A Date Which Will Live in Infamy
By Robert Higgs • Sunday December 7, 2008 9:07 AM PDT • 10 Comments
December 7. When I was growing up, everybody called it Pearl Harbor Day. I have not heard anyone use that term for a long time, but a Web search shows me that some people still do, at least in that quintessential Navy town, San Diego. The ranks of the World War II veterans are dwindling quickly, but as long as some of them survive, commemoration of the attack on Pearl Harbor will probably continue to be an annual event.
The men of my father’s generation made up the great bulk of the sixteen million Americans who served in the armed forces at some time during the Big One. Although my father, who had been in the Army in the late 1920s, did not serve during the war because the authorities considered his efforts more valuable in the Oklahoma oil fields and later in an Oregon shipyard, many of his friends did serve, and I remember listening in as a wide-eyed little boy on their conversations about the war in the late 1940s. For most of them, it was the defining event of a lifetime, overshadowing even the Great Depression.
As I grew up, it never occurred to me that the “infamy” to which President Roosevelt referred in his famous speech of December 8, 1941, pertained to anybody but the Japanese. After all, as the president said when he asked Congress for a declaration of war, the United States had suffered an “unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan,” so the responsibility for starting the war appeared to belong indisputably to the Japanese – and, of course, it also never occurred to me that I should make any distinction between the Japanese people and the Japanese government in this regard.
Just as old dogs can learn new tricks, however, grown men can learn historical facts they were never taught in school, and over the years I have learned a great deal about the wider context and the important antecedents of the December 7 attack. I have even ventured to write a little bit about how U.S. economic warfare provoked the Japanese to take the desperate gamble of launching a war against the United States, Great Britain, and the Dutch government in exile in the East Indies in order to gain access to essential raw materials, especially oil, that the U.S.-British-Dutch embargo was denying them. Their attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet conveniently concentrated at Pearl Harbor was aimed at protecting their left flank as Japanese forces moved to take control of strategic locations across a wide expanse of the South Pacific and Southeast Asia.
A short comment is no place to settle the controversies that have raged ever since the attack about what Roosevelt and his chief subordinates knew in advance, but one thing has been known for a long time: however “dastardly” the attack might have been, it was anything but “unprovoked.” Indeed, even admirers and defenders of Roosevelt, such as Robert B. Stinnett and George Victor, have documented provocations aplenty. (See the former’s Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor and the latter’s The Pearl Harbor Myth: Rethinking the Unthinkable.) On December 8, the same day that Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war against Japan, former president Herbert Hoover wrote a private letter in which he remarked, “You and I know that this continuous putting pins in rattlesnakes finally got this country bitten.”
On the basis of facts accumulated over the past seven decades and available to anyone who cares to examine them, we are justified in saying that Hoover’s characterization of the war’s provocation was entirely accurate – both with regard to the Japanese imperial government as “rattlesnakes” and with regard to the U.S. government’s “putting pins in.” Indeed, we now have a much firmer basis for that characterization than Hoover could have had on December 8, 1941. Countless lies have been told, massive cover-ups have been staged, propaganda has flowed like a river, yet in this one regard, at least, the truth has undeniably been brought out.
Most American historians, of course, no longer bother to deny this truth. They simply take it in stride, presuming that the Japanese attack, by giving Roosevelt the public support he needed to bring the United States into the war against Germany through the “back door,” was a good thing for this country and for the world at large. Indeed, some actually shower the president with approbation for his mendacious maneuvering to wrench the American people away from their unsophisticated devotion to “isolationism.” In no small part, Roosevelt’s unrelenting dishonesty with the American people (Stanford University historian David M. Kennedy tactfully refers to the president’s “frequently cagey misrepresentations”) in 1940 and 1941 – plain enough if one reads nothing more than his pre-Pearl Harbor correspondence with Winston Churchill – is counted among his principal qualifications for “greatness” and for his (to my mind, incomprehensible) status as an American demigod.
I have noticed, however, that in polls of historians or lay persons to determine which presidents were “great,” the dead never have a vote. Lucky for Roosevelt.
Tags: American History, The State, War 
What a fine example of “survivorship bias”
D. Saul Weiner | Dec 7, 2008 | Reply
Yes,a short comment is no place to settle the Pearl Habor controveries. However, assertions such as that most American historians no longer deny the truth (as Higgs sees it) are simply false.
Indeed, the meany revisionists have at least a few questions to answer concerning Jpanaese activities before Pearl Harbor. What were they doing in China/ Why did they attack Russia in 1939–for Russia’s raw materials? Why did they not honor the Tripartite Pact when the Germans attacked Russia, about five monthe before Pearl Harbor? As the the back-door theory, there’s this: Hitler had broken so many treaties that one day Ribbentrob, his Foreign Minister, brought to Hitler a coffin shaped box containing the many broken treaties, and Hitler and his cronies thought this a great joke. In a word, there was no way for FDR or Churchill to think that Hitler would honor the Tripatite Pact, especially in light of the fact that Japan hadn’t done so.
They could only hope for Hitler to blunder and declare war–if indeed they had conspired to get Japan to attack at all. In a word, the wrong part of the Axis attacked the U S and there was no guarantee that the larger part of the Axis would play along.
Any comprehensive study of the Japanese society and government of the early 20th century will find that the Japanese were not puppets that FDR could manipulate. The Japanese picture is hardly a clear one, no more clear than the politics and practices of Hitler. If anything, opportunism was a key feature, along with a large dose of ignorance and arrogance. These produced the several blunders, such as Pearl Harbor and the German invasion of Russia. FDR and Churchill were not needed (if they ever really participated) in coaxing the Japanes (or, indeed, the Germans) to blunder.
Richard Burnett | Dec 7, 2008 | Reply
Mr Burnett does not challenge the facts and proof scholar Higgs and other present...only serving up same stuff on the same shovel/tangential rhetoric...ie conditioned response/defense of “blunders” and “oversite”....
the thousands murdered...and sacrificed on the alter of Mars in pursuit of globalism and internationalism ie United Nations..which was being PLANNED by pals of FDR before Dec 7...and like groups who clamored for a similar event before 9.11...they egged on Japan and herded sacrificial ancient battleships and expendable servicemen to die to get us into ANOTHER global war... for their globalist agenda and ends.
Chris Bieber | Dec 8, 2008 | Reply
There’s more to it. Roosevelt is an old Dutch Jewish name and in fact he was a Zionist who needed an excuse to drag the American people into a war with Germany because the latter was a threat to Zionism. Until Pearl Harbor the American public was in no mood to get involved in a war in Europe. We already were sinking German ships before we declared war on Germany.
After that we saw to it that in 1948 Israel was established on Arab lands and that led to Bosnia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Bali,Pakistan and more. If there is any taboo in any culture, it is against speaking the truth about history.
Hendrik Bakker | Dec 8, 2008 | Reply
Further to my previous comment: I forgot 9/11.
Hendrik Bakker | Dec 8, 2008 | Reply
Mr Bieber is both right and wrong–but decisively wrong as to my so-called non-denial of the facts. Yes, it is a fact that the Village Voice, a Chicago paper of the time, ran a story from a supposed eyewitness who asserted that the men flying the Japanese planes were white men. That the paper existed and the story was run is a fact–the substance of the story is not. Mr Bieber has misconstrued what I’ve written. There are American historians, a few, who buy off on the several conspiracy theories. But the bulk of them do not, to say nothing of those of other nations or persuasions. The Village Voice story is in the same set as Mr Bakker’s above thoery about Roosevelt’s name and ethnic origin. And as to the facts themselves, the conspiracy thoeries strike me as the usual mizmaster school of history or theology in which events and quotes are taken out of context, indeed taken not whole but edited and shaped, not unlike Charles Kane’s wife (in Citizen Kane) who made the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit by using scissors to recut the pieces. But it is worse than this: According to Prange, the Japanese claimed that they had not sent any radio messages from the carrier strike force–to which Stinnett, among others, claims that either they lied or were decieved by their own shipmates It comes to this: Either the Japanese lied, to include also the many other Americans and Japanese, that the official version is mostly lies, or it is mostly or entirely true. There’s really no alternative to this choice.
To make sure that mr Bieber gets me correct, the official history, to include Prange, John Keegan, John Ellis, Spector, William Manchester and many many others are right and such as Howard Zinn, Stinnett and Toland are decisively wrong. One last note: The new revelations or facts shown are merely the reshaping of some old facts into a form acceptable to the conspiracy/revisionists–they are not new facts, but shadows of older facts and myths. These revisionists are quite like Kane’s wife.
Richard Burnett | Dec 10, 2008 | Reply
If someone tried to cut off our resources we’d attack in a heartbeat. Blowback has been around a long time. And it’s kind of hypocritical to cut off COLONIAL oil from a country you are accusing of being imperialistic.
daddysteve | Jul 6, 2009 | Reply