Two national Freedom Trains have toured the United States: the 1947–49 special exhibit Freedom Train and the 1975–76 American Freedom Train which celebrated the United States Bicentennial. Each train had its own special red, white and blue paint scheme and its own itinerary and route around the 48 contiguous states, stopping to display Americana and related historical artifacts.
The 1940s Freedom Train exhibit was integrated—black and white viewers were allowed to mingle freely. When town officials in Birmingham, Alabama, and Memphis, Tennessee, refused to allow blacks and whites to see the exhibits at the same time, the Freedom Train skipped the planned visits, amid significant controversy.
The 1947–1949 Freedom Train
The first Freedom Train was proposed in April 1946 by Attorney General Tom C. Clark, who believed that Americans had begun taking the principles of liberty for granted in the post-war years. The idea was adopted by a coalition that included Paramount Pictures and the Advertising Council, which had just changed its name from "War Advertising Council".
Plans and messaging
Thomas D'Arcy Brophy (of advertising firm Kenyon & Eckhardt) described the Freedom Train as "a campaign to sell America to Americans". The Advertising Council planned an assortment of other events to accompany the Train, including messages in radio programs, comic books, and films. In each city where the train stopped, they organized a "Rededication Week" for public celebrations of the United States. In February 1947, the group formed the "American Heritage Foundation" and named Brophy its president.
The Board of Trustees for the new foundation included: Winthrop W. Aldrich (chairman), president of Chase National Bank and brother-in-law of J. D. Rockefeller Jr.; Chester Barnard, chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation; John Foster Dulles, then a lawyer and Republican political advisor, soon to become the U.S. Secretary of State; Paul G. Hoffman, CEO of Studebaker automobile company, administrator of the Marshall Plan, and soon-to-be President of the Ford Foundation; Eric Johnston, former President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and president of the Motion Picture Association of America; Reinhold Niebuhr, prominent theologian; and Charles E. Wilson, CEO of the General Electric Company and soon to be chief of the Office of Defense Mobilization—sometimes described as "co-president" of the United States under Truman.
The Board of Trustees did not include any African-Americans until after the train had launched. Walter White, Lester Granger, and A. Philip Randolph were proposed and rejected as candidates for membership. Frederick D. Patterson, president of Tuskegee Institute and founder of the United Negro College Fund was named as a trustee in October 1947.
American Federation of Labor President William Green and Congress of Industrial Organizations President Philip Murray were vice presidents of the Foundation.
The National Archives supplied the train with key documents, while, as archivist Elizabeth Hamer noted in August 1947, "Hollywood, chiefly, is putting up the capital for this exhibit." The Foundation rejected the list of documents proposed by the National Archives, which included documents such as Executive Order 8802. Contrary to the wishes of the Justice Department, the Foundation excluded collective bargaining from the list of citizens' rights. In the final roster, the only document pertaining to black history was the Emancipation Proclamation—and even in this case, accompanying commentary focused on the white president Abraham Lincoln who issued the document. The Train also displayed a letter from Christopher Columbus, the Mayflower Compact, and documents of German and Japanese surrender from World War II.
While preparing for the tour, the planners decided to downplay comparisons of the United States with Nazis, as well as direct calls for foreign intervention. Instead they sought to focus on crafting a shared ideology for Americans. Clark wrote, "Indoctrination in democracy is the essential catalytic agent needed to blend our various groups into one American family. Without it, we could not sustain the continuity of our way of life. In its largest sense, preaching Americanism is an affirmative declaration of our faith in ourselves."
The Train displayed exhibits such as "Good Citizen", which portrayed men wearing suits Exhibits also defined American freedoms in terms of consumerism and boasted of superior commodity production. For women (more often referred to as "girls" or "sisters"), good citizenship was defined in terms of clothing, participation in certain acceptable community activities, and raising children.