“We are going into this war lightly,” I.F. Stone wrote in the Nation on December 8, 1941. The editors of Life magazine agreed. “Americans took the news, good and bad, with admirable serenity,” they wrote in their first post-Pearl Harbor edition. And it’s true. If you look through American magazines and newspapers in the weeks following the Japanese attack that launched the Second World War you feel like you are looking at a nation that is mainlining Prozac. There is very little of the sense of horror and drama that overtook this same country sixty years later after September 11, 2001. Americans at the start of World War II did not appear emotionally wounded the way they did after the attack on the World Trade Center. There are no articles in which people described where they were when they heard the news or how they felt. There are no accounts of people crying or hugging each other for support. Instead, the dominant mood is one of relentless cheerfulness. More then than now, life went on as before. Almost nobody canceled basketball games or hockey games in December 1941, though most major sports took a week off after this year’s tragedy. The baseball owners’ meetings in Chicago on December 8, 1941 went on as scheduled, with the Chicago Cubs acquiring a catcher. Indeed, the Hollywood Reporter described a December 7 amateur baseball game between the team from Paramount Studios and the L.A. Nippons, a team of Japanese Americans. News of the Pearl Harbor attack came over the radio during the third inning. The players paused for a minute before resuming the game that Paramount went on to win 6-3. In New York a radio announcer broke into the regular broadcast, “Japanese bombs have fallen on Hawaii and the Philippine Islands. Keep tuned to this station for further details. We now return you to the Polo Grounds” for the New York Giants game. In Dallas, 2,500 people had just finished watching “Sergeant York” starring Gary Cooper at the Majestic Theater when news of Pearl Harbor was announced. “There was a pause, a pin-point of silence, a prolonged sigh, then thundering applause,” Time magazine reported. Christmas celebrations went on as planned. On December 9, the Boston Globe ran a story–headlined “New England Toilet Goods Ass’n and Guests Enjoy Christmas Party”–reporting on festivities held at the Parker House the evening after the attack. “A splendid floor show and general dancing were enjoyed,” the Globe noted. The society columns carried on pretty much as before. The Globe reported comings and goings at the December 8 Women’s Civic Federation’s lecture on the arts: “Mrs. Charles Miles (Jean Carpenter) adding a bright note with her fetching red quilted blouse . . . Mrs. Leland Powers, a gay red hat above her checked black and white suit.” In New York, the gossip columns noted that Joe DiMaggio and Franchot Tone had dined at Sardi’s. Like most of his peers, Walter Winchell didn’t mention international events in his first wartime column. There was no thought of canceling the White House Christmas Tree festivities in 1941. The newspapers ran mammoth headlines atop each day’s front page edition, updating readers on the momentous events, but there was also room for front-page levity. “Jap Ambassador Buys Drawers,” was the headline above a Washington Post story about an attach from the embassy who went shopping for underwear just after Pearl Harbor. THERE WERE some similarities between the American responses to December 7 and September 11. Flags flew everywhere after both events. There was an overwhelming sense of national unity, with the same sort of United We Stand posters. But in other respects things were different. American culture really has changed, and you can measure some of the changes by comparing the media then and now. One searches for reasons why Americans responded so cheerfully to the disaster of 1941 and so, well, melodramatically to the disaster of 2001. One explanation has to do with technology. It’s very different to hear of an attack over the radio or read about it in the newspaper–and to watch images of planes crashing into the World Trade Center again and again on television. Life magazine did publish photographs of the dead at Pearl Harbor–some of the pictures were graphic, including corpses lying about in the morgue–but these didn’t come out until three weeks after the attack. Other explanations for the different responses are unrelated to technology. In the first place, in 1941, after a decade of economic depression, Americans were co-religionists in a cult of peppiness. Popular culture and popular conversation were relentlessly upbeat. The hit movies in 1941 were sugary effusions such as “Babes on Broadway” with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland dancing up a storm. A Bob Hope musical comedy called “Louisiana Purchase” opened in December 1941, featuring lines of bathing suit-clad beauties and songs with such titles as “Everybody Dance” and “It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow.” On Broadway itself, George Abbott’s “Best Foot Forward” featured dozens of 18-year-olds prancing and singing and cavorting. Everybody had a patriotic duty, it seems, to be optimistic. Being happy was a sign of success. It wasn’t yet cool to be thoughtfully gloomy or alienated. The New Yorker didn’t allow the disaster at Pearl Harbor to interrupt its light, charming patter. The Talk of the Town pieces stuck to their normal mood, but with a war twist–cute things private school boys said during air-raid drills, the thrill society matrons felt at being air-raid wardens. The first movies that came out about the war were military comedies such as “You’re In the Army Now” and “Tanks a Million.” These were slapstick baubles starring such comedians as Jimmy Durante and Phil Silvers recycling the clich d jokes of training camp life: The drill sergeant gets splashed by the private driving through a mud hole and sends him to peel potatoes. The hero falls for the pretty daughter of the camp commandant who catches them in an after-curfew clinch. There was a bigger difference then between highbrow magazines and mass market magazines. The highbrow magazines were much more critical and downbeat. An editorial in the New Republic thundered, “The real sin at Pearl Harbor was a sin of which all America was guilty: the sin of complacence, overconfidence, inertia, the reluctance to abandon our soft and easy way of life.” But at the bigger magazines, a tone of relentless boosterism prevailed. Whatever American feature they described was inevitably marvelous. “The Pennsylvania Turnpike, winding its way through beautiful hill country, is perhaps America’s most magnificent motor highway,” Life enthused in December 1941. “And at convenient intervals are the attractive, colonial Howard Johnson restaurants where tired motorists can stop for a bit of relaxation and hearty refreshment.” This World’s Fair prose style carried over into descriptions of our military leaders and equipment. Each weapon was invariably described as the most formidable of its kind. Texaco ran a series of advertisements describing life on U.S. warships: “Soda fountains aboard modern cruisers and battlewagons are a part of the up to date equipment. . . . Regular U.S. mail boxes are located in several parts of the ship.” BUT THERE WAS also something deeper and more inspiring than all the Dale Carnegie bonhomie. Americans after Pearl Harbor seemed to feel suddenly fulfilled, as if a great burden had been taken from their shoulders, the burden of inactivity, the anxiety that America had been shirking its global responsibilities. Americans did not by and large believe that the war had started on December 7, 1941. In their minds, if the press of the period is any indication, the war had started in 1939. In December 1941, some newspapers were already carrying regular updates of the conflict such as “World War II: Day 839.” The Boston Globe had a running feature called “War Headlines A Year Ago” to remind readers where the war had stood 365 days before. And yet America had remained on the sidelines. “The trouble with Ameri
ca, said President Roosevelt on August 19th, is that too many Americans have not yet made up their minds that we have a war to win and that it will take a hard fight to win it,” Life had reported in September 1941. When Pearl Harbor finally came, it was not a great shock, the papers testify. The next day, the Boston Globe opined, “The attack made by the Japanese yesterday against Hawaii did not come as a surprise to many in the country.” Franklin Roosevelt sent a message to Congress a few days later that announced, “The long-known and the long-expected has thus taken place.” So the first response was one of anger and determination, mixed with a strange exhilaration. Finally, America would get to do its part. “Voters Wanted Strong Action Against Japan for Years, Gallup Institute Poll Finds,” was the headline of a piece in the New York Times. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette editorialized: “Like Gulliver bound by a multitude of small cords, the United States has been bound down by its own confusion. Those cords are broken now. . . . Two worlds are opposed and only one will survive. The final outcome is not in doubt.” A similar sense of release was expressed by the Oregonian: “America–the greatest ship of state the world has known–is now a-sail, pressing for victory.” The enthusiasm wasn’t felt merely in the editorial offices, but also on the streets. “It had to happen. I hope we blow them to hell,” a Western Union messenger told a Boston Globe reporter. Harvard president James B. Conant told 8,000 exuberant Harvardians, “We must consciously develop a psychology of attack. Public opinion must be loud in demanding that we face the offense whenever and wherever possible.” Conant insisted that the United States could not permit Germany and Japan to negotiate a surrender until they were economically and psychologically crushed. There were numerous stories describing the efforts of college presidents to restrain their students, most of whom wanted to enlist immediately. At Columbia, a dean told a gathering of 1,700 students not “to lose your heads” and “go rushing off just because you feel that you must do something right away.” Writing in the Nation, Jonathan Daniels summed up the mood: “It is the hour for elation. Here is the time when a man can be what an American means, can fight for what America has always meant–an audacious, adventurous seeking for a decent earth. . . . All the weak bad things are only shadows beside our destiny now.” AND SO Americans entered the war with a surge, eager both to enjoy what they could at home and to press on to transform the world abroad. Today we feel guilty about our consumerism, our interest in material things. We sense a contrast between our selfishness at home and the heroic war efforts of those who serve abroad. But the popular press in those days evinced no such guilt, and seemed unconscious of any friction between domestic pleasure and foreign combat. One sacrificed for the common good where one could, and one enjoyed the commercial pleasures when possible. It was natural to be a combatant and a consumer both. In the newspapers and magazines of 1941 there are juxtapositions that are jarring to our eyes. On one page, a gripping story recounts an American setback in the Pacific, while on the facing page, a headline offers “How to Improve Your Bowling” or “Escape to the Sun: Florida has the cure for what’s going to ail a lot of Americans this winter.” Americans were not in denial. They knew the war would be “long and grim,” as the New York Times editorialized. One story in that newspaper predicted it would take 10 years. U.S. News was closer to the mark with its forecast that “1942 and most of 1943 probably will be years of defense, years when preparation is being made for attack. In 1943: The turn will probably come.” And people took the war effort seriously. In Seattle, mobs smashed the windows of stores that disregarded the blackout rules. There was a characteristic headline in the Washington Post about a family that had lost three sons at Pearl Harbor. It ran: “3 Sons Slain, 2 Left Alive for Vengeance.” Though Americans clearly feared German armies more than Japanese ones, there were warnings not to underrate the enemy in the Pacific. “The enemy is formidable and, far from being insane, he is well prepared and devilishly shrewd,” Walter Lippmann wrote. But by and large, Americans did not see their unpreparedness for war as a reason to indict their former life as soft, materialistic, or somehow corrupt. There were a few who made this accusation–magazine mogul Henry Luce among them–but most people apparently wanted to carry on with as many of the old ways as possible, and as soon as possible. “The initial excitement is dying down,” a New York Times writer noted on December 11, 1941–four days after the attack!–and radio schedules were returning to normal. “Merchandisers and resident buyers discounted the view that buyers’ trips to the markets here next month would be cut to any substantial extent,” a business reporter noted. The stock market trudged along. Even as people switched to wartime roles, they kept their mind on the occupations they would return to when peace was restored. “Auto Makers Look Forward to Postwar Task, See Use for Huge Additional Facilities,” ran a Post headline after the attack. In other words, America went to war with radical visions for the world but conservative visions of home. They wanted to transform the way Europeans and Japanese lived, but they wanted to return to the American status quo when the nasty business of saving democracy was over. America went to war not in the spirit of Sparta, but in the spirit of Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and Sears. POLITICALLY, there were interesting differences between the reaction to Pearl Harbor and this year’s attack. In 1941, recriminations started almost immediately. Four days after Pearl Harbor, the New York Times reported, “The Senate again broke into bitter and personal exchanges today as new demands were made that American losses in men, ships, planes and defense facilities in the Pacific be spread in detail, and at once, upon the public record.” A board of inquiry was formed, and the Knox Report came out in a matter of weeks, assigning responsibility for the losses. There was also a general embrace of wartime censorship. “Some who deal with news in Washington have come to the conclusion in the last few weeks, and come to it reluctantly, that government censorship is needed,” the TRB columnist in the New Republic announced. Shortly after the war started, General George C. Marshall gave an off-the-record briefing to a group of correspondents on the condition that none of it be printed. The Times correspondent apparently told Arthur Krock, who was not there, about the substance of the briefing. Krock proceeded to publish the news under his own byline in the Times, on the pretext that he personally had not given his word. Byron Price, a former AP reporter, was subsequently named chief censor. He was the subject of glowing profiles in many papers. The final political contrast is the broadest: The belligerent voices were on the left; the doves were on the far right, and Pearl Harbor had delivered a crushing blow to those isolationists. The America Firsters, the Christian Front, the Coughlinites, the Mothers’ Movement, and all other such groups were to be forgiven for their past protests, which had prevented America from being fully prepared for the war, so long as they enlisted in the fight now that it was here. Still, the coverage of the isolationist groups was contemptuous, and liberal magazines were always on the lookout for backsliding on the right. The conservatives used many of the same arguments one finds on the left now. A few days after Pearl Harbor, Father Coughlin, the strident radio priest, argued that World War II was a class war that would pit the rich nations (Britain, France, and the United States) against the have-not nations (Japan, Germany, and Italy). In fact, he continued, the war was being fought to preserve the “imperial supremacy of the pound,” and Americans were “engaged in saving the economic system of internationa
lism and the imperial regime of the British Empire.” What Coughlin called internationalism today’s leftists call globalization. Meanwhile on the left, the Nation ran an essay called “Fruits of Appeasement” on the need to confront anti-Americanism with stern power. It reads like a cold warrior’s tract. Arthur Schlesinger, whose essays were everywhere in the weeks around Pearl Harbor, had a piece in the Nation arguing that if the Republican party was to have a future it had to jettison its heartland isolationism and embrace the East Coast establishment’s internationalism. A few weeks later, the magazine hosted a symposium of Republican heavyweights, from Dewey on down, who basically agreed. The left and the Dewey wing of the GOP were then comfortable with the assertive use of American power. WHEN YOU step back and contemplate the range of post-Pearl Harbor media, you are struck by how extraordinarily proud of itself America then was. It was proud most of all of its economic might. “USA’s Strength is the Power to Produce” was the headline above one Plymouth advertisement. The newspapers and magazines devoted enormous amounts of space to detailing how much steel America produced, how much coal it mined, how much wheat it grew. There were scoreboard-type tables showing what a vast lead America had over the Axis powers in industrial production. America was also proud of its way of life. The country’s people saw no reason they should curtail their normal pleasures unless absolutely compelled to. These bourgeois activities were not considered frivolous or somehow corrupting. Americans were proud of their leaders. They were proud of the weapons they were building. They were proud of themselves. Most of all, they were proud of their ability to exert power as a force for good abroad. And why shouldn’t they have been? It’s normal for a country to think highly of itself. Now, of course, America has greater reason to think well of itself. We know what extraordinary things our country proceeded to achieve during World War II and in the immediate postwar period. We know that we were able to endure and triumph in a 40-year Cold War. And yet when you look at today’s media and compare them with the media of 60 years ago, it is clear that these days, our Americanness is more of a problem. We worry about being overbearing and causing people in other countries to hate us. It never would have occurred to journalists in 1941 to wonder why the Japanese hated Americans, or to think there could be any merit in their point of view. Our commentators are now more apt to emphasize the limits of American might, to argue that Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever arena we are likely to enter is bound to be a quagmire. Today, we fret more and worry that we have been corrupted by affluence or relativism. We are more anxious about ourselves. Over the past weeks, when I’ve mentioned to people that I was reading through the post-Pearl Harbor press, they inevitably commented that I was probably encountering a lot of racist “Jap” bashing. In fact, there was relatively little. Life did a story called “How to Tell Japs From the Chinese” which identified supposed Japanese facial features. There were many cartoons in which Japanese were treated as devious slant-eyed snakes. And there were a few opinion pieces in which the Japanese were treated as clever little demons. But, at least at this point in the war, most of the coverage of Japan was not racial. Rather, the pieces emphasized Japan’s political system. “Starved, oppressed, Hirohito’s 72,000,000 slaves accept their lot with fatalism,” was a typical summary of Japan in Life magazine. The report emphasized that Japan’s wealth was concentrated in just a few hands, that Japanese women were horribly treated, that a twisted warrior ethos caused Japanese men to pay undue deference to the emperor. What’s striking is not those pieces from 1941, but our present-day perception of ourselves. When we are reminded of post-Pearl Harbor America, the first thing that pops into many heads today is that we had racist attitudes and we interned Japanese Americans living on these shores. In other words, of all the things to know about the American reaction to the attack from the Pacific, the one foremost in many Americans’ minds is the one that is most discreditable to the United States. This is a reflection of where the emphasis has been in American culture of late. We have become a country disproportionately familiar with our own failures. We have developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to the possibility that we may be hubristic. In our uncertainty about ourselves, we respond to disasters with an emotional sensitivity that would have been foreign to our countrymen 60 years ago. It’s a weakness unbecoming to a great democratic power as it embarks on a long campaign against an indisputably evil set of foes. David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
