In 1943 Norman Rockwell painted democracy’s portrait. An editor from Kansas helped make it possible.

Artist Norman Rockwell stands among his paintings on exhibit in 1965 at Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, Los Angeles. (UCLA Library Special Collections)

The Saturday Evening Post was in trouble.

In March 1942 it had published “The Case Against the Jews,” a polemic by 33-year-old journalist and conscientious objector Milton Mayer. Two years before, also in the pages of the Post, Mayer had urged the United States to stay out of World War II because another global conflict would do more harm than good. Now the young activist, who was of Jewish heritage himself, accused American Jews of losing their souls by being assimilated into materialistic, gentile culture.

Subscriptions were canceled and so many advertisers lost that the Post had to double its newsstand price, to a dime. With a circulation of just over 3 million, the Post was America’s best-selling publication. But with the trouble caused by Mayer’s piece, it saw the top spot go to Life, an upstart photo magazine not yet a decade old.

If there was a star at the Saturday Evening Post, it was Norman Rockwell.

Rockwell, whose saccharine illustrations of American life featuring cooks, policemen, housewives in bathrobes, and boys and dogs adorned many Post covers, watched the turmoil at the magazine with concern, according to Rockwell biographer Deborah Solomon. There were rumors the magazine was about to fold.

“When he thought about the Post going under, he wasn’t sure whether his career would be over, or whether he would be better off,” Solomon writes in “American Mirror,” her 2013 biography of Rockwell. “At least his life would be in his own hands. Tired of answering to Post editors, he wanted to do something major, to alter his fate.”

The Post, which had a reputation of being isolationist, anti-New Deal, and skeptical of the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, found itself in a precarious spot. The country had entered World War II less than four months before and the outcome seemed anything but certain. In Europe, the Nazis had invaded Poland, Belgium, Holland, France — and now Russia. Jews, dissidents, homosexuals, Romani, and Soviet prisoners of war were being sent to Dachau, but it was not yet known the forced labor concentration camp was transforming into an extermination machine. In the Pacific, the Philippines had fallen to the Japanese and Gen. Douglas MacArthur had fled the island stronghold of Corregidor. Since Pearl Harbor, American resolve had turned against the powers of fascism and imperialism.

The Post was in danger of losing the trust of the American people.

Curtis Publishing sacked Post editor Wesley Stout and a couple of other names high on the masthead. The new editor was Ben Hibbs, a Kansan who was editing the Country Gentleman, another Curtius publication, aimed at the business of farming.

Hibbs was 40. He had grown up in Pretty Prairie, a town of a few hundred in south-central Kansas. His first byline, at the age of 10, was an announcement for the local paper about his fourth grade class hosting a Saturday morning picnic at the Old Settlers Grove.

“I suppose I never had a chance to be anything but a journalist,” he mused. “To me the English language has always seemed to be an instrument of beauty and precision, and from early boyhood the mere act of setting down words on paper has kindled within me a pleasant glow of inner excitement.”

He worked his way through journalism school at the University of Kansas in Lawrence by working in a brick plant, sweeping up the local Methodist church, and bussing trays in the cafeteria. After graduation, his first job was as a reporter at a newspaper at Pratt, and he was soon writing about moonshiners in the sandhills. He later took a job as an English instructor at the college at Fort Hays, he recalled. But he wasn’t happy and soon returned to journalism.

His last job in Kansas was as managing editor of the Arkansas City Traveler. Then Curtis Publishing of Philadelphia offered him a job as an associate editor of the Country Gentlemen, a publication with an eye-popping circulation of more than 2 million. When he became editor of the magazine in 1940, he introduced himself to readers as a Kansas product who loved America and believed in human freedoms.

He said he had “an abiding faith in the triumph of human liberties over brutality and blood and ruin which darken half the world, that (I believe) passionately that the decency and fundamental rightness of the people, particularly the common folks, will carry this nation through the storm and dangers of the years we now live.”

He rejected isolationism because science had erased the protections of time and distance. After Pearl Harbor, he urged Americans to stay “mad, fighting mad” to accomplish the tasks ahead and to give their children a chance at a peaceful future.

“Ben Hibbs speaks the ‘Kansas language’ so well and so consistently that his style of writing may be expected to have some influence on the tradition-bound Saturday Evening Post,” predicted an opinion writer at the Kansas City Star in March 1942.

The writer then quoted Hibbs on a recent visit to his Kansas hometown.

“There are thousands of Pretty Prairies throughout this land and therein lies my faith in America. … In the country and the country towns there is still a stability of thought and life which is our greatest bulwark in time of crisis.”

As Hibbs was being named editor of the Post, Rockwell was wrestling with his artistic crisis. In May 1940 a former administrator of the Museum of Modern Art, Thomas D. Mabry, now assigned to a division that produced graphics for the war department, told Rockwell that one of their urgent needs was for posters depicting the four freedoms as outlined by Roosevelt in his 1941 State of the Union address. But the material assigned to Rockwell to illustrate, including the Atlantic Charter, was too abstract to render into a painting, according to biographer Solomon.

How do you visualize freedom?

The answer came to Rockwell as he was lying in bed in his Arlington, Vermont, home at 3 one morning. He’d recently attended a town meeting during which a working-class acquaintance had spoken against a plan to rebuild a school that had burned down.

“Nobody agreed with him, but everyone listened,” Solomon wrote.

That’s it, Rockwell thought. That’s freedom of speech.

Rockwell could show Roosevelt’s four freedoms — speech, worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear — by painting his neighbors doing ordinary things, as Solomon put it. Rockwell was at his studio by 5 that morning, roughing out sketches.

But the Office of War Information was not enthusiastic about Rockwell’s sketches. Rockwell was told the OWI wasn’t looking for illustrators, according to Solomon, but for fine arts men — real artists.

On his way back home, Rockwell stopped in Philadelphia for a meeting with his new editor, Hibbs. If Hibbs didn’t immediately recognize that Rockwell had the idea for some of the most iconic images in popular art, he at least saw a chance to counter the anti-Mayer backlash and shore up relations with the Roosevelt White House.

“Drop everything else,” Hibbs told him. “Just do the Four Freedoms.”

Rockwell spent the next seven months on the paintings, according to the Saturday Evening Post’s website. They were published weekly starting Feb. 20, 1943, each occupying a full page (and the pages were big back then, 10 by 13 inches) and accompanied with an essay. The essays were by Booth Tarkington, Will Durant, Carlos Bulosan, and Stephen Vincent Benét.

“Freedom of Speech” was the first in the series, a realization of the sketch of the town hall meeting, with a forgettable essay by Tarkington.

“Freedom of Worship” came next. It is a tightly framed composition of mostly white faces and hands in prayer representing several mainstream faiths. It is considered to be the weakest of the series. It is a pleasing composition, but does not convey the constitutional guarantee of freedom of — and freedom from — religion.

“Worship” is accompanied by an essay by Durant that is at once offensively pompous and puerile: “When we yield our sons to war, it is in the trust that their sacrifice will bring to us … the privilege of winning for all peoples the most precious gifts in the orbit of life — freedom of body and soul.”

“Freedom from Want” was third, with an essay by Filipino-American novelist and poet Bulosan. This is the illustration that depicts a family at Thanksgiving dinner, with a grandmotherly type placing a huge roast turkey on the family table. The essay is the best and bravest of the four, with Bulosan writing on behalf of the working poor, migrants, artists and intellectuals, and the disaffected.

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

Bulosan talks about Kansas wheat and Mississippi rain, of the winds of the Great Lakes, of the timbers in Oregon and wildflowers in Maine.

“We are multitudes in Pennsylvania mines, in Alaskan canneries,” he writes. “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.”

The fourth painting, “Freedom from Fear,” finished the series with the March 13, 1943, issue. It depicts a white couple tucking their children into bed for the night, the father holding a newspaper with a headline about German bombings. The accompanying Benét essay is unremarkable.

The Rockwell paintings were an immediate hit. The government made them the centerpiece of a new war bonds campaign and a seemingly endless series of posters followed. You can still buy them as prints from the Norman Rockwell Museum at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where the artist lived the last 25 years of his life.

In 1943, the paintings weren’t just popular art but an articulation of what many Americans were searching to put into words. What were we fighting for? What are the things that are most precious to us? What is the promise of American democracy? They were an affirmation in oil paint of our basic decency, of our shared dreams, and a belief in the future. The paintings helped us make sense of an otherwise senseless world. They are flawed by mid-century prejudices and assumptions, something the Post seems to acknowledge in part with the Bulosan essay, but they are as near a universal artistic declaration of democracy as we could have expected, if not hoped for.

For a 21st century reimagining of “Freedom from Fear” and the other paintings, Smithsonian magazine featured the work of artists Ryan Schude, Edel Rodriguez, Tim O’Brien, and Melinda Beck.

Rockwell would continue his work long after World War II, and he would wrestle in a more realistic way with American democracy in “The Problem We All Live With.” It is a 1963 depiction of a Black child, Ruby Bridges, being accompanied by U.S. marshals as she walks past racist graffiti on her way to school.

Rockwell died in 1978, at the age of 84.

Hibbs died before him, of leukemia, in 1974. He was 73.

His obituary in the New York Times noted that Hibbs, who helmed the Post for 20 years, had been a personal friend of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had met Eisenhower when, during World War II, the general invited him and other journalists to tour Dachau to counter misinformation that atrocities there had been exaggerated.

In other words, Hibbs was brought to the death camp to fight the first round of Holocaust denial. Some 40,000 individuals died there, of overwork, disease, starvation, and execution. In total, the Nazis killed six million Jew and millions of others.

“I have been asked by many people if the concentration camps were as bad as the newspapers have been saying,” Hibbs wrote in the Post. “I can answer in one word: Worse.”

Milton Mayer, the young writer who in 1942 upset the Post applecart, survived the furor over his essay. A decade later he traveled to Germany and interviewed the residents of a midsized town about how ordinary people felt about the Nazi regime. What he found, reported in his 1955 book “They Thought They Were Free,” is that the descent into totalitarianism was so gradual that most people didn’t notice it.

Mayer died in 1986, at 77. The book is Mayer’s best known work.

In it, he concluded that otherwise decent individuals had allowed themselves to be seduced by lies, and some clung to those lies long after the defeat of the Nazis.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.