A copy of Norman Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech" hangs on the wall of Croton's government meeting room. Does its spirit reign on the floor?

A letter in The Gazette by a former trustee prompted us to research the history of the iconic art work that graces the Georgianna Grant Meeting Room. It was donated by another trustee, William Ryder.

“Freedom of Speech” by Norman Rockwell

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If you read the letters page of the current issue of The Gazette, you may have noticed a short correspondence from former Croton trustee Bob Anderson, lamenting that our village elections are held in November and not in March like they used to be.

We commented on that just a bit more than a week ago, posing the question of whether the 2011 switch from March to November had made Croton more democratic, or rather, more Democratic. Of course to the two-thirds of Croton voters who are registered Democrats, it’s probably not a big problem, although we have reason to believe that even some on the left of the political spectrum don’t think it’s a good idea to have what some have called a “one party town.”

In his letter, Anderson opined that the move to November elections “was a way to consolidate the power of a single political party and eliminate the open discussions and debates on local issues” typical of a purely village election. Anderson mentioned the print of a famous Norman Rockwell painting mounted in the Georgianna Grant Meeting Room, where the Board of Trustees convenes—entitled “Freedom of Speech”—and asked whether the principle expressed in the artwork “is true any longer in our village.”

That got us to wondering how and when the Rockwell painting got there, and some other things as well. It turns out that the print was donated to the village during the 1970s by William Ryder, who was a well respected trustee at the time. Ryder is still with us, although sadly his wife, Fidelis Ryder, passed away earlier this year.

We got the story from the Ryders’s son, Billy Ryder. Billy told us that his father, in fact the whole family, were big fans of Norman Rockwell’s works, and would often visit the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA.

“My Dad bought many of his prints that he signed very cheaply back in the day and stored them under his bed,” Billy said. “Norman Rockwell passed away and my Dad had all the prints certified by the museum [and] had them framed with protective glass. I have three hanging in my home as do my brothers and sisters.”

Norman Rockwell in the 1920s

Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” has its own fascinating history, which is more well known. It was one of four paintings he executed to illustrate Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.” Reportedly Rockwell struggled to come up with the right concept. Then he remembered a scene from West Arlington, Vermont, where Rockwell lived from 1939 to 1953. At a town meeting in 1942, one of his neighbors, Jim Edgerton, got up to express a very unpopular opinion against rebuilding the school house after the original one had burned down. Edgerton was struggling to make his living as a farmer, and he feared the increased taxes would ruin him.

(Edgerton lived to be 92, and died in 2022.)

Rockwell recalled that while there was no way his neighbor’s opinion was going to prevail, he was listened to respectfully, as the painting so beautifully expresses.

That brings us back to the present day, and our own town meetings of the Croton Board of Trustees. One can easily find old videos of earlier Board meetings, much livelier than today’s, when members of the public got up to challenge the trustees’s actions and policies and often engaged in lively debates with them. But, as we have lamented before in the Chronicle, contemporary meetings of the Board allow Crotonites to speak for only five minutes and there is only very limited give and take between the trustees and the public they supposedly serve.

This is true even during public hearings on new laws or other important issues. Debate is straightjacketed, channeled, and limited to the extreme. Even the trustees rarely debate each other about proposed legislation and expenditures. Almost all Board votes these days are unanimous. And during village elections, when unopposed candidates might still be expected to hold town halls—like the one Jim Edgerton spoke at—and make their cases for re-election to the public, they do not do so. Nor, even worse, do they seem to feel the need to do so.

So while we have a Rockwell painting on the wall, and the formal trappings of democracy on the meeting floor, do we still have the spirit of democracy in our halls of government? We think it is questionable.

We also think that this is a bipartisan issue, one that should concern everyone across the political spectrum. After all, what goes around can eventually come around; and absolute power can, as Lord Acton wrote in the 19th century, corrupt absolutely.

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