On January 16, 1941, in his State of the Union address, Franklin Roosevelt outlined what he believed were the building blocks necessary for the foundation of and essential to the preservation of a strong democracy: Freedom of speech and expression, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want and Freedom from fear. These, he made clear, should be the right of all people, not just Americans and pursuit of them would be the cornerstone of his administration’s foreign policy.
Clearly, these were goals far too lofty to be attainable in their totality but they were of a nature that just recognizing their value and working toward their implementation was an objective sufficient to set America apart from a 1941 world dominated by German aggression and soon to be vastly altered by Japanese imperialism. It would be four years before we could even begin to consider these as national ideals again. There was a war to be fought and for a good part of those years the question would not be whether America would prevail but whether America would endure.
In January, 1941, the United States was headed toward a conflict that would threaten it’s existence as a nation more than any event since the Civil War and more than any external threat since 1789 when a collection of colonies became the United States. To be sure, we had fought other wars over the roughly one hundred-fifty years of our existence. We had engaged in a significant fight with England (1812), had fought a war in Mexico (1846) and had battled Spain (1896) to establish our preeminence on the American continent and had helped bring World War I to a close. We had engaged in undeclared, small wars, the “Banana Wars”, in and around the Carribean and Central and northern South America but in no case, even the War of 1812, did our enemy threaten our existence as a nation. In less than eleven months, on December 7, 1941, that would change and the world and, more to the point, America would change with it. We would never again be the same county; we would never again be the same people.
In his speech the following day Roosevelt asked for a declaration of war saying:
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In the roughly four hour attack the Navy and Marine Corps suffered a total of 2,896 casualties of which 2,117 were deaths. The Army lost 228 killed or died of wounds,. In addition, at least 57 civilians were killed and nearly as many seriously injured.
Four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States
It has been 70 years since that calamitous day. Old enmities have given way to new friendships and old enemies are today’s allies. Those we once fought now stand with us in a new war, the war on terror and that is how it should be, how it should be so long as we never forget that this was the war that gave us the greatest generation. Half a million American men and women gave their lives so that we could continue to enjoy Roosevelt’s four freedoms and more and we must be informed and vigilant; we must guard against the temptation to trade those freedoms for the illusion of safety.