Some Americans Then and Now, 1941 – 2011

In response to this fascinatingly worded claim came a link to a brief Times editorial of December 7, 1951. We already know that there was no coverage of Pearl Harbor on the front pages in 1951, ten years later: Japan was already a staging center for the Korean War, and so the Washington Post editorialized that "the Japanese American alliance ought to be maintained in harmony."

But that Times editorial!

When the American people woke up on Dec. 7, 1941, they were living in an age in which there still lingered some of the easy-going optimism of the nineteenth century. They still believed that without too much effort and too much pain things might be made to turn out all right. They knew about Hitler but many of them didn’t quite believe that he existed.

This is a particularly incredible view. (Although it sounds familiar now, too.)

Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933; six months later, all other political parties were outlawed. Dachau opened in 1933. Three months after that, Germany left the League of Nations. In 1935, Jews were made non-citizens and "inter-marriage" was outlawed; forced abortions began. Kristallnacht was in 1938. Polish Jews were forced into labor in 1939. Shortly thereafter, Germany was going broke because of its preparations for war, yet invaded Poland in 1939, and Norway, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and France in 1940. The Battle of the Atlantic had begun in 1939, with the U.S. officially joining in 1941, well before Pearl Harbor, and Hitler's invasion of Russia began in summer of 1941.

But did "many" Americans not "quite believe" that Hitler existed when they "woke up" on December 7, 1941?

In November of 1938, the Times carried this: "Nazism was denounced in vigorous terms by spokesmen for organized labor tonight, who called for vigorous measures to meet the conditions existing in Germany." Ah, the head of the American Federation of Labor!

Two months prior, nearly 20,000 people, "many of them obviously of Central European origin," gathered in New York City, in Madison Square Garden no less, to call for help for Czechoslovakia, according to the Times.

And the Times printed part of Rabbi Joseph Konvitz's Rosh Hashanah message of 5699 in 1938.

And what was this round-up of newspaper editorials from Idaho to Minneapolis to Maine, "aggregated" (!!!) in the Times, saying of Hitler and Jews in 1938?

The brutality of Berlin mobs in last week's anti-Jewish demonstrations, reinforced by new and still harsher decrees from the Nazi government, constitute a chapter in modern history which a short time ago no one would have believed possible. Persistent exaltation of might, however, with the fostering of nationalistic bigotry and the throttling of free speech and press, have done their work.

So this 1951 Pearl Harbor editorial was a bit of nonsensical hand-wringing. It was patently not true; it was the sort of revisionist history that takes place when one can't or won't face the truth of one's own very recent history.

And as for Matt Cooper's claim—this is the Matt Cooper that was the politics editor for Time.com and the former Washington bureau chief of Newsweek—that Americans ten years later faced the facts of Pearl Harbor with a "telling" lack "self-doubt," unlike our current approach to 9/11—well, it's 100% hallucination. (Not least because 1951 was the year in which anomie was reinvented with the publication of Catcher in the Rye.)

There was, in fact, "self-doubt" as the Korean War began. (W.E.B. DuBois, then 82, was arrested for circulating petitions against the war; the Stockholm Peace Petition received between 1 and 2.5 million signatures circa 1950.) There was self-doubt in those ten intervening years, even as the "internment" camps opened and then were closed, in 1944, by the Supreme Court. There was, despite the approving opinion polls and media triumphalism afterward, even doubt and hand-wringing about the fire-bombing of Japan and then the use of atomic bombs in 1945. And surely there was some self-doubt after 1953 as well, when more than 40,000 Americans didn't come home.