Norman Rockwell - Freedom from Fear

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression - everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way - everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want - which, translated into universal terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants - everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear - which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor - anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb. 

Taken from Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 speech to Congress, the "Four Freedoms" -- Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear -- became a rallying point for the United States during WWII.

Artist Norman Rockwell created four vignettes to illustrate the concepts. Rockwell intended to donate the paintings to the War Department, but after receiving no response, the painter offered them to the Saturday Evening Post, where they were first published on February 20, 1943.

Popular reaction was overwhelming, and more than 25,000 readers requested full-color reproductions suitable for framing.

After the paintings were first published in 1943 - by the Saturday Evening Post - the U.S. Department of the Treasury put Rockwell's "Four Freedoms" on tour around the country.  That tour raised more than $130,000,000 in war-bond sales.