This commentary speculates about how famed Vermont painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell might have viewed Burlington’s March 2 town meeting elections in relation to his beloved free speech.
But I want to begin with the great Roman Cato the Elder on willful destruction of the traditions that make a nation truly what it is. He warned the ancient Romans that they would lose their republic if they lost the traditions that allowed them to be a republic.
The Founding Fathers read about Cato in Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.” They made freedom of speech part of the foundation of the American republic.
That foundation was massively increased when Franklin Delano Roosevelt developed the concept of the four freedoms — of speech, religion, from want, and from fear. All readers have to do is type in the link, Rockwell, Roosevelt, and the Four Freedoms, and they will see the C-SPAN exhibit put together by the Massachusetts Rockwell Museum, and a talk guiding you through the exhibit by a George Washington University art professor, when it appeared in Washington, D.C. Also, they can search for the exhibit book with the same title as the exhibit, and they will learn even more about the combined work of Roosevelt and Rockwell in emphasizing, above all, the links between freedom of speech and freedom from fear.
When Rockwell’s paintings appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1943, a crescendo of support began for inextricably linking his artistic interpretation of the positivity of free speech as an antidote to the negativity of fear. Freedom of speech and from fear are depicted as the empathy that greets a speaker by those who disagree with him and ultimately voted against his position, and the empathy that parents have for a child who they tuck into bed, protecting them from fear.
In a mysterious coincidence in American history, 1943 was also the year of the greatest single Supreme Court opinion on freedom of speech, the First Amendment and the prohibition on discrimination against viewpoints like that of the speaker in Rockwell’s painting.
State censorship of viewpoints is now forbidden by a long line of Supreme Court decisions that prevent the left and the right from censoring viewpoints. But the greatest statement of this principle was Justice Robert Jackson’s statement in West Virginia v. Barnette, 1943, which held that schoolchildren cannot be forced to salute the flag or pledge allegiance to the flag.
Rarely has so much been put into a single statement as Justice Jackson’s ringing declaration: “No official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess, by word or act their faith therein.“
Rockwell, Roosevelt and Justice Jackson would have been amazed if they could come back and see this week’s town meeting elections in Burlington. My city council representative and candidate in the Central District has joined all the other Progressive councilors, and all the mayoral candidates, in their attack on the free speech of the muralist Pierre Hardy by arbitrarily and capriciously removing his downtown mural to a place where no one can see it.
They have done this in the interest of a false and misleading concept of diversity, which has been used over and over in this country as a weapon against free speech.
The ancient Roman Cato the elder, the great American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the great Vermont painter Norman Rockwell, and the great Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, all would have disagreed.
