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| Battleship Row, 7 December 1941 |
On this day on December 7, 1941, “a date which will live in infamy” the American naval base on Oahu at Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japan. Pearl Harbor has become iconic though sometimes people who shouldn’t have have nonetheless forgotten the exact date.
There are a substantial number of remembrances across the web today, including here, here, here (photos), and here.
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| USS Maine |
I don’t aim to repeat that with my post. What I am interested in on this anniversary is the way in which the United States memorializes its disasters. America has a series of tragic dates, which are often remembered better than the victories. Pearl Harbor–I think–is more familiar than Midway (though perhaps not D-Day). The Maine is remembered more than any battle in the Spanish-American War. The Alamo still resonates in a way that no victory of either the Texas Revolution or the Mexican-American War does. The burning of Washington rivals Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans by way of remembering the War of 1812. For the American Revolution, Valley Forge is as legendary as Yorktown. The Civil War is somewhat the exception, with Gettysburg–a victory for the United States–dominating all other events.
Fascinating also is the way in which the most recent of these–9/11 and Pearl Harbor–have become inextricably linked to their date. December 7 and September 11th have come to be an identifying label for both events. They have managed this in a way that not even July 4th can duplicate, being on the wrong day, and all.
The British do something similar with Dunkirk, the Somme, and the “Black Week” of the Boer War, among others. The British “lose every battle but the last one,” an epigraphic way of universalizing the obsession with defeat, so perhaps this is not particularly American behavior. Those events are linked to dates as well, though not quite as specifically as Pearl and 9/11: 1940 for Dunkirk, 1 July 1916 for the Somme (ignoring that the battle went on for months), the name itself for the “Black Week.”
I don’t have a reason why this might be, or a conclusion about what such a fixation means, but it strikes me nonetheless that it is odd that such a strong strain of American historical memory is taken up obsessing about such catastrophes: defeat from the jaws of victory, indeed.
48 comments
December 7, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Colin
i have never understood why the Declaration gets the U.S. independence holiday rather than the Battle of Yorktown. What was the original politics around designating these holidays? I seem to remember there was a lot of memorializing in the early Republic, so presumably there were competing projects…
Maybe we really are a nation of texts, or possibly it’s hard to celebrate the glorious Yorktown victory without thanking the French. (Thank you, French!)
December 7, 2009 at 1:33 pm
John
I’ve always considered Revere’s ride and the Battle of Trenton (a.k.a. “Washington’s Crossing”) to be equally iconic to Valley Forge as symbols of the American Revolution. The Civil War is more complicated – Gettysburg is iconic, but not everyone regards it as a victory. In regard to other wars, I wonder if the fixation on defeats is necessary to maintain the belief that a particular war was justified or heroic. It’s easier to excuse a war’s brutality if you remember an early defeat.
December 7, 2009 at 1:51 pm
jvhillegas
Thanks for this thought-provoking post, silbey.
It’s easier to excuse a war’s brutality if you remember an early defeat
That’s an interesting possibility, John; a great idea for an article, if it hasn’t been written yet!
Historical memory and the processes of memorialization are fascinating topics. I recently read an article in The Public Historian on The Museum of the Warsaw Rising that discussed this issue — unfortunately there’s not a URL I can link to for this article, but I did write a brief note about it here.
December 7, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Doctor Science
It’s definitely not just a US thing: Anzac Day is huge.
I believe the phenomenon in question was best described by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon), in the short story “Her Smoke Rose Up Forever”: pain is a stronger stimulus than pleasure, so we remember pain better, it’s more of a defining experience in our memories. Pain (including unexpected grief) is *shocking*, in a way that joy is not.
December 7, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Urk
Is there anyone else who can’t read or hear “a day which will live in infamy” without thinking of the ending of “the further Adventures of Nick Danger” by the Firesign Theater?
December 7, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Colin
And some kinds of pain have a precise moment. December 7th 1941 seems an example both of a precisely-dated shock, and of the power of Presidential words.
When we were applying for permanent residence for my foreign spouse, the INS gave us our interview date, and it was December 7th, 1992. I remember thinking that can’t be good, but it was fine.
December 7, 2009 at 2:53 pm
Paul J.
I agree with Dr. Science. In Mexico people remember the day Cortez conquered the Aztecs as well.
My personal theory for why this is is because tragedy and defeat fundamentally alters our world view, whereas victory reinforces it. Therefore it is really our defeats that define who we are in a sense. Just an idea to muse over anyway…
December 7, 2009 at 3:18 pm
TF Smith
Interesting idea of battles as historical memory trope…the “First Battle,” “Last Stand/Delaying Action,” “Turning Point,” and “The Last Battle” concepts all come easily to mind.
I think one can simply read the pattern as events (the “first battle” idea) that begin wars – Dec. 7 or the sinking of the Maine – tend to be remembered as the transition from peace to war…
Another paradigm seems to be the “turning point” where the strategic tides change, and Normandy and Midway are both seen as such – as is Gettysburg, I think.
Then there is the “Last Stand” idea of the crucial delaying action, whether actual or not – Thermopylae and the Alamo both resonate in this fashion.
Interestingly enough, the Alamo, I think, has the “Thermopylae” angle to it, but also sort of fits the “first battle” element, as well, in terms of the decade-long conflict over the Southwest between Mexico, the United States, and various surrogates…
Is Valley Forge really as legendary as Yorktown? I think Lexington and Concord resonates more than Valley Forge, which was not actually a battle – just a really bad choice for winter quarters. Saratoga, as a “turning point,” seems to get as much attention as Yorktown as a “last battle,”…
And isn’t Fort McHenry more of a touchstone for the 1812-15 war than Bladensburg OR New Orleans?
December 7, 2009 at 3:55 pm
JRoth
i have never understood why the Declaration gets the U.S. independence holiday rather than the Battle of Yorktown. What was the original politics around designating these holidays?
I believe that, even during the war, Americans spoke of the “Spirit of ’76” – there was a strong sense that the Revolution, in its origins, was a special, idealistic venture. Years of winning-by-running, cold winters, and sunshine patriotism were but pale aftersparks of the heady, early days. So I think that it’s not surprising that a moment from those early days was memorialized.
Aside from that, the Declaration of Independence really was significant in a way that no single battle could be (after all, it’s not as if a victory at Yorktown would have won the war for the Brits – things would most likely have dragged on and on…) – only the Treaty of Paris could have compared, but why would you memorialize such a dull, technical event, one that occurred far away.
None of which is to say that there were no politics or other baser considerations in the focus on the Fourth; but I don’t think it’s especially counterintuitive.
December 7, 2009 at 4:02 pm
JRoth
I think it’s crucial to bear in mind that it’s not defeats, it’s outrages – the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania, the burning of the White House…. I don’t think that mid-war defeats resonate much (Battle of New York, anybody?). The Alamo’s a bit of an outlier there, but I think that the slaughter of it, and the presence of already-famous men, made it into such an icon, both then and now (if half the men had lived, among them Crockett or Bowie, I doubt it would have resonated nearly as much).
Dunkirk doesn’t really count, btw, since it was more “heroic effort to save our boys” than “pivotal defeat” – it’s not as if Dunkirk had any significance wrt the loss of the Continent. The narrative is about British spunk, not loss.
December 7, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Another Damned Medievalist
Perhaps because these dates reinforce the idea of righteous retaliation?
December 7, 2009 at 4:08 pm
PorJ
Quick: what is V-J Day?
We remember Pearl Harbor but we wont remember the dropping of the atom bombs. That’s because Pearl Harbor excuses the dropping of the bombs. Has something to do with vengence and misguided notions of justice….
December 7, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Linkmeister
Another example of defeats being remembered, for centuries in this case: The Battle of Kosovo, when the Serbs lost to the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire in 1389. They were still invoking the memory of that loss in the mid-1990s. They may still be, for all I know.
December 7, 2009 at 4:17 pm
Colin
Thanks JRoth! That’s very helpful.
Interesting that military victories are in their nature harder to date than military defeats, though that would seem to violate some principle of symmetry. …or not, if it’s big colonial empires that absorb most of the defeats.
December 7, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Matt McKeon
I don’t think anyone is going to forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But the point that the treachery of the sneak attack excuses the destruction of the two cities is well taken. I would argue that the Japanese conduct of the war was more influential in the decision to use the bombs against Japanese cities than Pearl Harbor.
December 7, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Matt McKeon
by excuses, I mean in the minds of the Americans at the time.
December 7, 2009 at 5:12 pm
silbey
I think it’s crucial to bear in mind that it’s not defeats, it’s outrages – the sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Lusitania, the burning of the White House…. I don’t think that mid-war defeats resonate much (Battle of New York, anybody?)
Maybe, though I note that the Somme (on the British side) is iconic, as is Tet in the American remembrance of Vietnam.
Also, that doesn’t particularly explain why disasters (and note that “defeat” was only one of the several words I used to describe this phenomenon) become so legendary to the point of putting into the shadow just about everything else. As PorJ noted with V-J day, no one remembers that date; or really of Midway, etc. D-Day is different, as I noted. It’s not that the disasters are remembered, it’s that they’re *more* remembered and often, in fact, are the only things remembered.
(Oh, and Dunkirk surely counts: just as 9/11 counts despite all those stories of heroic first-responders, etc).
military victories are in their nature harder to date than military defeats,
Um, why is that? Lots of military victories are easy to date, but for whatever reason, those dates don’t stick.
December 7, 2009 at 5:44 pm
TF Smith
Well, one of the problems with trying to “remember” VJ Day is there are at least three contenders – August 14, 15, and Sept. 2….
However, for those who were there (Paul Fussell’s generation, for example) they remember them well…
December 7, 2009 at 5:45 pm
TF Smith
PS – What Americans remember (or not) as VJ Day is celebrated as a national holiday in Korea, China, and Vietnam, for a variety of reasons…Filipinos tend to remember it as well.
December 7, 2009 at 6:12 pm
dana
My intuition is in line with ADM’s. We like stories of defeat when those stories are at the beginnings of narratives that end with our triumph.
December 7, 2009 at 6:31 pm
Mike
Hi All, I stumbled across this site and this post happily coincides with thoughts I’ve had for a while. Nothing complicated here, I think – awful defeats need some kind of explanation without doling out too much blame, so they move into the realm of myth-making. Yes, I do mean December 7, 1941 is a myth. Or, more to the point, it has become a mythological subject.
We need to explain the bad things that happen to us, not the good. And, as Dana says, it’s a story of defeat that really is the intro to a story of national redemption.
December 7, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Jonathan Dresner
What Americans remember (or not) as VJ Day is celebrated as a national holiday in Korea, China, and Vietnam, for a variety of reasons
It’s observed in Japan as well, with solemn ceremony, but the Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries get more attention.
How come there are no Vietnam anniversaries on the public calendar?
December 7, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Canid
How come there are no Vietnam anniversaries on the public calendar?
I remember churchbells ringing in our small midwestern town the night the ceasefire went into effect. Just a few days after LBJ died (and Roe v Wade) (and Frazier v Foreman) (busy few days)
I live in Texas now, where Texas Independance Day is sort of observed, but not Alamo Day….
December 8, 2009 at 5:19 am
dave
On the British parallel, it’s important to note that the narrative of ‘defeat after defeat until victory’ doesn’t apply in the naval context, certainly not pre-WW1, where the tradition is of always winning, just not necessarily easily. Early naval losses in the War of 1812 were a particular kick in the teeth for just that reason – the RN just didn’t lose single-ship duels, a tradition gloriously restored by the Shannon.
OTOH, I always thought it was interesting to note what actually happens in the narrative of In Which We Serve – every engagement is a defeat or a retreat, and the end [also of course the beginning] is disaster… From which will come [we are assured] triumph. So perhaps in WW2 the navy was joining the military tradition.
December 8, 2009 at 5:45 am
silbey
We like stories of defeat when those stories are at the beginnings of narratives that end with our triumph
Tet.
(And it doesn’t explain why the defeats become so much more prominent than the victories. Pearl Harbor is not balanced by a victory at the other end.)
dave, good point about the British having a different sense about the Navy (which is interesting in and of itself).
December 8, 2009 at 6:41 am
JRoth
But no one (who wasn’t there) remembers the date of Tet. It’s not a commemoration, which is what you’re otherwise discussing – Tet was a turning point, and viewed as such at the time, which is why it’s part of the Vietnam narrative. But it’s neither commemorated nor rallied around.
And I would argue that Pearl Harbor is balanced by D-Day. There was no comparable balancing victory in the Pacific (Midway was very important, but it came at the beginning of a 3 year slog – it would be a very odd thing to balance against Pearl Harbor), but D-Day is surely in the same class of memory as Pearl Harbor.
I would also note that the flag-raising on Suribachi certainly has an iconic place in American memory, even if no one could tell you the date.
December 8, 2009 at 6:54 am
PorJ
You know, the most obvious thing is that the President simultaneously told Congress and an enormous national audience to remember the date. Had that ever been done before in American history? It would not have been possible without broadcasting (only 2 decades old at the time). Since then: has an American President commanded the nation to remember a specific date?
Sometimes I think we over-analyze.
December 8, 2009 at 6:58 am
kid bitzer
‘course, one significant fact about the attack on pearl harbor is that it was date-bound from the very start. fdr got up the next day and called it a date which will live in infamy. no one after tet or iwo jima or midway said, ‘this is a date that will live in remembrance’.
so part of the question here has to be: what was in fdr’s mind on 12/7 or 12/8 that caused him to think, ‘boy, there are just some dates that live in infamy, and this sure is one of them!’
i mean: he had to already have in mind the conceptual category of: dates that live in infamy. otherwise, why pin the infamy on the date, rather than the place or the name or hundreds of other things?
what’s the older tradition to which he was hearkening back?
not exactly infamy, but earlier anyhow:
“please to remember the fifth of november, gunpowder treason and plot”.
that at least is an explicit injunction to remember a date.
December 8, 2009 at 7:00 am
kid bitzer
whoa–porj posted while i wrote.
except he ends with a worry about over-analysis, while i call for more. nothing exceeds like excess.
December 8, 2009 at 7:02 am
JRoth
I do think that it’s true that defeats play a different conceptual role from victory in story-making – every championship team claims to be underdogs or to have been counted out, even if they’re the Yankees or the Patriots. It’s the classic narrative arc, so it’s not so surprising that defeats aren’t swept under the rug. But, as I said, it’s not quotidian defeats that become iconic – anyone know anything about the Wasp? – but disastrous ones.
December 8, 2009 at 7:04 am
kid bitzer
the quotidian defeat of the wasp was exhaustively chronicled by cheever, i believe.
December 8, 2009 at 8:05 am
silbey
It’s not a commemoration, which is what you’re otherwise discussing
Not quite; I’m discussing the memorialization of something, which includes those things that are a dominant memory (ie you can’t think of a particular conflict without thinking of this particular event), not necessarily only those things that we actively commemorate.
You know, the most obvious thing is that the President simultaneously told Congress and an enormous national audience to remember the date
Sure, and I like your idea that FDR chose that rhetorical trope, knowing that it would appeal to an American audience.
More generally, note that I’m making two points: that we tend to remember defeats as well as, if not better than the victories, and that Pearl and 9/11 have become date-bound in a fascinating way.
December 8, 2009 at 10:40 am
Anderson
The Civil War is more complicated – Gettysburg is iconic, but not everyone regards it as a victory.
Perhaps it’s *more* iconic for the South for that very reason.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago….
… “For every white Southern boy” was understood, I’m sure.
December 8, 2009 at 11:49 am
Linkmeister
silbey: “Pearl Harbor is not balanced by a victory at the other end.”
Perhaps not, but the commemoration is. Perpendicular to the Arizona Memorial in the harbor you’ll find the USS Missouri, on whose deck the Japanese surrender documents were signed. There was a great deal of discussion as to the positioning of the ship; fear that it would overshadow the Arizona was a big concern of the survivors.
I’ve been there; the layout seems to work just fine.
December 8, 2009 at 3:01 pm
silbey
Perhaps not, but the commemoration is.
Mmmm. I can guarantee you that almost everyone of my students could identify what happened on December 7, 1941, just from the date, and that none of them would know when the surrender came, or on what ship it was signed.
December 8, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Linkmeister
We Oahu residents might be a tad parochial.
December 8, 2009 at 7:00 pm
Not Prince Hamlet
Which is why we had to swipe the Missouri from Bremerton, which had its own parochial interests but didn’t have Dan Inouye.
December 8, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Jason B.
Dan Inouye seems more kickass the more I hear about him.
December 9, 2009 at 4:22 am
ajay
“The Royal Navy does not have a tradition of glorious last stands. It has a tradition of winning.”
The British do something similar with Dunkirk, the Somme, and the “Black Week” of the Boer War, among others
I don’t think many people in Britain still think anything very much about the Black Week of the Boer War :)
I’m in no position to comment on popular memory in America. But, I’d say, the most iconic image of the Second World War in Britain is definitely the Battle of Britain, not Dunkirk. (They recently put up a new statue in Trafalgar Square – of Keith Park, not Bertram Ramsay). Yes, Dunkirk, but also D-Day, and El Alamein, and maybe the convoys – with the exception of D-Day those are defensive victories.
For the Russians, it’s Stalingrad, and the Great Siege – in my limited experience I don’t think that, say, Kursk or Bagration have the same impact, and even with Stalingrad it’s the city fighting they’re thinking of, not Op SATURN. They certainly don’t have big emotional associations with the fall of Bresk-Litovsk or the Kiev encirclement.
December 9, 2009 at 6:03 am
silbey
I don’t think many people in Britain still think anything very much about the Black Week of the Boer War :)
I suspect that many people in Britain don’t think about the Boer War at all, but if they did, the “Black Week” would be one of the things about which they thought. Ditto in the U.S. for the Spanish-American War and the Maine
But, I’d say, the most iconic image of the Second World War in Britain is definitely the Battle of Britain, not Dunkirk.
Does Dunkirk have to be the “most iconic” for the point to hold?
And note that World War I is even more extreme, with the Somme and Passchendaele dominating popular memory and even Armistice Day being treated as a cessation of disaster rather than a victory. There’s not a single British victory from 1918 that is really known to the popular mind.
December 9, 2009 at 10:01 am
ajay
“Does Dunkirk have to be the “most iconic” for the point to hold?”
Not at all. But I still think it’s a bit of an exception. Of other British disasters of the period, the Fall of Singapore doesn’t have the same status, neither does the retreat from Burma or the fall of Tobruk or the collapse of the Narvik intervention.
Market-Garden does, a bit, but that might be just because they made rather a good film about it. Dieppe does for the Canadians, of course. But you can’t say, I think, that Britain memorialises its disasters in WW2 in a way that it doesn’t also memorialise its successes. The point of my shopping list of Popular WW2 Icons is that they aren’t all defeats, and lots of the big defeats aren’t included.
And, to be honest, I’m not even sure that Dunkirk is regarded as a disaster in the same way that the loss of the Maine and the Pearl Harbor attack, etc. are. The common image is that the French let us down, and we managed to salvage our army through heroic improvisation. (Left unmentioned is the bit where we didn’t manage to salvage any of the heavy equipment; and the real disasters, like the 51st at St Valery, aren’t generally remembered outside their home areas.)
Absolutely true on the Great War, though. The whole thing is remembered as a disaster.
December 9, 2009 at 11:33 am
Erik Lund
David, Ajay: On the Royal Navy and glorious last stands-
“And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea,
But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.
Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle-thunder and flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.
For some were sunk and many were shatter’d, and so could fight us no more –
God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?”
December 9, 2009 at 2:00 pm
Matt McKeon
The quality of the defeat is the key. The fall of Singapore was shameful, while the charge of the Light Brigade was heroic, if doomed.
Actually there is a whole trope on hopeless attacks. Pickett’s Charge, Culloden, the kindermord, the Australians at Gallipoli.
December 9, 2009 at 2:34 pm
silbey
But you can’t say, I think, that Britain memorialises its disasters in WW2 in a way that it doesn’t also memorialise its successes.
I don’t think that I did say that, quite.
But your point is taken about Dunkirk. It is a “look at our plucky lads!” kind of thing.
December 9, 2009 at 5:53 pm
kid bitzer
for how long has it been a british point of pride to say that we “punch above our weight”?
i see that now said not only of the military, but of sporting clubs, and even of academic units (“our faculty here at the university of bridgefieldshire has fewer researchers than some of its rivals, but we punch above our weight!”).
presumably post wwi? presumably this is not something that one says when one still has the worlds largest navy?
in any case–plucky!
December 9, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Doctor Science
How come there are no Vietnam anniversaries on the public calendar?
Good point, except I can’t remember anything about Korea, either.
For Vietnam the only ones that have stuck in my memory are April 30 (fall of Saigon, helicopters on the embassy roof), and May 4th (Kent State). I don’t think it’s coincidence that both are tied to iconic photographs.
December 10, 2009 at 1:55 am
ajay
kid – probably before WW1. Pride in winning against heavy odds goes back a long way – to the Armada at least. And for most of the time that Britain had the world’s dominant navy (1815-1914), it didn’t do much fighting with it; the fighting was done by the army, which was always small and frequently outnumbered.
“The fact that the English were defeated has so confused Historians that many false theories are prevalent about the Bannockburn Campaign. What actually happened is quite clear from the sketch map shown above. The causes of the English defeat were all unfair and were:
… Superior numbers of the English (four to one). Accustomed to fight against heavy odds, the English were uneasy, and when the Scots were unexpectedly reinforced by a large body of butlers with camp stools the English soldiers mistook them for a fresh army of Englishmen and retreated in disgust.”
December 10, 2009 at 1:56 am
ajay
“How come there are no Vietnam anniversaries on the public calendar?”
Tet? Easy to remember the date…