Day of Infamy Speech

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), often referred to by his initials FDR, was an American politician who served as 32nd president of the United States of America. The New York Democrat was the only US president to serve more than two terms in office, beginning with his election in 1933 and ending with his death in 1945. During that time, he is credited with guiding the country through the Great Depression, remaking the federal government through his New Deal, and shepherding the US through most of WWII. Late in the war, FDR, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin negotiated the foundations of the United Nations, an intergovernmental organization that FDR hoped would resolve future world problems.

FDR was born in Hyde Park, New York. His parents came from wealthy, socially prominent New York families, and he was distantly related to Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th president of the United States. After graduating from Harvard, where he studied economics and edited the Harvard Crimson newspaper, FDR studied law at Columbia and began working as a lawyer. By then he had also married Eleanor Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s niece and another distant relation. The couple had five surviving children, but FDR’s repeated affairs strained their marriage. They remained political partners for the rest of their lives, and Eleanor was just as active as her husband in liberal social causes, particularly when it came to race and gender. She was also a frequent presence on the national airwaves (See: Background).

FDR entered politics in 1910, when he won a seat in the New York State Senate. There, he gained a reputation as an energetic progressive reformer, taking on the New York Democratic Party’s famous Tammany Hall political patronage machine to push for candidates he felt were better qualified to serve the public. In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson appointed FDR as assistant secretary of the Navy. In that position, he expanded civilian control over the military and instituted merit-based promotions. He gained valuable skills that he put to use during his own presidency, learning to cooperate with union leaders among the Navy’s civilian employees and overseeing ship deployments when the US entered WWI. During his time in the Wilson administration, FDR was also a strong supporter of Wilson’s effort to form the League of Nations. While the League of Nations ultimately failed, partly because of growing isolationist sentiment in the United States after WWI, FDR later incorporated many aspects of Wilson’s plan for an intergovernmental problem-solving organization into plans for the United Nations.

After WWI ended, FDR suffered a series of setbacks. In 1920, he was selected as the Democratic Party’s nominee for vice president, but he and his running mate, James Cox, lost the race to Republicans Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The next year, a Senate report castigated him for his role in the Newport sex scandal, an overreaching effort to root out queer activity in the Navy. In 1921, he was diagnosed with polio, which left him permanently paralyzed from the waist down. Despite some advising him to retire from politics, he continued to plan for his future career with the help of Eleanor and other advisers. While he was rarely photographed in his wheelchair or seen using it in public, FDR’s disability—and the efforts he undertook to teach himself to walk with leg braces—became an integral part of his public image and personal appeal to those struggling through the Great Depression. By 1929, he had worked his way back into political office as governor of New York. As the Great Depression began that year and unemployment soared, he advocated for unemployment insurance to assist desperate workers, farm aid, and old-age pensions. These policies helped him win re-election to the governorship in 1930 and, in 1932, the presidency.

By 1941, when the “Day of Infamy” speech was broadcast nationwide on all the major radio networks, FDR’s voice would have been familiar to most Americans because of his famous Fireside Chats. He delivered his first presidential Fireside Chat about banking and the Great Depression on March 12, 1933, just eight days after his inauguration. Later Fireside Chats explained subsequent New Deal policies and helped generate support for far-ranging reforms like Social Security, Medicare, his failed effort to reorganize the judiciary, and, eventually, the US’s expanding involvement in WWII. FDR was known to revise each speech draft for days before it was ready for air. He addressed his audiences as “My friends,” and “My fellow Americans” and used commonplace words and analogies to create an impression that he was speaking to the public as he would to a friend. The “Day of Infamy” speech retains his accessible diction, but his persona is more formal given that he is addressing congress. His tone relates to his role as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy” (Paragraph 7) rather than a friendly person “of the people,” aiming to instill confidence and jingoistic feeling among listeners.

The “Day of Infamy” speech echoed many themes that FDR had already introduced in his wartime Fireside Chats, the first of which he delivered just after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. These themes included the United States’ role as a bulwark of spiritual virtue, peace, and democracy for the world, as well as the nation’s moral duty to support its allies and, if necessary, to fight for international peace. The day after the “Day of Infamy” speech aired on the radio, FDR addressed the public again in a Fireside Chat that detailed the attack on Pearl Harbor, revealed other attacks around the globe, and described the steps the US government was taking to begin its involvement in the war. It’s reported that 81% of the listening public tuned in to hear FDR’s “Day of Infamy Speech” (Brown, Robert J. Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America. McFarland, 2004), and The New York Times reported that 62 million adults listened to the following Fireside Chat.