My wife’s voice carried a raised-eyebrows quality. “Norman Rockwell?”

We were on our way to the Berkshires for a summer sojourn. When I expressed eagerness about visiting the Rockwell museum in the town of Stockbridge, Mass., Susan sounded surprised. “He doesn’t seem like your sort of guy,” she said as we rolled up the Taconic Parkway.

It’s true that Rockwell’s name often evokes a gauzy image of an America bathed in innocence, an America that surely disappeared decades ago – if it ever existed at all.

But the artist who spent most of his professional life producing covers for the most popular American magazine of that time, The Saturday Evening Post, wasn’t about burnishing a self-deceptive national myth. Even his most ostensibly innocuous work was a rich, carefully crafted exercise in story-telling – and those stories were deeply rooted in the lives and experiences of everyday people, as they navigated their everyday delights and difficulties.

“The great subject of his work was American life – not the frontier version, with its questing for freedom and romance, but a homelier version steeped in the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America’s founding in the eighteenth century,” wrote Rockwell’s biographer, Deborah Solomon.

For those of us living in the age of Trump, it is painful to contemplate the gulf that has opened up between the America that Rockwell embraced and the present moment. Our country today has somehow internalized the pathologies that an earlier America came together to defeat: intolerance, aggression, xenophobic hatred, enforced conformity, ignorance and deceit in the service of power lust. I don’t think the artist would have liked it one bit.

It is no coincidence that Rockwell found his form in an era when so much of the country was rejecting elitism and embracing the worth of ordinary Americans – a cohort called at the time, with no irony or disparagement, “the common man.” In politics, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was centering the interests of laborers, farmers and small business owners in a program of robust social reform. In culture, artists were producing works about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events – John Steinbeck’s Dust Bowl migrants, Arthur Miller’s angst-haunted salesman, Frank Capra’s small-town building-and-loan proprietor. Aaron Copeland was composing orchestral music celebrating Appalachian homesteaders, western ranchers, and a piece explicitly titled “Fanfare for the Common Man.”

In his unassuming, unstudied manner, Rockwell meshed perfectly with this ethos. His Saturday Evening Post covers – he produced more than 300 of them over four decades – depicted country doctors comforting a child, bespectacled boys dreaming of heroism as they read adventure stories, a teenager on the cusp of adulthood imagining her future, a confident female riveter taking her lunch break. His subject, always, was an Everyman or Everywoman, and they always had a story to tell.

In his 1950 work “Shuffleton’s Barbershop,” Rockwell lets us gaze, voyeur-like, through the cracked window of a darkened barbershop. The only light comes from the small backroom, where several gray-haired musicians are playing for their own pleasure. Their audience consists of a cat, half-hidden in the shadows.

We know it’s wintertime, because there’s a wood-burning stove aglow, a detail that conveys a hint of alienation as we peer in from the chilly street at a group of friends gathered in cozy warmth to make music together. But that is balanced by the strong sense of connection and community, embodied in neighbors getting together after hours to play purely for their own enjoyment.

“The people in his paintings are related less by blood than by their participation in civic rituals, from voting on Election Day to sipping soda at a drugstore counter,” Solomon wrote. And if we catch a whiff of wistful nostalgia, perhaps it is because the America Rockwell depicted wasn’t riven by the bitterness, anger and mistrust that saturates our society today – and, perhaps not coincidentally, wasn’t held in thrall by screens, large and small, that isolate us from face-to-face connection.

The apotheosis of this spirit was expressed in Rockwell’s four covers in 1943 depicting Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, the core concepts of the country’s wartime principles: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear. The works struck such a chord that they became the centerpiece of a war bonds campaign that raised $132 million to help defeat Nazi Germany.

They are each, in their own way, masterpieces of realist art. The freedom of speech work shows a rough-hewn young man standing up in a public meeting to express his viewpoint, amid an audience that is skeptical but at the same time respectful. The artist’s model was a young farmer who got up in a town hall meeting in Rockwell’s hometown to speak in opposition to a school tax increase; his neighbors heard him out patiently, even though he was in the minority.

The freedom from fear cover is a master class in attention to detail. It shows two parents fondly tucking their young daughter and son into bed. The sense of safe haven is conveyed by the children’s peaceful slumber, the parents’ relaxed postures. There is a doll in the picture, but the sleeping child isn’t clutching it; she has let it fall to the floor. Only the father’s newspaper, with its headline about bombings, suggests the danger lurking on other shores, and the enormous stakes of the wartime struggle then underway.

“When Rockwell painted The Four Freedoms, the idea of our freedoms being lost was right in front of our face,” Steven Heller, then the art director of the New York Times book review, said in a 2007 documentary.

And then there is Late Rockwell, the artist who emerged in the 1960s after he left the Post and went to work for Look Magazine. One of the reasons for the change was that the Post insisted that Rockwell not depict Black people except in positions of servitude. In an era of civil rights activism, Rockwell could no longer abide that restriction.

The result was a double-page illustration for Look in 1964 paying tribute to six-year-old Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an integrated school in New Orleans. She is being escorted to class by four faceless federal marshals, walking past a wall defaced by racist graffiti and splattered with a poorly aimed tomato.

A few years later, Rockwell depicted another moment of integration, this time in a suburban neighborhood. The newcomers, two young Black children, stand a few feet away from three white kids. There is innocence here – baseball gloves, pigtails, pets – along with curiosity and a certain wary acceptance, as the children take each others’ measure. The title is quite consciously neutral: “New Kids in the Neighborhood.”

There was no neutrality or innocence of any kind in Rockwell’s depiction for Look of the murders of three civil rights workers in Mississippi. One of the victims, Michael Schwerner, is holding another, James Chaney, in his arms, while Andrew Goodman lies sprawled at their feet. The murderers are unseen, except for long shadows cast by a car’s headlights. Schwerner turns to look at the men who will kill him, his face reflecting recognition of impending death, but no trace of fear.

A clear through-line runs from these civil rights era works back to Rockwell’s wartime paintings, in which he captured the spirit of an America that had become a bulwark against all the evils antithetical to FDR’s Four Freedoms. It was not inevitable that the United States would fulfill that role – some historians would say it was a near thing – but through some alchemy of wise leadership and fundamental American decency, the country rose to the moment and passed history’s test. It is impossible not to wonder: Can we do it again?

If Susan had any lingering doubts about Rockwell, they were put to rest by “The Holdout,” a 1959 cover for the Post that might have been subtitled “Eleven Angry Men – And One Determined Woman.” (He painted it two years after the now-classic movie about a deadlocked jury was released.)

In Rockwell’s rendering, a lone female juror is being argued with, lectured, even bullied by the rest of the jury, all of them male. She is composed, but determined, and she is not giving in. In her resolute posture, we can see a clear echo of his wartime freedom of speech painting.

After spending all morning in the museum, we stopped at the bookstore, where we bought a copy of “The Holdout.” The framed illustration sits atop a cabinet in our living room, where I can see it as I write.

Susan has suggested a modern-day title for it: “The Mansplainers.”

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

Photos: Susan Benkelman

Further reading:

Deborah Solomon, “American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell,” Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

“American Dreams: Norman Rockwell and the Saturday Evening Post,” Lucasfilm, 2007,