Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (review)

David Hackett Fischer's Liberty and Freedom is a museum exhibit catalog, an encyclopedia of the iconography of liberty and freedom, and a narrative of the multiple meanings of liberty and freedom in America from the arrival of the first Europeans to the present day. The book is a companion to the exhibit "American Visions of Liberty and Freedom," which started at the Virginia Historical Society and which will eventually travel to Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Lexington, Massachusetts, and St. Louis. But the book is more than a museum catalog; it is the third volume of a planned series of four on which Fischer has been working for over two decades. Albion's Seed was the first book in the series. The second and fourth volumes (not yet published) will examine the meeting of Africans and Europeans in America and the "cultural transformation" after the Revolution. Fischer describes the first and second volumes as ethnographic, the third as iconographic, and the fourth as quantitative with close attention to individual experience. These books are united by a set of common questions and the centrality of culture as an explanatory force. In Liberty and Freedom, Fischer builds upon his argument from Albion's Seed to argue that just as British folkways persisted in America and contributed to the creation of distinctive regional cultures, there were multiple folk cultures of liberty and freedom and in many cases, these persist in America today.

In his introduction, Fischer explores the etymology of liberty and freedom from the ancients to the Vikings to the English as they were about to embark to America, defining liberty as "ideas of independence, separation, and autonomy for individuals or groups," and freedom as the "rights of belonging and full membership in a community of free people" (10). Of course these definitions meant different things to different people at different times. Fischer identifies four ideas of liberty and freedom that parallel the four British folkways of Albion's Seed—ideas associated with Puritan New England, Cavalier Virginia, Quakers in the Delaware Valley, and the backcountry.

Trees, goddesses, bells, and reptiles and insects were all part of the iconography of liberty in early America and represented one or more of the folkways. Fischer has high praise for scholars who have tried to tackle some of the same issues, in particular Michael Kammen's Spheres of Liberty and Eric Foner's Story of American Freedom. But while Kammen's and Foner's approaches are good for studying documents or the intellectual history of freedom, Fischer claims they do not adequately address how ordinary Americans felt about and defined liberty and freedom, which is what his book claims to do.

Fischer divides the history of liberty and freedom into five chronologically defined periods—Early America (1607–1775), A Republic United (1776–1840), A Nation Divided (1840–1912), A World at War (1916–1945), and a People Among Others (1945–2004). He explores the iconography (broadly defined) of liberty and freedom by explaining the meaning of objects, art, cartoons, flags, people, songs, mottos, documents, furniture, and monuments, tracing the meanings of these icons from their creation into the twenty-first century. For example, Fischer tracks the transformation of Uncle Sam from a real New England Yankee to the kindly old uncle that he became.

Goddesses and women were significant symbols of liberty and freedom. Fischer examines how the images became more Americanized, changing in the 1780s from representations of ancient goddesses to images of Columbia and the mother of the republic fully capable of defending her own freedom and independence. In the 1790s, images of liberty focused on youth and beauty as opposed to the earlier, more bellicose images and they passed through a more matronly phase at the beginning of the nineteenth century. During times of war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberty became more serious, while in times of peace, liberty retreated to the image of a...