Infamy Speech - Impact and Legacy

Impact and Legacy

Roosevelt's speech had an immediate and long-lasting impact on American politics. Thirty-three minutes after he finished speaking, Congress declared war on Japan, with only one Representative, Jeannette Rankin, voting against the declaration. The speech was broadcast live by radio and attracted the largest audience in US radio history, with over 81 percent of American homes tuning in to hear the President. The response was overwhelmingly positive, both within and outside of Congress. Judge Samuel Irving Rosenman, who served as an adviser to Roosevelt, described the scene:

The White House was inundated with telegrams praising the president's stance ("On that Sunday we were dismayed and frightened, but your unbounded courage pulled us together."). Recruiting stations were jammed with a surge of volunteers and had to go on 24-hour duty to deal with the crowds seeking to sign up, in numbers reported to be twice as high as after Woodrow Wilson's declaration of war in 1917. The anti-war and isolationist movement collapsed in the wake of the speech, with even the president's fiercest critics falling into line. Charles Lindbergh, who had been a leading isolationist, declared:

Roosevelt's framing of the Pearl Harbor attack became, in effect, the standard American narrative of the events of December 7, 1941. Hollywood enthusiastically adopted the narrative in a number of war films. Wake Island, the Academy Award-winning Air Force and the films Man from Frisco (1944), and Betrayal from the East (1945), all included actual radio reports of the pre-December 7 negotiations with the Japanese, reinforcing the message of enemy duplicity. Across the Pacific (1942), Salute to the Marines (1943), and Spy Ship (1942), used a similar device, relating the progress of US–Japanese relations through newspaper headlines. The theme of American innocence betrayed was also frequently depicted on screen, the melodramatic aspects of the narrative lending themselves naturally to the movies.

The President's description of December 7 as "a date which will live in infamy" was borne out; the date very quickly became shorthand for the Pearl Harbor attack in much the same way that September 11 became inextricably associated with the 2001 terrorist attacks. The slogans "Remember December 7th" and "Avenge December 7" were adopted as a rallying cry and were widely displayed on posters and lapel pins. Prelude to War (1942), the first of Frank Capra's Why We Fight film series (1942–1945), urged Americans to remember the date of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, September 18, 1931, "as well as we remember December 7th 1941, for on that date in 1931 the war we are now fighting began." The symbolism of the date was highlighted in a scene in the 1943 film Bombardier, in which the leader of a group of airmen walks up to a calendar on the wall, points to the date ("December 7, 1941") and tells his men: "Gentlemen, there's a date we will always remember—and they'll never forget!"

Sixty years later, the continuing resonance of the Infamy Speech was demonstrated following the September 11, 2001 attacks, which many commentators compared with Pearl Harbor in terms of its impact and deadliness. In the days following the attacks, author Richard Jackson notes in his book Writing the War on Terrorism: Language, Politics and Counter-terrorism that "there a deliberate and sustained effort" on the part of the George W. Bush administration to "discursively link September 11, 2001 to the attack on Pearl Harbor itself", both by directly invoking Roosevelt's Infamy Speech and by re-using the themes employed by Roosevelt in his speech. In Bush's speech to the nation on September 11, 2001, he contrasted the "evil, despicable acts of terror" with the "brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity" that America represented in his view. University of Washington Professor and author Sandra Silberstein draws direct parallels between the language used by Roosevelt and Bush, highlighting a number of similarities between the Infamy Speech and Bush's presidential address of September 11. Similarly, Emily S. Rosenberg notes rhetorical efforts to link the conflicts of 1941 and 2001 by re-utilizing Second World War terminology of the sort used by Roosevelt, such as using the term "axis" to refer to America's enemies (as in "Axis of Evil").