FDR - Jean Edward Smith [337]
At noon Monday, Roosevelt motored down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill, deliberately choosing an open car to demonstrate his confidence and resolve. In the second car rode Eleanor and Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, whom FDR had asked to join the presidential party. When he entered the House chamber, the Congress rose as one for a prolonged standing ovation. Twelve times in a speech of only twenty-five sentences the president was interrupted by thunderous applause. He catalogued Japan’s Pacific aggression—not only at Pearl Harbor but in Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake Island, and Midway:
The facts of yesterday speak for themselves. No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.135
It was a powerful speech, powerfully delivered. Congress acted within thirty-three minutes: unanimously in the Senate, 388–1 in the House, the lone dissenter Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin of Montana—who had also voted against war in 1917.
The United States was at war.
* The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of 1908 arose in response to action by the San Francisco Board of Education, which in 1906 decreed that Japanese students must attend a segregated Oriental school lest they overwhelm the city’s white students. Since there were only ninety-three Japanese students involved, overcrowding was scarcely the issue. As the San Francisco Examiner crowed, “Californians do not want their growing daughters to be intimate in daily school contact with Japanese young men.”
TR intervened, called the San Francisco action a “wicked absurdity,” and invited the school board to Washington, where a compromise was worked out. Tokyo agreed not to issue passports to Japanese citizens who wished to settle in the United States, thus choking off immigration, and the San Francisco school board agreed to allow properly prepared Japanese students to enroll in the same classes with whites. The arrangement was spelled out in a series of notes between the Japanese government and the State Department and is summarized in 2 Foreign Relations of the United States 1924 370–371 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1939).
* By statute, Japanese ministers of war and Navy were chosen from the senior ranks of the services. By refusing to nominate a candidate or withdrawing its officer from the cabinet, either service could topple a government. The Army, moreover, reserved the right to appeal directly to the emperor, bypassing the civilian government altogether. The system was patterned on Germany before World War I, an infelicitous choice similar to General P. G. T. Beauregard’s decision to base the Confederate battle plan at Shiloh on Napoleon’s tactics at Waterloo. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear 503–504 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
* Ambassador Grew was married to Alice de Vermandois Perry, the granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, the victor of the Battle of Lake Erie and brother of Commodore Matthew Perry, who opened Japan to the West in 1853. Her father, Thomas Sergeant Perry, held the chair in English literature at Keio University. Alice had spent her youth in Japan and had developed a wide network of contacts who gave