Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (America: a Cultural History) (Hardcover)

by David Hackett Fischer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
English-speaking people have distinct words for the concepts of freedom and liberty. But that doesn't mean everyone agrees on what they mean, as Fischer (author of the bestselling Washington's Crossing) reveals in this exhaustive study of how the two have been defined in words and images from colonial times to the present. Short chapters supply the backstories of familiar symbols like the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam, and also reintroduce forgotten figures like Brother Jonathan, an early 19th-century representation of America as a country bumpkin that was popular in Europe. In a precursor to today's "salad bowl" image of cultural diversity, artists of the Revolutionary era portrayed America as "a flight of birds, a flock of sheep, even a kettle of fish." As the modern age approaches, photography becomes increasingly important, as seen in a triptych of riveting images from the Civil Rights movement. But the record also becomes somewhat muddled, Fischer finds, with Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix appearing as images on nearly equal footing with Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. In the end, the oversize, beautifully illustrated book shifts subtly from a rich graphic survey, incorporating painting, flags and sculpture, to a broader chronicle of the many ways Americans have articulated their most cherished ideals. Over 400 illus., 250 in color.
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From The Washington Post
In 1774, a committee established by the Continental Congress approved a design for a new seal, meant to give the nascent American cause symbolic and visual form. The design was a hodgepodge of signs that had been floating around during the last years of British rule: a marble column topped by a liberty cap resting on a copy of the Magna Carta, supported by 13 hands reaching in from the sides. The hands suggested unity, the Magna Carta recalled the tradition of limiting the sovereign's absolute rights, and the liberty cap, or pileus, was a classical reference to the rituals of freeing slaves from bondage. The elements all had good pedigree and clear meanings, but something went wrong in the execution. A soft-pointed liberty cap atop an upright marble column produced an image so clearly phallic that it brings a blush to the cheeks even today.

The seal of 1774 hasn't lasted; nor, for that matter, has the liberty cap, which was all the rage in the 18th century but is recognized today only by dutiful students of iconography. Recovering such details, and placing them in context, is the successful aim of David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom. Fischer's new book is the third in a series he is devoting to the cultural history of the United States (volume two is still in the works). It follows and builds on the central thesis of the first volume, Albion's Seed: that the early United States was the product of four great migrations from the British Isles -- Puritans, Royalists, Quakers and hardscrabble types from Ireland and the Scottish borderlands. Fischer doesn't reargue that bold claim, but he does rely on these distinctions to organize the sprawling contents of the new work.

And it does sprawl. At 851 pages, Liberty and Freedom is a big book, and a very loose-jointed one. The words "another," "also" and "others" recur again and again at the openings of Fischer's chapters, a rhetorical concession to a topic so huge that no single narrative or theme can really contain it. "The North also searched for emblems of its sacred cause," reads a typical transition, from a chapter that covers the Confederate flag and an anti-Union spittoon used in the South, to a chapter featuring an eagle named Old Abe who was used as a live mascot by a Union regiment from Wisconsin. The story of Old Abe's sad demise (in a fire years after the Civil War ended) is one of the book's many captivating digressions.

Even Fischer's title, and his brief effort to sketch a broader argument about liberty and freedom, don't give the contents much overarching unity. He argues that liberty and freedom were distinctly different understandings of the American project and that we have, throughout history, vacillated between conceiving our national ideal in limited, legalistic ways and more organic, responsible ones. Liberty, he writes, is built on the idea of being free from restraint, with what we think of today as rights conceived of more as privileges, granted and protected by the state. Liberty is a fundamentally Roman and usually hierarchical concept. Freedom, on the other hand, was derived from northern Europe and based on a more communal sense of equal rights and responsibility among all people. The two concepts are often used synonymously, Fischer acknowledges. "But ancient differences between liberty and freedom were not so easily erased," he argues. Occasionally, as in the images and ideals of liberty championed by Tory elites and loyalists, or the reciprocal rights championed by the Quakers, he can find the concepts clearly differentiated. But most of the time, they are intermingled or indistinct.

Despite this, and despite Fischer's reliance on the questionable idea of a collective memory or "folkways" that transmit symbolic meanings down through the ages, the book is endlessly entertaining. It offers the author a chance to fact-check and retell some of the great stories of American history (Francis Scott Key and "The Star-Spangled Banner," Betsy Ross and the flag) and dredge up icons that have been sadly forgotten. Among these is Brother Jonathan, a personification of the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries in the same vein as the British John Bull, or Yankee Doodle and Uncle Sam. Brother Jonathan was a bumptious sort who morphed, over time, into a figure of violence, hypocrisy (during the slavery debate) and nationalist myopia. To critics outside America, he was a nasty character and an apt representation of U.S. foreign policy. Inside this country, the author argues, he lost currency after the Civil War, in part because of increasing urbanization. And yet, with many in the United States roundly criticizing this country for precisely the things that Brother Jonathan once stood for, why has this particular folkway run dry?

There are, perhaps, larger conclusions to be drawn from the wealth of material Fischer has collected. It's interesting to see how little a role religious imagery plays. When religious meanings creep in, they tend to have a nasty edge: a satanic figure dictating the Emancipation Proclamation to Abraham Lincoln, or devil wings and horns drawn onto the image of the women's rights crusader Victoria Woodhull. It's also fascinating to note how vital a sense of grievance is to the perpetuation of a visual symbol. The Confederate flag survives because Southern resentment is still strong. Liberty trees and liberty poles, icons that emerged in Northern states during the Revolutionary era, have all but disappeared. In 2002, the U.S. Navy brought back the old "Don't Tread on Me" flag, with its angry serpent -- revivifying an old icon during a time of post-Sept. 11 anger.

Fischer mostly avoids the temptation to make these larger kinds of conclusions. He is interested in local context, close reading and connecting threads. He calls the books in this series "braided narratives," and while there are times when the braid is very loose, there are hundreds of fascinating strands in this volume, each of them worth tugging at.

Reviewed by Philip Kennicott

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 864 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195162536
• ISBN-13: 978-0195162530
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7.3 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #166,215 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Iconography of Liberty and Freedom, January 3, 2005

By	S. Pactor "reader" (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the third book in the four book (projected) that Fischer began with the seminal "Albion's Seed".

Liberty and Freedom is devoted to those two concepts, which Fischer holds are key to understanding the culture of America. Fischer uses quilts, flags, photos, paintings, sculpture and pretty much anything else under the sun(toilet decorated with a bald eagle, anyone?) to illustrate this thesis.

Clearly, Fischer is concerned with the idea of America. What is most novel about this book is the way that Fischer tries to assimilate some of the newer teachings of social history with the the method of traditional history(focus on military events/political leaders).

Never one to shy away from histiographical concerns, Fischer illustrates these varying approaches in a short appendix.

This book is of high quality, copiously illustrated and is published in conjunction with a touring museum exhibition that is travelling as far west as St. Louis (as a Californian, I am a little upset that it isn't coming out farther).

The chapters of the book are short to the point of being anecdotal: two pages on Emerson, four pages on Thoreau, three pages on Martin Luther King. However, that is in line with Fischer's central concern which is to document the imagery of the ideas of liberty and freedom in American history.

The heavier intellectual lifting is towards the front of the book. In the first hundred pages, Fischer produces a nifty chart that documents the differing origins of the concepts of liberty and freedom (Did you know that liberty derives from the Roman republic/empire whereas Freedom comes from Germanic/Anglo tribal roots?). He then relates these concepts to the cultural groups that settled America (and to which Albion's seed is entirely devoted).

While it is possible to quibble with the result, I will save that for the real historians. Suffice it to say, this book is an awesome achievment, and Fischer is once again to be commended, not only for his attempts to bravely reconsile two competing schools of history, but also for his large spirited message, that groups which turn away from the concepts of liberty and freedom ultimately lose the battle in America's "marketplace of ideas."

A must for cynics and believers alike.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars America's finest historian outdoes himself, December 11, 2005

By	Odysseus "A Traveller" (Virginia, USA) - See all my reviews

David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed established him as one of the finest historians writing for a general audience. Since the publication of that landmark history, Fischer has produced a number of outstanding books, including among them Paul Revere's Ride, and Washington's Crossing, each of which skillfully demonstrates how cultural forces, reflected in individual decisions and actions, affected the course of events at a critical fork in the historical road.

This latest work from Fischer compares favorably to his greatest works, and is a plausible candidate for his finest effort yet.

To be great history, a work must succeed on several levels. One is that it must be interesting -- the reader must feel compelled to press on. Another is that it must be informative; it should educate, ideally in a fair way, conveying what is most important, and minimizing the influence of author bias. But the acid test of what makes for a great history may be whether it enables the reader to understand his world in a fundamentally new, insightful way. Albion's Seed and Fischer's other great works accomplish this. So too does Liberty and Freedom, in spades.

Fischer aims to trace the development of the concepts and values of Liberty and Freedom throughout American history. To lay the foundation, he studies the terms themselves. Liberty, Fischer finds, derives from the classical Latin world, with connotations relating to the release from bondage. Consequently, in later history, it carries overtones of meaning the ability to move and to act without interference or constraint by others.

Freedom, on the other hand, relates to the Germanic "Freiheit," and has different connotations, specifically the possession of the full rights of citizenship, of belonging to a society. We see its connotations in phrases such as "the rights of free-born Englishmen," the sense that in belonging to a community, each member is accorded certain rights and freedoms.

Fischer argues that the English language is unique in carrying these twin concepts within the language in parallel, with the result that English-speaking cultures have long pursued both conceptions, and only more recently have begun to use the terms more interchangeably. The suggestion is made that the dual conception arises in part from the historical fact that both Romance and Germanic language and cultural influences implanted themselves in England many centuries ago.

Fischer traces the flowering of the concepts of liberty and freedom in America, with great attention to how these have been expressed through popular culture and political argument. His history is one of broad participation; elected leaders make cases for their visions of liberty and freedom, but so too do the teeming masses express their evolving views of liberty and freedom in ways that shape the country's direction.

Someone who is considering buying this book should be aware that this is just about the quickest 800 pages you will ever come across. I devoured it in just a few days on my commutes. His writing is brisk, the volume handsomely illustrated. The chapters are brief and thematically very tightly organized. If there is a slow patch in the book, I cannot recall it.

One of Fischer's more interesting conclusions pertains to the role of America's military conflicts in shaping the progress of American freedom. His general thesis is that each conflict has led at first to a curtailment of individual freedom, but then has resulted in its considerable expansion. Consider, for example, that the Civil War began with the suspension of habeas corpus and ended not only with its reinstatement but with the (then) radical 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, establishing emancipation and equal protection of the laws. WWII began with the incarceration of Japanese Americans, but its end ushered in the integration of America's schools, armed forces (and major league baseball.) Even the Cold War, which has become equated in Hollywood's popular memory with the early abuses by Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, produced the boomerang effects of Miranda Rights, the Civil Rights act, and many other expansions of liberty in the 1960s.

Fischer's message is a hopeful one in the climate of America's current conflict. He reminds us not only that each of America's conflicts has produced an initial constraint on individual liberties followed by their subsequent expansions, but also that each conflict has advanced the ball relative to the one before. The restraints on individual freedoms, for example, that occurred in the context of World War I far surpassed those that occurred in either WWII or the Cold War.

Fischer saves his most powerful lesson till the end, when he documents that political power flows to those who publicly dedicate themselves to liberty and freedom, not to those who promise cradle-to-grave security, government-provided benefits, or any variant thereof. Americans' commitment to the twin conceptions of liberty and freedom remains strong even as Americans disagree on what these concepts mean and how they should apply to our daily lives. But the politician who ignores these fundamental values does so at his/her own peril.

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A WINNER FOR THE SYMBOL-MINDED, December 1, 2004

By	Whitney Smith - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

If you're interested in American symbols of all kinds and/or in the varied and changing attitudes Americans have had toward liberty and freedom, this is a must-have book. Well-organized, easy to read but profound, with over 500 illustrations, this book again marks David Hackett Fischer as an author with a unique understanding of how the country's present has developed out of a past few Americans understand. Bravo, David!