometimes strange moods fill our children. Our march toward security and peace is the march of freedom — the freedom that we should like to become a living part of. It is the dignity of the individual to live in a society of free men, where the spirit of understanding and belief exist; of understanding that all men are equal; that all men, whatever their color, race, religion or estate, should be given equal opportunity to serve themselves and each other according to their needs and abilities.

But we are not really free unless we use what we produce. So long as the fruit of our labor is denied us, so long will want manifest itself in a world of slaves. It is only when we have plenty to eat — plenty of everything — that we begin to understand what freedom means. To us, freedom is not an intangible thing. When we have enough to eat, then we are healthy enough to enjoy what we eat. Then we have the time and ability to read and think and discuss things. Then we are not merely living but also becoming a creative part of life. It is only then that we become a growing part of democracy.

We do not take democracy for granted. We feel it grow in our working together — many millions of us working toward a common purpose. If it took us several decades of sacrifices to arrive at this faith, it is because it took us that long to know what part of America is ours.

Our faith has been shaken many times, and now it is put to question. Our faith is a living thing, and it can be crippled or chained. It can be killed by denying us enough food or clothing, by blasting away our personalities and keeping us in constant fear. Unless we are properly prepared, the powers of darkness will have good reason to catch us unaware and trample our lives.

The totalitarian nations hate democracy. They hate us because we ask for a definite guaranty of freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom from fear and want. Our challenge to tyranny is the depth of our faith in a democracy worth defending. Although they spread lies about us, the way of life we cherish is not dead. The American Dream is only hidden away, and it will push its way up and grow again.

We have moved down the years steadily toward the practice of democracy. We become animate in the growth of Kansas wheat or in the ring of Mississippi rain. We tremble in the strong winds of the Great Lakes. We cut timbers in Oregon just as the wild flowers blossom in Maine. We are multitudes in Pennsylvania mines, in Alaskan canneries. We are millions from Puget Sound to Florida. In violent factories, crowded tenements, teeming cities. Our numbers increase as the war revolves into years and increases hunger, disease, death, and fear.

But sometimes we wonder if we are really a part of America. We recognize the mainsprings of American democracy in our right to form unions and bargain through them collectively, our opportunity to sell our products at reasonable prices, and the privilege of our children to attend schools where they learn the truth about the world in which they live. We also recognize the forces which have been trying to falsify American history — the forces which drive many Americans to a corner of compromise with those who would distort the ideals of men that died for freedom.

Sometimes we walk across the land looking for something to hold on to. We cannot believe that the resources of this country are exhausted. Even when we see our children suffer humiliations, we cannot believe that America has no more place for us. We realize that what is wrong is not in our system of government, but in the ideals which were blasted away by a materialistic age. We know that we can truly find and identify ourselves with a living tradition if we walk proudly in familiar streets. It is a great honor to walk on the American earth.

If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building, and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists, discovering and eliminating disease, hunger, and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dream of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men.

Everywhere we are on the march, passing through darkness into a sphere of economic peace. When we have the freedom to think and discuss things without fear, when peace and security are assured, when the futures of our children are ensured — then we have resurrected and cultivated the early beginnings of democracy. And America lives and becomes a growing part of our aspirations again.

We have been marching for the last 150 years. We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. The significant thing is that we march on without turning back. What we want is peace, not violence. We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace.

We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth.

We are the sufferers who suffer for natural love of man for another man, who commemorate the humanities of every man. We are the creators of abundance.

We are the desires of anonymous men. We are the subways of suffering, the well of dignities. We are the living testament of a flowering race.

But our march to freedom is not complete unless want is annihilated. The America we hope to see is not merely a physical but also a spiritual and an intellectual world. We are the mirror of what America is. If America wants us to be living and free, then we must be living and free. If we fail, then America fails.

What do we want? We want complete security and peace. We want to share the promises and fruits of American life. We want to be free from fear and hunger.

If you want to know what we are — we are marching!

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Carlos Bulosan, “Freedom From Want”

When Norman Rockwell’s famous painting ran in The Saturday Evening Post , it was accompanied by an essay written by Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino American migrant worker. His essay about labor, farm life, and hunger offers a stunning juxtaposition against Rockwell’s imagining of a white, middle-class family’s holiday feast.

We have been marching for the last 150 years. We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. The significant thing is that we march on without turning back. What we want is peace, not violence. We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace.

We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth.

We are the sufferers who suffer for natural love of man for another man, who commemorate the humanities of every man. We are the creators of abundance.

We are the desires of anonymous men. We are the subways of suffering, the well of dignities. We are the living testament of a flowering race.

But our march to freedom is not complete unless want is annihilated. The America we hope to see is not merely a physical but also a spiritual and an intellectual world. We are the mirror of what America is. If America wants us to be living and free, then we must be living and free. If we fail, then America fails.

What do we want? We want complete security and peace. We want to share the promises and fruits of American life. We want to be free from fear and hunger.

— Carlos Bulosan, Filipino American migrant worker, 1943

• The Standard American Diet

Galleries & Exhibits

A complicated love story: Author Carlos Bulosan’s critique of America gave Filipino migrants a voice

“america is in the heart,” his definitive work, unveils hardships, heartaches and hopes of the first wave of filipino workers to arrive in the usa..

Illustration by Mara Corbett, USA TODAY NETWORK; Photo by AP

ALLOS, THE PROTAGONIST of Carlos Bulosan’s 1946 autobiographical novel, “America Is in the Heart,” wandered into a crowded pool hall one day shortly after arriving in Los Angeles.

A few minutes later, two police officers “darted into the place” and shot a young Filipino in the back. “The boy fell on his knees, face up, and expired,” Bulosan wrote.

The cops called an ambulance before dumping the youth’s lifeless body in the street, then “left hurriedly, untouched by their act, as though killing were a part of their day’s work.” 

Allos was horrified and bewildered. He couldn’t believe what he witnessed. His fellow pinoys – young Filipino men recently arrived in America – stopped to consider the bloodshed for a brief moment before turning back to their games.

“They often shoot pinoys like that,” one said. “Without provocation. Sometimes when they have been drinking and they want to have fun, they come to our district and kick or beat the first Filipino they meet.”

When Allos asked why the Filipinos didn’t complain, he replied, “Complain? Are you kidding? Why, when we complain it always turns out that we attacked them! And they become more vicious, I’m telling you!”

Bulosan was a novelist, poet, labor activist and one of the manong, the young men in the first wave of Filipino migrants arriving from 1903 to 1934. His best-known essay, “Freedom from Want,” was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1943 as a companion piece to Norman Rockwell's famous painting of the same name. It called on a nation at war to honor the values for which its young men were dying.

“America Is in the Heart” is Bulosan’s definitive work, a call to his fellow Americans, a cry for the rights of immigrants and workers by a Filipino who found his adopted country did not live up to the ideals American teachers had imparted onto a generation of colonial wards. The book documents how the earliest Filipino farmworkers were subjected to exploitation, systemic racism, brutal treatment by white law enforcement and anti-miscegenation laws that prevented them from starting families.

Bulosan’s work has been largely obscured by time and marginalized because of his association with liberals and communists in the labor movement. But his writing was important not just during his short life; it remains so as our nation grapples with the same questions and conflicts he wrote about: questions about race and workers’ rights, questions about whose histories deserve to be taught, questions about what it means to be an American.

“Bulosan is emblematic of the Filipino condition,” said Robyn Rodriguez, founder of the Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies at the University of California-Davis. “He was chronicling the early migration and settlement of Filipinos in a hostile society. One of the things that’s so striking about 'America Is in the Heart’ is this dissonance between his main characters, his protagonist and their undergoing this colonial education – America is this ideal, but all those dreams are shattered upon arriving here.

He interrogated it. That’s the mindset we need to see more … Bulosan saw America in all its beauty and all its faults.

“He saw it as his obligation to use his writing as a way of critiquing the structures of power,” Rodriguez said. “He knew there was power in the pen, and he deployed that power in all the ways he could.”

Jose Antonio Vargas, a Filipino American journalist, author and activist for undocumented immigrants, said Bulosan “speaks to the working-class experience in America.”

“That’s why documenting the manong experience is so incredibly important. We have to remind ourselves. … I have nieces and nephews for whom America is a given; and for Bulosan, it was an open question. His vision of America is very wide-eyed and open – it’s not this blind patriotism.

“He interrogated it. That’s the mindset we need to see more. … Bulosan saw America in all its beauty and all its faults.”

Is this the real America?

“If you want to know what we are, look at the men reading books, searching in the dark pages of history for the lost word, the key to the mystery of living peace. We are factory hands, field hands, mill hands, searching, building, and molding structures. We are doctors, scientists, chemists, discovering and eliminating disease, hunger, and antagonism. We are soldiers, Navy men, citizens, guarding the imperishable dream of our fathers to live in freedom. We are the living dream of dead men. We are the living spirit of free men.”

Bulosan was born around 1911 in Pangasinan, a province in the Philippines. He migrated to the USA in 1930.

In “America Is in the Heart,” Bulosan described a hardscrabble life with his father, a subsistence farmer, and his mother, who sold salted fish in a village market. His father was forced to sell off his land piece by piece, so without property to inherit and few prospects for employment, Bulosan joined an exodus of young, single Filipino men who boarded steamships for the USA and the territory of Hawaii.

After hundreds of years of Spanish annexation, the Philippines became an American colony in 1898, the spoils of victory after the Spanish-American War. Filipinos who fought against Spain alongside the United States saw the Americans’ demand for independence from England in 1776 as a template for the island nation’s self-rule.

Instead, another war – called an “insurrection” by the United States, as Filipinos fought to keep their own land – “would disrupt life across the provinces in ways that would reverberate over the generations and play a central role in the movement of Filipinas/os to the United States,” wrote Dawn Bohulano Mabalon in her 2013 book, “Little Manila Is in the Heart,” an answer to Bulosan’s book. 

The United States sent all-Black regiments overseas, pitting Black soldiers against brown people. A policy of “benevolent assimilation” was adopted even as the Americans brutally fought Filipino guerrillas, calling them by racial slurs  “n------” and “goo-goos . ”  Filipinos’ education by American teachers sent abroad – modeled on the boarding school education of Native Americans at the time that separated them from their families, cultures and languages – snuffed the sparks of Filipino nationalism, culture, languages and traditions.

Bob Sampayan’s father was Bulosan’s first cousin. They grew up together in the Philippines and came to the USA in 1930 with high hopes to work, to be educated and to eventually return to their homeland, though Bulosan would never see the islands again.

“They wandered the streets and found what they thought was this beautiful park, and they slept there” upon their arrival, said Sampayan, who had a long career in law enforcement and became mayor of Vallejo, California. “When they woke up at dawn, they realized it was a cemetery. Then, they did what you’d do when you arrive in a new country: They went looking for work, for a place to stay. They worked at various jobs, anything they could do: working in restaurants, busing tables, washing dishes. They worked in agriculture, working the fields, traveling all over the Central Valley.”

Bulosan landed in Seattle, one of thousands of young, single Filipino men who traveled from the fish canneries of Alaska down to Washington, Oregon and California, following crop cycles. Very few Filipino women were allowed to migrate, as men were thought to be a stronger source of labor, and white lawmakers had no desire to see Filipinos bear children who would be U.S. citizens. 

The workers were exploited at every turn: Predatory farm managers fired them on a whim, charged exorbitant rents for overcrowded, vermin-infested field houses and worked them to exhaustion. Filipinos were beaten, brutalized, even lynched for talking to white women or going into towns where they were unwelcome.

“I could not compromise my picture of America with the filthy bunkhouses in which we lived and the falling wooden houses in which the natives lived,” Bulosan wrote in his essay “My Education,” an undated work included in “On Becoming Filipino,” a collection of his poems, essays and short stories.

“I began to ask if this was the real America – and if it was, why did I come? I was sad and confused. But I believed in the other men before me who had come and stayed to discover America. I knew they came because there was something in America which needed them and which they needed. Yet I slowly began to doubt the promise that was America,” Bulosan wrote.

Black, brown, exploited

“...We sacrifice our individual liberties, and sometimes we fail and suffer. Sometimes we divide into separate groups and our methods conflict, though we all aim at one common goal. ...What we want is peace, not violence. We know that we thrive and prosper only in peace.”

“It’s important for Americans to understand the exploitation that happened in the building of this country,” said Patrick Rosal, a Filipino American poet, writer and professor at Rutgers University-Camden in New Jersey. “The emancipation of slaves and the rise of industrial farming occurred around the same time. They needed workers, but they needed them cheap, so they brought in immigrants.”

Black people freed after the Civil War sought better lives and higher wages, leaving the fields of the South to work in factories in the North; those who’d enslaved them resented paying those they considered less than fully human for labor that had once been free. Rapidly expanding farms in Hawaii, California, Washington and Oregon needed cheap, easily exploitable labor.

“It was a direct result of white supremacy,” Rosal said, “globalizing it through the annexation of the Philippines and using Black soldiers to do it. They needed labor, but they also wondered, just who were these Filipinos? Are they immigrants or citizens? They aren’t Black. But they aren’t white, either.”

The emancipation of slaves and the rise of industrial farming occurred around the same time. They needed workers, but they needed them cheap, so they brought in immigrants.

In “America Is in the Heart,” Bulosan’s Allos described his first months in America as frightening, violent and humiliating.

Allos saw a fellow worker’s severed arm float past him at an Alaska fish cannery. He ran from a gun-wielding mob of white men after picking apples on a Washington farm; and found himself targeted by law enforcement for the color of his skin, the slant of his eyes and the accent in his speech. 

“It was the worst life,” said Dillon Delvo, executive director of Little Manila Rising, a Stockton, California-based nonprofit that advocates for environmental justice and historic preservation.

Delvo’s father came to the USA in 1928, he said, “an 18-year-old man who left everything behind and came with this idea of creating the first Filipino American family.”

That dream would be long deferred; His father was 67 by the time Delvo was born.

“There are a lot of us who had really, really old dads,” said Delvo, 48, “and ... it wasn’t until much later that I found out there were laws preventing them from marrying.”

Filipino men initially were not seen as a threat, but as the Depression threw millions out of work, simmering resentments began to boil over, said James Zarsadiaz, director of the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.

“In the 1920s and ’30s, you began to see more Filipinos getting involved with white women and vice versa,” he said. “And it’s not just about them having mixed-race children and interracial marriages, but also white working-class resentment about Filipinos taking their jobs, so there was an economic impetus.”

The manong “were not alone, though they were actively segregated from white society,” said Rodriguez, who is trying to preserve their history, traveling through the Central Valley to talk with farmworkers. “They lived very rich lives with each other.”

Writing for their lives

“We are bleeding where clubs are smashing heads, where bayonets are gleaming. We are fighting where the bullet is crashing upon armorless citizens, where the tear gas is choking unprotected children. Under the lynch trees, amidst hysterical mobs. Where the prisoner is beaten to confess a crime he did not commit. Where the honest man is hanged because he told the truth.”

In the 1930 s, Bulosan and other Filipinos, angered by the treatment of their fellow pinoys, as well as the Mexican, Native American and Black farmworkers they encountered, tried to organize them to fight for better conditions. The effort moved in fits and starts, and Bulosan fell ill with tuberculosis.

By 1937, Bulosan wound up in Los Angeles County Hospital, where he remained for two years. He spent the time there reading works by American, European and Filipino writers. Two white sisters, Sanora and Dorothy Babb, supplied him with books by Pablo Neruda, Karl Marx, Walt Whitman, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi, John Steinbeck and José Rizal, a Philippine nationalist who was executed by the Spanish for sedition in 1896.

Bulosan endured surgeries on a cancerous leg, to remove lesions from his lungs and to remove a kidney, leaving him frail and vulnerable for the rest of his life.

“One day, before I came to the hospital, I was talking to a Negro boy about race and prejudice and he asked, ‘But there isn’t any prejudice against the Filipino in this country, is there?’” Bulosan wrote to a friend in 1937. “When I told him some of my experiences he was surprised, believing that Negroes were the only persecuted race in America.

“We who know prejudice sometimes have a tendency to believe that we are the only ones discriminated against,” he continued. “There have been times when I have been sad and bitter and felt this way. Then I remember that there are thousands of people besides Filipinos who have had similar experiences – Negroes, Chinese, Japanese and even native-born whites. And I began to feel less alone, remembering those people and those few Americans I have known without a trace of prejudice.”

The Filipino Agricultural Laborers Association staged a strike in 1939, and after World War II, Bulosan helped organize cannery workers’ and asparagus pickers’ strikes along with Rudy Delvo, Claro Candelario, Chris Mensalvas and Larry Itliong, who would go on to lead the Delano grape strike/boycott of 1965-70 in California along with Philip Vera Cruz (a fellow Filipino), Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

“I met (Chavez), and one of the things he talked about was Carlos Bulosan and what Carlos tried to do in the 1930s and ’40s,” Sampayan recalled. “He was trying to get people to unionize but also to be part of mainstream America while also retaining their roots and culture and heritage.”

“Studying Bulosan is studying the history of work itself,” Rosal said. “There’s a difference between studying the tables and the statistics, and the stories: the exploitation, the way they lived, the danger that was a part of their everyday lives. ... Bulosan gives us things economics don’t: the stories of the workers and their interior lives.”

Even as Bulosan’s writing gained attention – besides The Saturday Evening Post, his work appeared in The New Republic and The New Yorker – he remained poor, sharing money with destitute friends, spending it, funneling it into the labor movement.

As the Cold War began, federal law enforcement targeted liberals who’d been active in the labor movement. 

According to the University of Washington’s online archive of his work, Bulosan was under government surveillance as he worked with a cannery workers’ union. Five of its officers were targeted for deportation, and Bulosan was among those who fought successfully for them to remain – selling signed and numbered copies of his poems to benefit the defense fund.

Hospitalized again in 1952 for tuberculosis, Bulosan struggled with alcoholism and homelessness after he was released from the sanitarium a year later.

Bulosan died Sept. 11, 1956, “when, after a night of drinking with a labor lawyer who was a close friend, he wandered around the streets of Seattle,” Filipino poet and essayist E. San Juan wrote in the introduction to “On Becoming Filipino.” “At dawn he was found sprawled on the steps of the City Hall, ‘comatose and in an advanced stage of broncho-pneumonia.’

“He was less a victim of neurosis or despair than of cumulative suffering from years of privation and persecution,” San Juan concluded.

Bulosan “was victimized by McCarthyism at the height of the Cold War, when those who stood on the side of the labor movement were seen as threatening,” said Rodriguez, founder of the center that bears his name. “And that helped to make him disappear from the national narrative.”

Still, he and the other manongs persevered, she said. “There were some successes; they managed. And that’s important when you see what it really was to be a minority then, and what can happen when minoritized people come together.”

Preserving Filipino stories

“America is also the nameless foreigner, the homeless refugee, the hungry boy begging for a job and the Black body dangling from a tree. America is the illiterate immigrant who is ashamed that the world of books and intellectual opportunities is closed to him. We are all that nameless foreigner, that homeless refugee, that hungry boy, that illiterate immigrant and that lynched Black body. All of us, from the first Adams to the last Filipino, native born or alien, educated or illiterate — We are America!”

Many stories of the manong have been lost or overlooked for a variety of reasons: U.S. history curricula have long failed to tell the stories of marginalized people, people of color and non-European immigrants. The manongs’ bachelorhood meant many of them had no sons or daughters with whom to share their stories. Some who married wed white women and assimilated into American society, raising their children less as Filipinos and more as Americans.

“It’s very much a part of Filipinos to embrace full-on American assimilation,” said Zarsadiaz of the University of San Francisco. “They might want their children to be Catholic or to eat Filipino foods, but they teach them that they’re Americans first.”

That mindset is rooted in the colonial relationship the Philippines had with the United States and its influence on Filipino culture. 

“To them, (English) is the language of modernity, and they embraced it,” Zarsadiaz said.

Zarsadiaz said some manong may not have shared their stories because they didn’t want to relive painful memories of the racism and brutality they faced. 

“Some of that might be trauma, and some of it might be that way of, just do the damn thing and don’t talk about it,” he said. “It’s a very Filipino thing to just tough it out. There’s this stereotype of Filipino resilience; it took a long time for them to work their way to a decent life – not a rich life, but a decent life.”

The Bulosan Center faces an existential crisis, Rodriguez said: State funding is set to run out by the end of the 2021-22 academic year , and there is little support from the University of California-Davis .

Rodriguez plans to leave academia after 30 years and start a nonprofit to preserve the stories of the manong and the field workers, labor organizers and other Filipinos who came after them. She plans to work directly with community groups, free from the constraints of academia, frustrated and tired at having to fight the university for resources to support the Bulosan Center.

The nonprofit would be named for her son, Amado Khaya, an activist and community organizer who went to the Philippines to live and work with indigenous farmers on the island of Mindoro as they fought to preserve their land and way of life. He died in August 2020 from severe food poisoning.

Rodriguez has been traveling on her own through the Central Valley, collecting stories for the Central Valley Empowerment Alliance, which launched the Larry Itliong Resource Center in late October.

We have to tell the stories that were not told, but we also have to connect them to our present to sow the seeds of community among us — that’s why it matters to a wider audience.

Preserving Filipino stories has been an uphill struggle, she said. 

There’s an urgency to the work: “Many of them are getting older, and there’s not a lot of physical evidence, no employment records or photographs. All we have is memories, and some of them are fading, and then what?”

“We have to tell the stories that were not told, but we also have to connect them to our present to sow the seeds of community among us – that’s why it matters to a wider audience,” said Rosal, whose latest collection of poetry, “The Last Thing,” examines life in the USA and the Philippines.

“These are American stories not being told – and that’s a detriment to America itself,” Delvo said.

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Author, Poet, and Worker: The World of Carlos Bulosan

• Biography and Overview
• US Imperlialism in the Phillipines and at Home
• Immigration History, Union History
• Union History, Early Publications, Left Community
• World War II and Bulosan's Rise as a Writer
• Cold War Attacks on the Union, Bulosan's Work
• ILWU Local 37 - 1952 Yearbook
• Bulosan's Final Years in Seattle
• Bulosan's FBI File
• Cannery Worker Activism and Civil Rights
• Exhibit Bibliography
• Read in English
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Portraits with Cities Falling: World War II and Bulosan’s Newfound Fame

When the United States entered World War II, the popular image of Filipinos in the country took a turn. With the Philippines holding the line against Japan in the Pacific, Filipinos were suddenly cast as allies in the war effort. Hostility towards the Left also lessened somewhat, with the Soviet Union as an ally against fascism, and the U.S. Communist Party adopting new policies friendly to U.S. patriotism. Carlos Bulosan found himself working under new global conditions. As he titled a 1942 poem, he was writing “Portraits with Cities Falling.”

The wartime atmosphere occasioned new opportunities for Bulosan, with the 1940s proving to be his most successful decade in terms of publication. He published numerous articles and short stories in national publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, The Saturday Review of Literature, The New Republic, and Mademoiselle . Most widely read of all was a March 6, 1943 piece in The Saturday Evening Post called “Freedom from Want,” based on U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” The essay is a lyrical testament to the struggles of American laborers. It was accompanied by a seemingly incongruous painting by Norman Rockwell of a white American family on Thanksgiving . Bulosan’s author profile in the Evening Post tells of how he nearly lost the manuscript in a Tacoma bar.

Bulosan also published a series of books in the 1940s. Two volumes of his poetry appeared in 1942, Chorus for America and Letter from America , followed by a poetic celebration of the US/Philippine war effort, The Voice of Bataan , in 1943. He then hit the national bestseller lists in 1944 with the publication of The Laughter of My Father , a collection of satirical short stories based on folktales from the Philippines. Lastly, Bulosan published his semi-autobiographical novel America is in the Heart in 1946, recounting the experiences of himself and other Filipinos along the West Coast during the Great Depression.

"Mga Larawan na May Nasisirang Lungsod": Ang Ikalawang Digmaang Pandaigdig at Ang Panibagong Kabantugan ni Bulosan

Nang pumasok ang Estados Unidos sa Ikalawang Digmaang Pandaigdig, binago ang pangkaraniwang pansin ng mga Pinoy na nasa U.S. Dahil sa pagsisikap ng mga hukbong Pilipino laban sa Hapon sa Pasipiko, biglang naging magkapanalig ang U.S. sa Pilipinas. At saka binawasan ang kapootan laban sa mga maka-kaliwa, dahil naging kapanalig din laban sa Pasismo ang Soviet Union, at humiram ang Lapiang Komunista ng U.S. ng bagong patakaran ukol sa pagkamakabayan ng mga Amerikano. Na tamo ni Bulosan ang pagbabago ng kapaligirang politiko. Nang sinulat niya ang tula noong 1942, "Mga Larawan na May Nasisirang Lungsod" ["Portraits with Cities Falling"].

Dahil sa panahong pandigmaan, nagkaroon ng bagong pagkakataon si Carlos Bulosan, kaya napakatagumpay siya noong dekadang 1940. Pinaglagyan ng maraming mga artikulo at maikling kuwento ang paglalathalang pambansa, katulad ng The New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, The Saturday Review of Literature, The New Republic , and Mademoiselle . Ang pinakabinasa ng mga artikulong ito ay ang tinatawag na "Freedom from Want" noong 1943, binase sa "Four Freedoms" ni Pangulo ng U.S. si Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Noong dekadang 1940, naglathala si Bulosan ng mga hanay na aklat. Ilinitaw ang dalawang tomo ng kaniyang mga tula noong 1942, "Chorus for America" at "Letter from America." Noong 1943, ang sumunod dito'y ang pagdiriwang ng mag-pagsisikap pangdigmaan ng U.S. at ng Pilipinas, "The Voice of Bataan." Naging miyembro siya ng pinakamataas sa mga nabibiling aklat dahil sa kaniyang paglalathala ng The Laughter of My Father noong 1944, ang paglilikom ng mga satirikal na maikling kuwento base sa mga alamat galing sa Pilipinas. Sa katapusan, ilinathala niya ang kaniyang mala-kathambuhay, America is in the Heart , noong 1946. Ang paksang ito’y ang mga pangyayari ni Bulosan at ng mga ibang tao, sa Kanlurang Baybayin noong Great Depression.

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FDR and the Four Freedoms Speech

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Franklin Roosevelt was elected president for an unprecedented third term in 1940 because at the time the world faced unprecedented danger, instability, and uncertainty. Much of Europe had fallen to the advancing German Army and Great Britain was barely holding its own. A great number of Americans remained committed to isolationism and the belief that the United States should continue to stay out of the war, but President Roosevelt understood Britain's need for American support and attempted to convince the American people of the gravity of the situation. 

In his Annual Message to Congress (State of the Union Address) on January 6, 1941, Franklin Roosevelt presented his reasons for American involvement, making the case for continued aid to Great Britain and greater production of war industries at home. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed.

As America entered the war these "four freedoms" - the freedom of speech, the freedom of worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear - symbolized America's war aims and gave hope in the following years to a war-wearied people because they knew they were fighting for freedom.

Roosevelt’s preparation of the Four Freedoms Speech was typical of the process that he went through on major policy addresses. To assist him, he charged his close advisers Harry L. Hopkins, Samuel I. Rosenman, and Robert Sherwood with preparing initial drafts. Adolf A. Berle, Jr., and Benjamin V. Cohen of the State Department also provided input. But as with all his speeches, FDR edited, rearranged, and added extensively until the speech was his creation. In the end, the speech went through seven drafts before final delivery.

The famous Four Freedoms paragraphs did not appear in the speech until the fourth draft. One night as Hopkins, Rosenman, and Sherwood met with the President in his White House study, FDR announced that he had an idea for a peroration (the closing section of a speech). As recounted by Rosenman: “We waited as he leaned far back in his swivel chair with his gaze on the ceiling. It was a long pause—so long that it began to become uncomfortable. Then he leaned forward again in his chair” and dictated the Four Freedoms. “He dictated the words so slowly that on the yellow pad I had in my lap I was able to take them down myself in longhand as he spoke.”

The ideas enunciated in the 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; President Roosevelt’s vision for an international organization that became the United Nations after his death; and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 through the work of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Suggested Reading

Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Belknap Press, 2005).

Laura Crowell, “The Building of the ‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” Speech Monographs 22, (November 1955): 266-283.

Samuel I. Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (Harper & Brothers, 1952).

Halford R. Ryan, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rhetorical Presidency (Greenwood Press, 1988).                

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The Library's mission is to foster research and education on the life and times of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and their continuing impact on contemporary life. Our work is carried out by four major areas: Archives, Museum, Education and Public Programs.

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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Norman rockwell’s ‘four freedoms’ brought the ideals of america to life.

This wartime painting series reminded Americans what they were fighting for

Alice George

Museums Correspondent

Norman Rockwell, the master of Americana, captured the essence of daily life in hundreds of 20th-century magazine covers, and 75 years ago this month, he accomplished a greater feat, translating the nation’s ideals into indelible images known as the Four Freedoms .

By illuminating rights that every American—and every person—should enjoy, Rockwell’s Four Freedoms validated the U.S. decision to enter World War II and overcome powerful enemies whose actions devalued human life. His enduring messages have lingered in the national consciousness, remaining as significant today as they were when the Saturday Evening Post published them in four consecutive weeks during the winter of 1943.

Rockwell’s images had a clear meaning, says the Smithsonian’s Larry Bird : “Why we fight, what we’re about, what we’re fighting for, what we’re fighting to save.” Bird is co-curator of the National Museum of American History’s exhibition “ American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith,” which features a large set of the original Four Freedoms war bond posters from 1943.

Immediately after publishing Rockwell’s four paintings— Freedom of Speech , Freedom of Religion , Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear —the magazine received 25,000 requests to purchase copies. Color reproductions of all four sold for 25 cents apiece. The paintings became the basis for 4 million war posters sold as part of the War Bonds effort, raising $132,992,539. “They were received by the public with more enthusiasm, perhaps, than any other paintings in the history of American art,” The New Yorker reported in 1945. 

Within weeks of publication, Rockwell’s paintings began a national journey. Across 16 separate cities, a total of 1.2 million people lined up to see the paintings, which were put on display in department stores, not museums. Those who bought war bonds received color reproductions in return. After completing that tour, the paintings rode the rails to a wider assortment of towns and cities, where Americans could admire Rockwell’s works in a custom-made train car. 

Although the paintings became famous as an endorsement of the struggle to defend American ideals in World War II, the Four Freedoms first entered the American lexicon in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s January 1941 State of the Union address, almost a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor swept the United States onto the field of battle. At the beginning of 1941, when isolationist sentiments still held sway over many Americans, Roosevelt’s goal was a simple one: to convince voters that standing alone ultimately could sacrifice freedoms at home and abroad.

“By an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to the proposition that principles of morality and considerations for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers,” he told Americans. “We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom.”

FDR then  described  the four freedoms every human being should enjoy—an addition to the speech that the president himself made in its fourth draft. He wanted to make Americans understand why the United States should provide material support for the western Allies as they battled Germany’s Nazi regime and the Japanese empire, both of which were stripping away individual rights. At the time, Roosevelt was convinced the United States was not ready to enter the war, but he believed armaments production for the Allies represented one way to protect cherished freedoms without risking American lives. While his speech planted a seed of inspiration in Rockwell’s brain, staunch isolationists rejected FDR’s message, claiming that it promoted war.

The United States and Great Britain wrapped Roosevelt’s ideas into the Atlantic Charter  issued  in August 1941. Both the State of the Union and the Atlantic Charter represented these freedoms as international ideals—rights that should belong to anyone anywhere. And through international initiatives such as disarmament and economic stability agreements, any nation should be able to exist without fear and with the opportunity to offer broad rights to its citizens.

For Americans, the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and freedom of religion. “Freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” are nowhere in the nation’s founding documents, but they reflect the hopes of a nation emerging from the Great Depression and preparing to enter the biggest global conflict ever. “They are aspirational goals that we, or at least those who believed in the sort of New Deal politics, saw as the role of government,” says Harry R. Rubenstein , who also curated the museum's exhibition  American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith  and, like Bird, is a contributor to a book bearing the same title.

Seventeen months after FDR’s address, Rockwell traveled to Washington to promote his idea of illustrating the Four Freedoms to bolster the war effort. His autobiography states that not one official initially welcomed his proposal. The hard truth was that there were people inside and outside of government who questioned the artistic value of Rockwell’s storytelling works, which were often equated with advertising illustrations. Ultimately, though—and the historical record is unclear on the details here—Rockwell was able to persuade the powers that were, reaching an agreement to produce the paintings for the government and the Saturday Evening Post  magazine.

After promising to create the images, Rockwell faced the difficult task of transforming governmental phraseology into evocative tableaux on canvas. He had expected to finish all four scenes in two months, but the work dragged on through seven months of false starts and revisions.

Nonetheless, Rockwell was fully committed to the  Four Freedoms . “I just cannot express to you how much this series means to me. Aside from their wonderful patriotic motive,” he told his impatient editors, “there are no subjects which could rival them in opportunity for human interest.”

With the February 20, 1943 issue of  The Saturday Evening Post , the paintings began appearing weekly, each  accompanied  by an essay.  Freedom of Speech  features a blue-collar worker speaking to a room filled with more finely dressed Americans, all listening intently to the Lincolnesque figure’s words.  Freedom of Religion  depicts several individuals of different religious backgrounds in a moment of prayer. A man wearing a fez holds a Bible or Koran; a woman fingers a rosary. Rockwell worked for two months on this painting, which carries an inscription: “Each according to the dictates of his own conscience.” The artist said later that he could not recall the source of the words; however, almost identical language can be found in the “Thirteen Articles of Faith” written by prophet Joseph Smith in 1842 to explain the bedrock beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons).

Freedom from Want  pictures a large, healthy family eagerly awaiting a Thanksgiving feast. In  Freedom from Fear,  a mother and a father check on their sleeping children. In the father’s hand is a newspaper reporting the bombing of London—the only international reference in all four paintings. Rockwell finished these two paintings most quickly, and later said he thought they were the weakest. However, Bird says  Freedom from Fear  “continues to speak to me, just in daily life. And in that sense, it’s timeless.” Whether the headline refers to German attacks on London or to frightening developments in today’s world, the painting’s message applies.

While the  Four Freedoms  experienced huge success within the United States, they met a less receptive audience abroad. FDR described freedoms that should belong to everyone in all nations. Rockwell’s paintings, on the other hand, showed recognizably American scenes and seemed to celebrate life in the United States. Like most of his works, they portrayed Americans as a humble, God-fearing people who enjoy a strong and prosperous family life. 

Freedom from Want  features a dinner table laden with food—an image that rankled non-Americans suffering from the effects of wartime shortages. The sumptuous scene is colored by a playful Rockwell smiling up at the viewer from the lower right-hand corner. (This occasional representation of himself, much like film director Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearances in his suspenseful films, offers an unexpected dash of humor. A single eye on  Freedom of Speech ’s right edge also belongs to Rockwell. He thought that inserting part or all of his face into scenes appropriately cast doubt on connections between art and truth.)  Freedom from Fear , too, irritated some people in Allied war zones who were unable to protect their children from an immediate threat. Oceans away from World War II’s battlefronts, Rockwell’s protective parents enjoyed an extra layer of safety unavailable to parents in most nations at war.

Rockwell’s simple images transmit complex messages. What Bird calls “his toolkit” included Rockwell’s interpretation of “human nature, human condition, irony, juxtaposition of things”—all part of a technique now well-known to most Americans. Rubenstein believes “the genius of his work is taking a very lofty ideal and bringing it down to the most personal experience.” He also sees Rockwell’s choice of domestic scenes as one of the paintings’ strengths: “These aren’t the politicians; these aren’t heroic soldiers. These are the people who support the nation, or what the nation had been and hoped to be again.”

Roosevelt admired Rockwell’s skillful delivery of a potent message. “I think you have done a superb job in bringing home to the plain, everyday citizens the plain, everyday truths behind the Four Freedoms,” he told Rockwell. Says Bird, the artist “dramatized their meaning in a way that was not available to Roosevelt, as great as he was as a radio orator and as a communicator.” Capturing idealized visions of Americans, what Bird calls “our better angels,” empowers Rockwell’s art.

After the war, the already well-traveled paintings made another national expedition aboard the Freedom Train. More than 3.5 million Americans in 326 cities saw them on that 1947-48 trek. The offices of the  Saturday Evening Post  served as the paintings’ home throughout the 1950s and most of the 1960s, with Rockwell finally reclaiming them before the magazine closed its doors in 1969.

Today, the paintings reside in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but this year, they  begin  another tour, entitled "Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & The Four Freedoms."  It starts in May at the New York Historical Society, and visits Detroit, Washington, D.C., Houston and Caen in Normandy, France.

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Alice George | | READ MORE

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.

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4 Freedom from Want

• Published: December 2015
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Over the half century following Roosevelt’s address, the contested understanding of “freedom from want” would touch on some of the central debates in American political discourse and influence the course of public policy. Moreover, the activism the phrase seemed to call for in the struggle against poverty would also infuse the domestic New Deal as well as many of the modernizing projects that were of fundamental importance to US engagement with a developing world emerging from colonial rule. But as in the international sphere, a domestic reaction against ambitious plans for state intervention soon became evident. Instead, a rival conception of freedom gained hold, where American capitalism was allowed to operate in unconstrained form. Taking Roosevelt’s address as its starting point, this chapter explores the tensions between rival ideas about the essence of freedom from the necessity of social welfare, and the interplay between the foreign and the domestic spheres, focusing in particular on the way British policymakers, in particular developers of their own Beverage Plan for their post-war society, engaged and evolved Roosevelt’s ideals.

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Carlos Bulosan’s Essay, ‘Freedom From Want’: A Freedom Born of Work

Author gives added meaning to rockwell’s painting.

Friends Read Free

When we all gather around the table with friends and family for Thanksgiving or Christmas, we feel joyful and thankful to be surrounded by such good people and blessings. During this time, we celebrate and share our blessings—the fruits of our labor, born of struggle and effort.

In 1943, Norman Rockwell captured this joy and thankfulness in his painting “Freedom From Want,” also known as “The Thanksgiving Picture” or “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” A family gathers around the table to partake in the wonderful fruits of their labor. This picture radiates with the warmth, joy, and gratitude that make such a meal so special.

All members of this family have a smile brightening their faces. A grandmotherly figure brings out the turkey while an older gentleman stands behind her at the head of the table. The elderly couple represents the living tradition of American ideals, which set the mold, security, and path for later generations. The others all lean in toward each other with excited faces, giving their full attention to those around them. A man in the bottom right corner looks directly at the viewer; he welcomes us into his world, free from want and full of gratitude and gladness.

Bulosan says that in order to obtain and enjoy the fruits of our labor, we must work to bring the good things of nature into our lives and to diminish the fear that surrounds us in our daily lives. When we work for the fruits and pleasures of our labor, we win security and peace for ourselves, our neighbors, and our country.

Tyrannical Thieves

When our history and freedoms are taken away or distorted, the end result is want. This means that we must work constantly, not for ourselves but for those who have enslaved us. We become slaves to fear, hunger, and want. We lack the ability and energy to enjoy the freedom that respects the dignity of the individual.

Bulosan says that, as part of the plan to enslave a free people, there are also those who seek to “falsify American history—the forces which drive many Americans to a corner of compromise with those who would distort the ideals of men that died for freedom.”

Marching On

In peace, we are free from want. In peace, abundance allows us to seek higher thoughts and virtues, and to obtain a better future for ourselves, our children, and our country.

In a land that created abundance for itself and much of the world, we work for that freedom from want, obtaining peace and security from fear and hunger. We have the chance to create a world that was the dream of our Founding Fathers, one in which we can truly pursue health of mind, body, and soul. We perpetuate a tradition that lives in each of us and supports the “living spirit of free men.”

When we sit down to our Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, we can celebrate our freedom from want and enjoy the abundance that frees us from fear and hunger. On that occasion and during the whole year, we can faithfully preserve and pass down this freedom and the traditions of our ancestors to our children.

Mark Twain’s Short Story, ‘The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm’

O. Henry’s Short Story, ‘A Service of Love’

Stephen Vincent Benet’s Short Story, ‘The Blood of the Martyrs’

T.S. Arthur’s Short Story, ‘Not Great, But Happy’

Essays About Freedom: 5 Helpful Examples and 7 Prompts

Freedom seems simple at first; however, it is quite a nuanced topic at a closer glance. If you are writing essays about freedom, read our guide of essay examples and writing prompts.

In a world where we constantly hear about violence, oppression, and war, few things are more important than freedom. It is the ability to act, speak, or think what we want without being controlled or subjected. It can be considered the gateway to achieving our goals, as we can take the necessary steps. 

However, freedom is not always “doing whatever we want.” True freedom means to do what is righteous and reasonable, even if there is the option to do otherwise. Moreover, freedom must come with responsibility; this is why laws are in place to keep society orderly but not too micro-managed, to an extent.

5 Examples of Essays About Freedom

1. essay on “freedom” by pragati ghosh, 2. acceptance is freedom by edmund perry, 3. reflecting on the meaning of freedom by marquita herald.

• 4.  Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

5. What are freedom and liberty? by Yasmin Youssef

1. what is freedom, 2. freedom in the contemporary world, 3. is freedom “not free”, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning freedom, 5. freedom vs. security, 6. free speech and hate speech, 7. an experience of freedom.

“Freedom is non denial of our basic rights as humans. Some freedom is specific to the age group that we fall into. A child is free to be loved and cared by parents and other members of family and play around. So this nurturing may be the idea of freedom to a child. Living in a crime free society in safe surroundings may mean freedom to a bit grown up child.”

In her essay, Ghosh briefly describes what freedom means to her. It is the ability to live your life doing what you want. However, she writes that we must keep in mind the dignity and freedom of others. One cannot simply kill and steal from people in the name of freedom; it is not absolute. She also notes that different cultures and age groups have different notions of freedom. Freedom is a beautiful thing, but it must be exercised in moderation. 

“They demonstrate that true freedom is about being accepted, through the scenarios that Ambrose Flack has written for them to endure. In The Strangers That Came to Town, the Duvitches become truly free at the finale of the story. In our own lives, we must ask: what can we do to help others become truly free?”

Perry’s essay discusses freedom in the context of Ambrose Flack’s short story The Strangers That Came to Town : acceptance is the key to being free. When the immigrant Duvitch family moved into a new town, they were not accepted by the community and were deprived of the freedom to live without shame and ridicule. However, when some townspeople reach out, the Duvitches feel empowered and relieved and are no longer afraid to go out and be themselves. 

“Freedom is many things, but those issues that are often in the forefront of conversations these days include the freedom to choose, to be who you truly are, to express yourself and to live your life as you desire so long as you do not hurt or restrict the personal freedom of others. I’ve compiled a collection of powerful quotations on the meaning of freedom to share with you, and if there is a single unifying theme it is that we must remember at all times that, regardless of where you live, freedom is not carved in stone, nor does it come without a price.”

In her short essay, Herald contemplates on freedom and what it truly means. She embraces her freedom and uses it to live her life to the fullest and to teach those around her. She values freedom and closes her essay with a list of quotations on the meaning of freedom, all with something in common: freedom has a price. With our freedom, we must be responsible. You might also be interested in these essays about consumerism .

4.   Authentic Freedom by Wilfred Carlson

“Freedom demands of one, or rather obligates one to concern ourselves with the affairs of the world around us. If you look at the world around a human being, countries where freedom is lacking, the overall population is less concerned with their fellow man, then in a freer society. The same can be said of individuals, the more freedom a human being has, and the more responsible one acts to other, on the whole.”

Carlson writes about freedom from a more religious perspective, saying that it is a right given to us by God. However, authentic freedom is doing what is right and what will help others rather than simply doing what one wants. If freedom were exercised with “doing what we want” in mind, the world would be disorderly. True freedom requires us to care for others and work together to better society. 

“In my opinion, the concepts of freedom and liberty are what makes us moral human beings. They include individual capacities to think, reason, choose and value different situations. It also means taking individual responsibility for ourselves, our decisions and actions. It includes self-governance and self-determination in combination with critical thinking, respect, transparency and tolerance. We should let no stone unturned in the attempt to reach a state of full freedom and liberty, even if it seems unrealistic and utopic.”

Youssef’s essay describes the concepts of freedom and liberty and how they allow us to do what we want without harming others. She notes that respect for others does not always mean agreeing with them. We can disagree, but we should not use our freedom to infringe on that of the people around us. To her, freedom allows us to choose what is good, think critically, and innovate. 

“Freedom From Want” by Rockwell

Any famous painting is a combination of both artistic talent and deep connotations invoked in it. Therefore, looking at an artwork merely as a picture without going deeply into the origins and subtle meanings of various scenes, and characters leaves many details unrevealed. A perfect example of a painting requiring a profound review and examination of its social and historical context is Freedom from Want by Norman Rockwell, first published on March 3, 1943. It is one of the four artworks demonstrating the critical values, which were intended to raise the citizens’ patriotism during the hardships of World War II. Thanks to its remarkable implementation and various inherent meanings, Freedom from Want is regarded as a true masterpiece of the American art of all times.

As most of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, the one being reviewed belongs to the realism artistic movement, which was relatively popular in America during those days. In Freedom from Want , the viewer can see a traditional American family gathered for a meal, probably for the Thanksgiving celebration. The particularity of Rockwell’s interpretation of realism is its relatively exaggerated and idealistic character with the depiction of “themes devoid of conflict or struggle” (Lynch, 2020, p. 4). Everyone is smiling and willingly sharing their life stories with each other. The detailed images of the characters’ faces, food, dishes, and silverware add to the artwork’s realistic impression. This conveys the author’s desire to paint an ordinary happy family which would bring the desired mood of tenderness and slight nostalgia to the audience.

Looking at Freedom from Want , it is necessary to take into account the significant historical influences reflected in the painting. This piece of art was created in 1943 when World War II was raging throughout the world, claiming thousands of innocent lives. The idealistic image of a family gathering was supposed to serve as a symbol of the future to come when all the hardships would be over. Besides, the idea of shortages common for the wartime is also reflected in some details. Although the general surroundings resemble a celebration, the table is notably empty with water as the only drink. As Lynch (2020) mentions, that reminds of a feast yet to come, since the demonstration of an abundant table would obscure the “realities of food rations and other shared sacrifices” (p. 69). Thus, historical events shape many of the details that can be seen in the painting.

Besides the aspects mentioned, the political factors also had a substantial influence on the reviewed artwork. The history of its creation was directly connected to the political goals of the country’s leadership. The starting period of American involvement in World War II was characterized by “the lack of open, direct talk about what the war was for” (Seal, 2016, p. 145). Countering that trend, Franklin D. Roosevelt made his famous speech on American society’s four traditional freedoms. The address was then supplemented by order of the relevant four paintings, one of which was Freedom from Want . It intended to demonstrate the nation’s true values and its desire to ensure a peaceful and prosperous life for everybody. Therefore, these political goals initially defined the idea to be conveyed by the painting and the composition to be used in it.

As the discussion above shows, understanding various historical, political, and social events occurring at the given time substantially assists in interpreting the painting. Thorough research in these areas helps understand the meanings of different details used by the artist and pay attention to those aspects, which would otherwise be neglected. Therefore, going deeply into the context surrounding the creation of Freedom from Want allows appreciating this masterpiece of American art.

Lynch, S. (2020). Morality and aspiration: Some conditions of Norman Rockwell’s four freedoms [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Bowling Green State University.

Rockwell, N. (1943). Freedom from want [painting] . Norman Rockwell Museum, Indianapolis, IN, United States. Web.

Seal, A. (2016). Freedom from abstraction. Dissent, 63 (4), 145–149. Web.

Freedom from Want

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Freedom from Want

Kathleen g. donohue.

In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt identified "four essential human freedoms." Three of these—freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion—had long been understood as defining principles of liberalism. Roosevelt's fourth freedom—freedom from want—was not. Indeed, classic liberals had argued that the only way to guarantee this freedom would be through an illiberal redistribution of wealth. In Freedom from Want , Kathleen G. Donohue describes how, between the 1880s and the 1940s, American intellectuals transformed classical liberalism into its modern American counterpart by...

In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt identified "four essential human freedoms." Three of these—freedom from fear, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion—had long been understood as defining principles of liberalism. Roosevelt's fourth freedom—freedom from want—was not. Indeed, classic liberals had argued that the only way to guarantee this freedom would be through an illiberal redistribution of wealth. In Freedom from Want , Kathleen G. Donohue describes how, between the 1880s and the 1940s, American intellectuals transformed classical liberalism into its modern American counterpart by emphasizing consumers over producers and consumption over production.

Donohue first examines this conceptual shift through the writings of a wide range of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century social critics—among them William Graham Sumner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Richard T. Ely, Edward Bellamy, and Thorstein Veblen—who rethought not only the negative connotations of consumerism but also the connection between one's right to consume and one's role in the production process. She then turns to the politicization of these ideas beginning with the establishment of a more consumer-oriented liberalism by Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl and ending in the New Deal era, when this debate evolved from intellectual discourse into public policy with the creation of such bodies as the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

Deftly combining intellectual, cultural, and political history, Freedom from Want sheds new light on the ways in which Americans reconceptualized the place of the consumer in society and the implications of these shifting attitudes for the philosophy of liberalism and the role of government in safeguarding the material welfare of the people.

Related Books

Myrna Perez

Ian Milligan

Sarah Kornfield

Andrew Sillen

Edward B. Davis

At the core of this volume 'is the story of how freedom from want, an economic freedom defined by classical liberalism, became one of the essential human freedoms of modern American liberalism'... Edward Bellamy, Thorstein Veblen, and Adam Smith are a few of the many thinkers whose work Donohue reviews... This scholarly volume deserves a wide audience.

A well-crafted example of traditional intellectual history. Donohue's close reading of the works of a variety of economic and political theorists not only provides interesting new insights into the thought of the individuals she examines, but also allows her to construct a compelling narrative of the dramatic change that occurred over a span of half a century in liberal thinking about the role of consumption and consumers in the political economy.

This is an intelligent, well-researched, carefully nuanced book about the gradual displacement in U.S. liberalism of a producerist outlook by a consumerist perspective... Donohue gives us a rich intellectual history of the bases for the government-managed, full-growth, high-employment, demand-driven economy that flourished as an ideal, and to a considerable extent in practice, between the 1940s and the 1970s.

Donohue offers a powerful case intertwining economic, intellectual, and political history... A most valuable contribution to the history of American economic thought.

A provocative update on the effort that has gone on at least since Alexis de Tocqueville's time to sort out the relationship between material desires and democracy.

An authoritative and well-researched account of the emergence of consumption and the consumer within American political economic thought.

Furthers understanding of the political history of mass consumption in the United States.

The book offers a well-researched and thoughtful history of ideas, and it should be of interest to economists as well as intellectual and economic historians.

An important contribution to the history of modern American liberalism. In a series of exceptionally acute readings of writers and activists both familiar and obscure, she makes a compelling case for an important shift in the estimate of the virtues of the consumer in American economic thought from the mid-nineteenth century through the New Deal. Her book will open many eyes with a fresh perspective on thinkers historians thought they knew well and brings to light the work of others whose significance has been neglected.

A wonderfully rich and complicated exploration of a major shift in the way Americans came to view their society. Brings together not only a great deal of existing scholarship but also an impressive familiarity with the primary sources to create a coherent and persuasive account of the rise of consumerist ideas in the first half of the twentieth century.

A truly original book. One that reveals an exceptionally strong command of the history of political theory and the history of economic ideas. Unusually bold and polished, it adds admirably to our understanding of the emergence of consumer ideology and the reshaping of American liberalism and politics.

Many books have been published recently on the topic of consumer society, but this one carves out a unique place on that shelf. Freedom from Want is impressively documented, well constructed, historiographically significant, and persuasive, expertly moving beyond consumer society itself to make an original contribution to the history of American liberalism.

Book Details

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Producerist Worldview, 1870–1900 2. Legitimizing the Consumer, 1880–1900 3. At the Crossroads, 1899–1912 4. Politicizing the Consumer, 1909–1923 5. "What's an Economic

Acknowledgments Introduction 1. The Producerist Worldview, 1870–1900 2. Legitimizing the Consumer, 1880–1900 3. At the Crossroads, 1899–1912 4. Politicizing the Consumer, 1909–1923 5. "What's an Economic System For?" 1917–1933 6. The Demise of Economic Planning, 1933–1940 7. The Common Ground of Abundance, 1933–1940 Conclusion Notes Essay on Sources Index

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What a ‘Free Palestine’ Means in Practice

By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

Imagine that the campus protesters got their wish tomorrow: Not just “Cease-fire Now” in Gaza, but the creation of a “Free Palestine.” How free would that future Palestine be?

This isn’t a speculative question. Palestinians have had a measure of self-rule in the West Bank since Yasir Arafat entered Gaza in 1994 . Israel evacuated its settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority that same year and Hamas won legislative elections the next.

How much freedom have Palestinians enjoyed since then? They and their allies abroad argue they’ve had none because Israel has denied it to them — not just by refusing to accept a Palestinian state, but also through road closings, land expropriations in the West Bank, an economic blockade of Gaza and frequent Israeli incursions into Palestinian areas.

There’s partial truth to this. Israeli settlers have run riot against their Palestinian neighbors . The Israeli government imposes heavy and unequal restrictions on Palestinians, as my colleague Megan Stack has reported in painful detail . The frequent mistreatment of Palestinians at Israeli checkpoints is a long-running disgrace.

At the same time, Israeli leaders have repeatedly offered the creation of a Palestinian state — offers Arafat and Abbas rejected. Charges of an Israeli economic blockade tend to ignore a few facts: Gaza also has a border with Egypt; many goods, including fuel and electricity , flowed from Israel to Gaza up until Oct. 7; much of the international aid given to Gaza to build civilian infrastructure was diverted for Hamas’s tunnels, and Hamas used the territory to start five wars with Israel in 15 years.

But there’s an equally important dimension to Palestinian politics that is purely domestic. When Abbas was elected in 2005, it was for a four-year term. He is now in the 20th year of his four-year term. When Hamas won the 2006 legislative elections, it didn’t just defeat its political rivals in Fatah. It overthrew the Palestinian Authority completely in Gaza after a brief civil war and followed it up with a killing, torture and terror spree that eliminated all political opposition.

Perhaps the absence of Palestinian democracy shouldn’t come as a shock. The regime established by Hamas isn’t merely autocratic. It’s more like the old East Germany, complete with its own version of the Stasi, which spied on, blackmailed and abused its own citizens.

“Hamas leaders, despite claiming to represent the people of Gaza, would not tolerate even a whiff of dissent,” The Times’s Adam Rasgon and Ronen Bergman reported on Monday . “Security officials trailed journalists and people they suspected of immoral behavior. Agents got criticism removed from social media and discussed ways to defame political adversaries. Political protests were viewed as threats to be undermined.”

Even this doesn’t quite capture the extent of Hamas’s cruelty. Consider its treatment of gay Palestinians — a point worth emphasizing since “ Queers for Palestine ” is a sign sometimes seen at anti-Israel marches.

In 2019, the Palestinian Authority banned an L.G.B.T.Q.-rights group’s activities in the West Bank , claiming they are “harmful to the higher values and ideals of Palestinian society.” In 2016, Hamas tortured and killed one of its own commanders, Mahmoud Ishtiwi, on suspicions of “moral turpitude” — code for homosexuality. “Relatives said Mr. Ishtiwi had told them he had been suspended from a ceiling for hours on end, for days in a row,” The Times’s Diaa Hadid and Majd Al Waheidi wrote .

Would an independent Palestinian state, living alongside Israel, improve its internal governance? Not if Hamas took control — which it almost certainly would if it isn’t utterly defeated in the current war. And what if the protesters achieved their larger goal — that is, a Palestine “from the river to the sea”?

We know something about what Hamas intends thanks to the concluding statement of a conference that it held in 2021 about its plans for “liberated” Gaza. Any Jew considered a “fighter” “must be killed”; Jews who flee could either “be left alone” or “prosecuted”; peaceful individuals could either be “integrated or given time to leave.” Finally, “educated Jews” with valuable skills “should not be allowed to leave.”

In other words, what the campus protesters happily envisage as a utopian, post-Zionist “state for all of its citizens” would under Hamas be one in which Jews were killed, exiled, prosecuted, integrated into an Islamist state or pressed into the servitude of a Levantine version of Solzhenitsyn’s First Circle. Those same protesters might rejoin that they don’t want a future to be led by Hamas — but that only raises the question of why they do absolutely nothing to oppose it.

This is not the first generation of Western activists who championed movements that promised liberation in theory and misery and murder in practice: The Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1975 to the cheers of even mainstream liberal voices . Mao Zedong, possibly the greatest mass murderer of the past 100 years, never quite lost his cachet on the political left. And magazines like The Nation eulogized Hugo Chávez as a paragon of democracy.

These attitudes are a luxury that people living in safe and free societies can freely indulge. Israelis, whose freedom is made more precious by being less safe, can be forgiven for thinking differently.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Bret Stephens is an Opinion columnist for The Times, writing about foreign policy, domestic politics and cultural issues. Facebook

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Perspective

When pto stands for 'pretend time off': doctors struggle to take real breaks.

Mara Gordon

A survey shows that doctors have trouble taking full vacations from their high-stress jobs. Even when they do, they often still do work on their time off. Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images hide caption

A survey shows that doctors have trouble taking full vacations from their high-stress jobs. Even when they do, they often still do work on their time off.

A few weeks ago, I took a vacation with my family. We went hiking in the national parks of southern Utah, and I was blissfully disconnected from work.

I'm a family physician, so taking a break from my job meant not seeing patients. It also meant not responding to patients' messages or checking my work email. For a full week, I was free.

Taking a real break — with no sneaky computer time to bang out a few prescription refill requests — left me feeling reenergized and ready to take care of my patients when I returned.

But apparently, being a doctor who doesn't work on vacation puts me squarely in the minority of U.S. physicians.

Research published in JAMA Network Open this year set out to quantify exactly how doctors use their vacation time — and what the implications might be for a health care workforce plagued by burnout, dissatisfaction and doctors who are thinking about leaving medicine.

"There is a strong business case for supporting taking real vacation," says Dr. Christine Sinsky , the lead author of the paper. "Burnout is incredibly expensive for organizations."

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Researchers surveyed 3,024 doctors, part of an American Medical Association cohort designed to represent the American physician workforce. They found that 59.6% of American physicians took 15 days of vacation or less per year. That's a little more than the average American: Most workers who have been at a job for a year or more get between 10 and 14 days of paid vacation time , according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

However, most doctors don't take real vacation. Over 70% of doctors surveyed said they worked on a typical vacation day.

"I have heard physicians refer to PTO as 'pretend time off,'" Sinsky says, referring to the acronym for "paid time off."

Sinsky and co-authors found that physicians who took more than three weeks of vacation a year had lower rates of burnout than those who took less, since vacation time is linked to well-being and job satisfaction .

And all those doctors toiling away on vacation, sitting poolside with their laptops? Sinsky argues it has serious consequences for health care.

Physician burnout is linked to high job turnover and excess health care costs , among other problems.

Still, it can be hard to change the culture of workaholism in medicine. Even the study authors confessed that they, too, worked on vacation.

"I remember when one of our first well-being papers was published," says Dr. Colin West , a co-author of the new study and a health care workforce researcher at the Mayo Clinic. "I responded to the revisions up at the family cabin in northern Minnesota on vacation."

Sinsky agreed. "I do not take all my vacation, which I recognize as a delicious irony of the whole thing," she says.

She's the American Medical Association's vice president of professional satisfaction. If she can't take a real vacation, is there any hope for the rest of us?

I interviewed a half dozen fellow physicians and chatted off the record with many friends and colleagues to get a sense of why it feels so hard to give ourselves a break. Here, I offer a few theories about why doctors are so terrible at taking time off.

We don't want to make more work for our colleagues

The authors of the study in JAMA Network Open didn't explore exactly what type of work doctors did on vacation, but the physicians I spoke to had some ideas.

"If I am not doing anything, I will triage my email a little bit," says Jocelyn Fitzgerald , a urogynecologist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved in the study. "I also find that certain high-priority virtual meetings sometimes find their way into my vacations."

Even if doctors aren't scheduled to see patients, there's almost always plenty of work to be done: dealing with emergencies, medication refills, paperwork. For many of us, the electronic medical record (EMR) is an unrelenting taskmaster , delivering a near-constant flow of bureaucratic to-dos.

When I go on vacation, my fellow primary care doctors handle that work for me, and I do the same for them.

But it can sometimes feel like a lot to ask, especially when colleagues are doing that work on top of their normal workload.

"You end up putting people in kind of a sticky situation, asking for favors, and they [feel they] need to pay it back," says Jay-Sheree Allen , a family physician and fellow in preventive medicine at the Mayo Clinic.

She says her practice has a "doctor of the day" who covers all urgent calls and messages, which helps reduce some of the guilt she feels about taking time off.

Still, non-urgent tasks are left for her to complete when she gets back. She says she usually logs in to the EMR when she's on vacation so the tasks don't pile up upon her return. If she doesn't, Allen estimates there will be about eight hours of paperwork awaiting her after a week or so of vacation.

"My strategy, I absolutely do not recommend," Allen says. But "I would prefer that than coming back to the total storm."

We have too little flexibility about when we take vacation

Lawren Wooten , a resident physician in pediatrics at the University of California San Francisco, says she takes 100% of her vacation time. But there are a lot of stipulations about exactly how she uses it.

She has to take it in two-week blocks — "that's a long time at once," she says — and it's hard to change the schedule once her chief residents assign her dates.

"Sometimes I wish I had vacation in the middle of two really emotionally challenging rotations like an ICU rotation and an oncology rotation," she says, referring to the intensive care unit. "We don't really get to control our schedules at this point in our careers."

Once Wooten finishes residency and becomes an attending physician, it's likely she'll have more autonomy over her vacation time — but not necessarily all that much more.

"We generally have to know when our vacations are far in advance because patients schedule with us far in advance," says Fitzgerald, the gynecologist.

Taking vacation means giving up potential pay

Many physicians are paid based on the number of patients they see or procedures they complete. If they take time off work, they make less money.

"Vacation is money off your table," says West, the physician well-being researcher. "People have a hard time stepping off of the treadmill."

A 2022 research brief from the American Medical Association estimated that over 55% of U.S. physicians were paid at least in part based on "productivity," as opposed to earning a flat amount regardless of patient volume. That means the more patients doctors cram into their schedules, the more money they make. Going on vacation could decrease their take-home pay.

But West says it's important to weigh the financial benefits of skipping vacation against the risk of burnout from working too much.

Physician burnout is linked not only to excess health care costs but also to higher rates of medical errors. In one large survey of American surgeons , for example, surgeons experiencing burnout were more likely to report being involved in a major medical error. (It's unclear to what extent the burnout caused the errors or the errors caused the burnout, however.)

Doctors think they're the only one who can do their jobs

When I go on vacation, my colleagues see my patients for me. I work in a small office, so I know the other doctors well and I trust that my patients are in good hands when I'm away.

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But ceding that control to colleagues might be difficult for some doctors, especially when it comes to challenging patients or big research projects.

"I think we need to learn to be better at trusting our colleagues," says Adi Shah , an infectious disease doctor at the Mayo Clinic. "You don't have to micromanage every slide on the PowerPoint — it's OK."

West, the well-being researcher, says health care is moving toward a team-based model and away from a culture where an individual doctor is responsible for everything. Still, he adds, it can be hard for some doctors to accept help.

"You can be a neurosurgeon, you're supposed to go on vacation tomorrow and you operate on a patient. And there are complications or risk of complications, and you're the one who has the relationship with that family," West says. "It is really, really hard for us to say ... 'You're in great hands with the rest of my team.'"

What doctors need, says West, is "a little bit less of the God complex."

We don't have any interests other than medicine

Shah, the infectious disease doctor, frequently posts tongue-in-cheek memes on X (formerly known as Twitter) about the culture of medicine. Unplugging during vacation is one of his favorite topics, despite his struggles to follow his own advice.

His recommendation to doctors is to get a hobby, so we can find something better to do than work all the time.

"Stop taking yourself too seriously," he says. Shah argues that medical training is so busy that many physicians neglect to develop any interests other than medicine. When fully trained doctors are finally finished with their education, he says, they're at a loss for what to do with their newfound freedom.

Since completing his training a few years ago, Shah has committed himself to new hobbies, such as salsa dancing. He has plans to go to a kite festival next year.

Shah has also prioritized making the long trip from Minnesota to see his family in India at least twice a year — a journey that requires significant time off work. He has a trip there planned this month.

"This is the first time in 11 years I'm making it to India in summer so that I can have a mango in May," the peak season for the fruit, Shah says.

Wooten, the pediatrician, agrees. She works hard to develop a full life outside her career.

"Throughout our secondary and medical education, I believe we've really been indoctrinated into putting institutions above ourselves," Wooten adds. "It takes work to overcome that."

Mara Gordon is a family physician in Camden, N.J., and a contributor to NPR. She's on X as @MaraGordonMD .

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