The Only Thing We Have to Fear

Reviews by Bill Doughty

Middle Age artist Hieronymous Bosch evoked fear and evil in his art hundreds of years ago.

Fear is corrosive. It eats away at a democracy. It feeds anger and hate. Sometimes it's necessary, but often fear is overhyped and misplaced, according to evidence provided by such critical thinkers as Steven Pinker, George Will, Bill Nye, Tom Hanks and Barry Glassner.

Fear is appealing and easy to access; the amygdala is immediate. The news media are rewarded by hyping fear: "If it bleeds, it leads." Autocrats foment fear to gain support. Fear works. 

Author Glassner reminds us in "The Culture of Fear":

"Samuel Coleridge was right when he claimed, 'In politics, what begins in fear usually ends up in folly.' Political activists are more inclined, though, to heed an observation from Richard Nixon: 'People react to fear, not love. They don't teach that in Sunday school, but it's true.' That principle, which guided the late president's political strategy throughout his career, is the sine qua non of contemporary political campaigning. Marketers of products and services ranging from car alarms to TV news programs have taken it to heart as well."

Glassner's national bestseller, featured in "Bowling for Columbine," is "The Culture of Fear: Why Americans are Afraid of the Wrong Things: Crime, Drugs, Minorities, Teen Moms, Killer Kids, Mutant Microbes, Plane Crashes, Road Rage, and So Much More" (Basic Books/Perseus, 1999). [Note: I pulled this book of the shelf to see how it could add context to the review of "Enduring Ideals," which follows this review; Glassner recently updated his work, and I'm looking forward to seeing his perspective twenty years later.]


Don't Believe the Hype

If people are afraid of the "wrong things," constantly sensationalized in the media and by some self-serving politicians, what are the "right things?" 

In "The Culture of Fear," Glassner tries to answer two questions: "Why are Americans so fearful lately, and why are our fears so often misplaced?" He concludes that instead of worrying about statistically minuscule threats, we should take "decisive action to quash – problems such as hunger, dilapidated schools, gun proliferation, and deficient health care for much of the U.S. population."

"Will it take an event comparable to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to convince us that we must joint together as a nation and tackle these problems? At the start of the new century it ought to be considerably easier for us to muster our collective will and take decisive action than it was for our own parents and grandparents six decades earlier. This time we do not have to put our own lives or those of our children at risk on battlefields halfway around the globe."

It's interesting to read Glassner's perspective, published two years before 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq.

He looks back to 1938 and the famous Orson Welles broadcast of an adaptation of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds." The broadcast created panic in New Jersey because of it's hyper-realistic presentation of actual "fake news." Glassner contrasts the hyper-fear of a Mars attack with the actual dangers of the rise of fascism in Europe at the time.


Commitment to Freedom

Meanwhile, nearly 80 years ago, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was alarmed – but not fearful – about the rise of Fascism, especially the threat of Nazism to Western democracies, as well as the militarization of Imperial Japan.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

On January 6, 1941, eleven months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, FDR gave his Four Freedoms speech. An examination of the speech's concepts is presented in a stunning coffee-table book, "Enduring Ideals: Rockwell, Roosevelt & the Four Freedoms" (Abbeville Press Publishers, 2018).

The book offers beautiful art by Norman Rockwell and other contemporaries, especially from World War II, as well as photos, sketches, source material and reimagined art inspired by the concepts of liberty that could be guaranteed by democracy.

Along with the finely reproduced art are insightful essays to give context and history.

William J. Vanden Heuvel, former deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, writes:

"(In) the address to the United States Congress that history knows as the Four Freedoms speech ... the president asked not only his countrymen and women but also the people of the world to understand that the terrible scourge of war could be justified to our children's children only if we in faith and honor determined to create a different world to assure the peace of humankind. That world, Roosevelt proposed, should be based on the Four Freedoms – freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. In the world of the time of the president's speech, however – beset by war, oppressed by Nazi domination, brutalized by racist thugs – every tenet of democracy was threatened and ridiculed."President Roosevelt's power as a speaker lay in his ability to present profound ideas in simple language."

Clockwise from top left: Freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

Rockwell's power as an artist transformed Roosevelt's words into pictures, even if the artist's paintings were imperfect in capturing the diversity and potential of America then and especially now. Rockwell hired people to pose and painted from staged photographs, so his realism wasn't quite real, and his staging might be considered hokey and corny in a post-Vietnam War and post-9/11 America.

Nevertheless, according to another essayist in this volume, Mark Shulman, "Rockwell translated FDR's lofty language into imagery that appealed to Americans' better angels and inspired the kinds of sacrifice necessary to fund the (Second World) war, to fight it, and to persevere in the face of horrifying adversity." 

In the wake of the First World War and the Great Depression – and in the growing shadow of an approaching WWII – FDR succeeded in coming to the aid of Great Britain.

Roosevelt and his team negotiated the U.S. Navy destroyers-for-bases initiative and lend-lease act while prying Americans, influenced by Charles Lindbergh, away from isolationism in the America First movement. 

Essayist Stephane Grimaldi writes, "Norman Rockwell embodied the American people who had to resign themselves to the need to defend the universal ideals of justice, peace, and prosperity. But President Roosevelt had to convince citizens that a foreign war was necessary. After all, aren't oceans the last bastion against tyranny?" Not really.

Imperial Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor and other parts of Oahu on Dec. 7, 1941 forced the nation to confront the realities and dangers of foreign threats in the Pacific and Europe. Rockwell's paintings, produced in 1942, were in part a mission statement outlined by Roosevelt for the United States and its Allies.

Rockwell's Rosie the Riveter, part woman, part man.

Essayist Jan Eliasson writes, "...while oceans may separate people, there is not that much that sets hopes and dreams apart."

This book blends history and shows the power of art, including in shaping public opinion. Some surprises included in this book:

• Rockwell's portrait of tough and gritty Rosie the Riveter, literally transgender because Rockwell used a woman's face and a man's body as real-life models; 
• Rockwell turning down a request to paint recruiting art during Vietnam;
• an interview with Ruby Bridges (the black girl in the iconic and powerful 1963 Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With") revealing that her father fought and was wounded in the Korean War; 
• the effects of Rockwell's art on Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and the United Nations; 
• how FDR, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy, was inspired by President Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address in developing the four freedoms concept; and
• Eleanor Roosevelt's role in translating FDR's mission statement into a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Commitment Against Fear

Essayist Allida Black insists we recognize the role FDR's widow, Eleanor Roosevelt, played after WWII in perpetuating the concepts and ideals of the four freedoms. Black shows Ms. Roosevelt's "concrete" achievement in putting the four freedoms into action:

"If FDR gave us the vision that Rockwell immortalized on canvas, ER insisted that American's recognize what it meant. 'It is not only in war ... that we fight for freedom,' she wrote, shortly after Rockwell's paintings appeared in the Saturday Evening Post. 'When the war is over, the four freedoms will not have been won, we shall simply have dominated their more aggressive enemies. At all times, day by day, we have to continue fighting for freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from fear, and freedom from want – for these are things that must be gained in peace as well as in war.'"

"Ultimately," Black writes, "Eleanor Roosevelt's commitment changed the world." The same can be said, to a degree, about Norman Rockwell who confronted fear in various forms before and after the war.

But fear, according to essayist Daisy Rockwell, the artist's granddaughter, "is now threatening all four of the freedoms Norman Rockwell enshrined."

Daisy Rockwell contends, "Since 2001, Americans have in fact been encouraged to live their lives in fear." She says, "A terrorist, by definition, is someone whose goal is to incite fear. Fear leads to chaos."

It can be argued that the attacks of 9/11 and Russian attacks on our political system and culture are forms of terrorism designed to cause fear and division leading to an erosion of freedom and unity.

As usual, the antidote to the corrosion of fear is found in education and critical thinking. So is art. "If you see something, say something" becomes, according to Daisy Rockwell, "see something, paint something.

Bill Nye says, "see something, think something."

Hieronymous Bosch's weird and fearful Vision of Hell.

Norman Rockwell's concept of the Golden Rule, a core concept for the Four Freedoms – universally applied.