“Emily S. Rosenberg has given us a fine, concise study of war, memory, and mythmaking in America that will prove equally appealing to teachers, students, and general readers.”–John W. Dower, author of “Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II”

Emily S. Rosenberg is DeWitt Wallace Professor of History at Macalester College. She is the author of Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (also published by Duke University Press) and Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945. She is coauthor of In Our Times: America since World War II and Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People.

A Date Which Will Live

Pearl Harbor in American MemoryBy Emily S. Rosenberg

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2003 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3206-0

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………ixIntroduction…………………………………………………………………………………………1I Signifying Pearl Harbor: The First Fifty Years…………………………………………………………91. Infamy: Reinvigorating American Unity and Power……………………………………………………….112. Backdoor Deceit: Contesting the New Deal……………………………………………………………..343. Representations of Race and Japanese-American Relations………………………………………………..534. Commemoration of Sacrifice………………………………………………………………………….71II Reviving Pearl Harbor after 1991…………………………………………………………………….995. Bilateral Relations: Pearl Harbor’s Half-Century Anniversary and the Apology Controversies…………………1016. The Memory Boom and the “Greatest Generation”…………………………………………………………1137. The Kimmel Crusade, the History Wars, and the Republican Revival………………………………………..1268. Japanese Americans: Identity and Memory Culture……………………………………………………….1409. Spectacular History………………………………………………………………………………..15510. Day of Infamy: September 11, 2001…………………………………………………………………..174Notes……………………………………………………………………………………………….191Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………213Index……………………………………………………………………………………………….229

Chapter One

Infamy

Reinvigorating American Unity and Power

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a master of persuasion, seized the opportunity of the surprise Japanese attack to appeal to Americans to join together in a war against the empire of Japan. In penning his six-and-one-half-minute speech to Congress asking for a state of war against Japan, he chose his words carefully. The address opened: “Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941-a date which will live in world history-the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” FDR crossed out “world history” and substituted “infamy.”

“A date which will live in infamy”

Infamy became the theme of the address. FDR did not ask Americans to go to war to protect the national interest, to stop Japan’s imperial ambitions, to protect vital resources, to avenge Japan’s atrocities in China, or to stand firm against aggression from a Tripartite alliance of dictators. He did not ask Americans to save democracy or civilization. Although any of these themes might have been invoked to rally Americans around familiar foreign policy traditions and to provide a persuasive framework, he did not choose them. Perhaps Roosevelt feared recalling President Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric during World War I. Wilson’s war message of April 1917 had detailed the strategic threat posed by the enemy, agonized over the violence of war, and advanced idealistic and lofty goals to justify participation. During the 1930s, however, the country’s strong antiwar, isolationist, and anti-Wilsonian sentiment had made such themes a political liability. In this initial speech to Congress, Roosevelt avoided echoes of Wilson’s war message and, instead, adopted the sole framework of “infamy”-a rhetorical tradition closely related to America’s frontier-fighting heritage.

In a very short appeal that contained no details about America’s security interests or the lives and equipment lost, the president called on Americans to avenge “infamy,” “treachery,” and “an unprovoked and dastardly attack.” Roosevelt summoned the nation to fight not just an enemy nation, but a treacherous people who would deceitfully negotiate for peace while preparing a surprise war. “Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us” (italics mine). In emphasizing the “character” of the attack by Japan and promising that such “infamy” needed to be followed through to “inevitable triumph,” Roosevelt structured his narrative to recall America’s most celebrated frontier legends: Custer’s Last Stand and the Alamo. These, too, were terrible defeats that provided rallying cries for overwhelming military counterforce leading to total victory. Memory research confirms that people remember events in ways that fit already familiar patterns and narrative structures. The infamy framework for Pearl Harbor was perhaps so powerful because it already circulated widely in frontier lore.

By referring to an “infamy framework,” I am not suggesting that Japan’s attack was in any way unreal or that “infamy” was not an appropriate descriptor. Rather, I use the term “infamy framework” as a shorthand for the various rhetorical and narrative components that came to structure the most influential remembering of the attack. Later chapters will examine other frameworks, some more and some less compatible with this one.

Historian Richard Slotkin (among others) has shown how the defeat of General George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry regiment by a large force of Indians led by Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 had become the iconic object called “Custer’s Last Stand.” Shaped by mass-marketed and highly partisan newspapers during the late nineteenth century, the last-stand legend buttressed a familiar frontier perspective on late nineteenth-century debates over Indian policy: progress in America could be achieved not through accommodation and philanthropy toward so-called “noble savages.” Instead, it could come only through regenerative, violent warfare against these barbaric racial others. In the traditional version of that legend, writes Slotkin, the battle occurs “in the margins of civilization, which poses the most extreme test of the culture’s value and its power to shape history.” This frontier challenge summoned men to marshal their assertively masculine traits and to reject soft, feminized values and policies. The Custer created in the legend, with his blond hair and youthful vigor, gallantly sacrificed his men in a defeat that would subsequently be gloriously avenged by vigorous military counterforce. The last-stand legend taught that strong, frontier-hardened men needed to secure civilization against barbarous attacks and to oppose the compromises proposed by (feminized) weaklings in the East.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this last-stand legend became widely memorialized in journalism, histories, textbooks, Wild West shows, and visual images of all kinds. Slotkin shows how it became an available metaphor not only to support the federal government’s determined warfare to end Indian resistance, but also to justify the use of force against whomever-labor militants, for example-seemed to threaten the established order. The metaphor provided by the last-stand legend also contributed to reshaping the historical memory of an earlier event-the siege at the Alamo. In March 1836, during the struggle over the independence of Texas, Mexico’s general Antonio Lpez de Santa Anna had led an attack on some two hundred Texans at an old mission in San Antonio called the Alamo. All of the Alamo’s defenders, including the legendary frontier figures James Bowie and Davy Crockett, were killed. The Alamo became a rallying cry for a counterattack by Sam Houston’s army, which defeated Santa Anna and secured the independence of Texas later that spring. An event of mostly regional significance for most of the rest of the nineteenth century, the battle of the Alamo was shaped by a concerted effort of Texan elites during the 1890s into a legend of national visibility and significance. Like the Last Stand, the Alamo became a metaphor for a massacre by racialized primitives that rallied righteous revenge by men of heroic, masculine qualities. “Remember the Alamo!” became a slogan known to most Americans, and on the eve of the War of 1898 a similarly structured call to action, “Remember the Maine!” whipped up nationalistic anger against a (mis)alleged Spanish “attack” on a U.S. ship in Cuba.

Nearly half a century later, the Pearl Harbor narrative became a refreshed version of these familiar cautionary tales. Physical defeat justified righteous revenge, even expressed as divine retribution. It became a marker of the nation’s moral superiority and its unjust victimization. In the late 1930s the Fiesta San Jacinto pilgrimage to the Alamo had become a popular annual event celebrated each April 22. Hollywood’s rendition of Custer’s Last Stand, They Died with Their Boots On (1941), starring Errol Flynn, played to packed theaters just before the Pearl Harbor attack. Understood through the prism of the Last Stand and the Alamo, the Pearl Harbor attack gained emotive power as an icon. It, too, promised fierce revenge against another humiliating defeat visited upon Americans. In the final revision of his speech, Roosevelt handwrote: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” The Custer/ Alamo/Pearl Harbor narrative was simple and nationalistic: Don’t mess with Americans or they will rightly rise up to destroy you.

Roosevelt’s speech also emphasized that the attack hit U.S. territory itself. Roosevelt’s fear that the damage might not be perceived as hitting close enough to home to crush isolationist sentiment guided his revisions. Three times in his first draft, Roosevelt wrote that attacks came against Hawaii and the Philippines. On revision, the Philippines (a U.S. colony but not a territory) was deleted, and it was only mentioned later in a list of other Japanese attacks throughout the Pacific. The infamy trope worked better if the attack was positioned clearly on American soil. Again, this emphasis recalled another episode in U.S.-Texas-Mexican relations when President James Polk used the rallying cry that a Mexican attack had “shed American blood on American soil” (actually it was disputed ground). Demanding revenge for a highly personal attack by people of bad character stirs emotions.

A persuasive speech, such as Roosevelt’s, is meant to mobilize. It necessarily aims to simplify, to flatten complexity and reduce ambivalence. If the story it tells is already familiar as a background legend in the culture, the work of persuasion becomes less difficult. The infamy trope, this insult to the nation-and implicitly to divine will-became a battle cry that, drawing upon popular rhetorical structures and historical legends, built recognition among Americans that few presidential proclamations can boast.

The president’s message was especially memorable because words, not photographs, sketched the initial public image of the attack. The Navy Department did not release photos that provided a view of the damage at Pearl Harbor for several weeks, and not until the first anniversary of the attack did an extensive photo spread appear in Life magazine. It was the words “infamy” and “treachery,” rather than visual images, that reverberated from Roosevelt’s speech into most representations of Pearl Harbor during the war and after, providing a long-lasting framework shaping the imagery of history and remembrance.

One implication of the infamy framework has been that, for most Americans, the historical narrative of World War II often begins with the Pearl Harbor attack, establishing American military action as reactive and defensive. Yet few other national histories in the world view Pearl Harbor as a beginning in the story of World War II. Yukiko Koshiro writes that “there is no single war to remember…. This diverse thrust has given rise to diverse names [for the war], all of them heavily charged with meaning and often incommensurable.” For most Chinese people, the war began in the early 1930s as Japan’s offensive against China; many in Japan saw (and continue to see) the attack as a defensive measure against a longer series of U.S. provocations that, in effect, began hostilities. For most Europeans, Pearl Harbor is simply one of several turning points of a conflict that began in 1939. Literary theorists emphasize that where a story begins and ends is vital to its structuring elements, to what is both remembered and suppressed. The infamy and retaliation structure draws power from its simplicity and its highly national-centric beginning (later wrapped up with its definitive atomic bomb ending).

Examining the structure of Roosevelt’s war message, however, highlights a curious omission. Although in countless anthologies, websites, and collected papers, the speech is called “Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor Speech,” the words “Pearl Harbor” never appear. Like the Last Stand and the Alamo, Japan’s surprise attack needed a shorthand label that would work to rally. Roosevelt did not instantly coin the phrase that would catch on, but headline writers did. In its afternoon edition on December 9, the Portland Oregonian adapted the familiar “Remember the Alamo!” into a new battle cry: “Remember Pearl Harbor!” The phrase quickly caught on. The catchy song hummed by many new recruits went:

Let’s remember Pearl Harbor As we go to meet the foe. Let’s remember Pearl Harbor As we did the Alamo.

One of the earliest and most famous of the wartime propaganda posters reiterated the “remember” theme. Below a tattered but still waving American flag, set against both the blue sky of peace and the black smoke of war, emerge the words: “Remember Dec. 7th!” Above the flag appears another familiar historical reference: “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” Many wartime films repeated the “remember” theme with lines such as “There’s a date we’ll always remember-and they will never forget!” (Bombardier, 1941). The words “Pearl Harbor” gradually became the common descriptor of what was to be remembered. They became the rhetorical shorthand for the “infamy” that would be remembered and then avenged through “righteous might.”

In the wake of Roosevelt’s speech, longtime interventionists stitched another theme into the Pearl Harbor symbol: the complacency and ignorance of the American people were partly to blame for the attack. Liberal columnist Walter Lippmann wrote that Americans since World War I had been under “deadly illusions” that they had no ultimate responsibilities for peace in the world. Journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote, “I accuse us. I accuse the twentieth-century American. I accuse me.” The United States, according to many, had been “asleep.” The Christian Science Monitor wrote that the United States had been “too flabby and sleepy.” America was not only sleepy, but also “innocent.” In August 1945, the Honolulu Advertiser summarized: “The shame of Pearl Harbor … was the product of towns and villages, of big cities and big factories, of oil, copper, cotton and scrap iron that flowed to potential enemies, of ‘America Firstism,’ the corn and hog farmer and of the slushy societies that were sure that love and understanding were all that a sick world needed.”

The “sleeping” metaphor-Americans as innocent, naive, and appallingly ignorant of a dangerous world-became a common part of the infamy story, reinforced by the dawn timing of the raid and the “rising sun” symbol of Japan itself. Since the 1970s American representations of the Pacific War have made pervasive use of an alleged quotation by Japanese admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Harvard-educated naval strategist who planned the attack. The film Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) quoted Yamamoto as leavening his victory at Pearl Harbor with the fearful prophecy that Japan had awakened a “sleeping giant” and filled him with a “terrible resolve.” This quotation well carried out the basic internationalist narrative of the sleeping nation, and it illustrates how narrative structures shape what is remembered and handed down through famous quotations. Yamamoto’s “sleeping” quote has become a standard anecdote that, assisted by the blood-red “rising sun” insignia, has helped structure many renditions of the Pearl Harbor story, seeming to provide special authenticity because it is presented as coming from the enemy itself.

The “sleeping” theme implicitly blamed the attack partly on the “isolationism” of Roosevelt’s Republican opponents. By tilting blame onto congressional isolationists and the pressure groups who had opposed Roosevelt’s cautious moves toward rearmament and involvement in the war, Roosevelt internationalists made Pearl Harbor a highly visible symbol in partisan political debates. Internationalists ridiculed Republican isolationists as ignorant and dangerous to the republic. In his nightclub act of the 1940s, comedian Zero Mostel imitated an isolationist senator decrying, “What was Hawaii doing out there in the middle of the Pacific anyway?”

A narrative in which the nation suddenly loses its childlike innocence suggests that maturity and manhood, symbolized in military force, will surely follow. For most of the war, this image of a sleepy America, misled by immature, ignorant, and weak (feminized) isolationists and pacifists but awakened to military manhood by infamy, held the spotlight. Circulated in presidential proclamations and hometown journalism, the “sleeping” metaphor, too, has continued to structure the retellings and rememberings.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from A Date Which Will Liveby Emily S. Rosenberg Copyright © 2003 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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