For months after Pearl Harbor, the news was unrelentingly rotten.
Americans barely had begun to wrestle with the enormity of the disaster when other stinging defeats followed in what seemed like daily succession. Newspapers constantly ran boldface headlines like “Japanese Subs Shell Santa Barbara,” “U.S. Troops on Corregidor Surrender,” “German U-Boats Sink Two More Ships off Florida.” and “Singapore Falls to Enemy.”
Last weekend, a nation deeply divided over the prospect of war against Iraq woke up to heartbreaking news from space, a region we like to think of as a showcase for American know-how. Some already had been worrying about having to fight on a second front with a nuclear-armed North Korean dictator. Since the dot-com bubble burst, a depressed economy relentlessly has robbed myriad Americans of a paycheck–100,000 in December alone.
And all the while, we’ve been living in the melancholy shadows of 9/11–this generation’s Pearl Harbor.
Though our military quickly sent Osama bin Laden’s Afghan hosts packing, his disciples remain at large. Our soldiers are shot in Kuwait and a U.S. diplomat is killed in Jordan–unavoidable reminders that the time of our innocence is over. Before us stretches an unforeseen and apparently endless age of vulnerability.
Nations have cracked under less strain.
The collective psyche, no less than an individual’s, can snap when sensing itself trapped in a labyrinth.
France did just that at the beginning of World War II. Wounded by the Depression, at war with themselves along class lines, the French folded their hand at the first German attack. A collaborationist French regime explained the country’s humiliating surrender as necessary atonement for past sins.
But it is not likely that we will do the same. The historical record shows that adversity and injury don’t immobilize Americans with depression or spasms of self-reproach. Instead, they goad us into action.
Consider the response of ordinary Americans when that flood tide of gloomy headlines began on Dec. 7, 1941.
Kids staked out Victory Gardens, clearing empty lots of broken glass and rubble. Planting those vegetable patches, we were convinced that we were bringing America one radish or an ear of corn closer to victory.
Answering the call to arms
Just as reserve units are being called up now, the Illinois National Guard was mobilized for the war against Japan and Germany. To fill vacant armories, replacement militia units were created. My father and my Uncle Bill joined those wonderful battalions of the overaged and marginally infirm.
They trained with equally ancient rifles, hand-me-downs from previous wars. But there was a snap in their step when they marched down home-front streets in 4th of July parades. You couldn’t miss seeing their pride in being the country’s last line of defense.
Defeats were commingled with victories. An expeditionary force to North Africa showed that our generals had a lot to learn about waging modern war. A battle in Tunisia in 1943 took the lives of so many Iowa National Guardsmen that their hometowns–places including Shenandoah, Clarinda and Red Oak–were virtually stripped of a generation of young men.
Our enemies had been banking on just that kind of experience to demoralize us. The Japanese calculated that America would tire quickly of a war to keep them from subjugating Asian nations so far from our own shores.
That wasn’t an unreasonable gamble, considering our national mood just before Pearl Harbor. Then as now, there was considerable anti-war sentiment. It brought together such unlikely allies as Robert McCormick, the archconservative publisher of this newspaper, and Robert Maynard Hutchins, the ultraliberal president of the University of Chicago. Lots of Americans could see no reason for sending our boys to bleed and die abroad when the country had yet to recover from the Depression.
That argument evaporated when Japanese dive-bombers and torpedo planes killed thousands of U.S. service members at Pearl Harbor. Editorial writers previously in the pacifist camp implored the president to take the war to our enemies with all possible vigor. Recruiting stations were swamped.
Decades later, President John F. Kennedy would exhort Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.”
In point of fact, Kennedy’s inaugural address didn’t so much break new ground as recapitulate a persistent theme in U.S. history. One who understood the import of JFK’s words long before they were spoken was Curtis Culin, a cabdriver from Chicago in civilian life.
Cabbie turns Normandy tide
Culin was a sergeant in the Army during the battle for Normandy–which, again, was a lot tougher than it is now remembered. After the D-Day landings, our forces were bogged down in the hedgerow country of northern France. For centuries, the peasants had raised berms around their fields and planted them thick with oaks and chestnuts.
Hidden behind them, the Germans executed a terrible slaughter of American troops. Our tanks would get hung up on the earthworks and couldn’t lead a breakthrough. Then Culin stepped forward with the brilliant idea of welding scrap iron to the tanks’ front ends, producing a cutting device that sliced through the hedgerows and turned the tide of battle.
To this day, we remain a nation committed, like Sgt. Culin, to the proverbial ideal of a better mousetrap. We may or may not invade Iraq. If we go in, we might liberate another people from a repressive dictatorship. Or we could get bogged down, as we once did in Normandy and Tunisia.
But one thing is for sure: Americans never will get over our impulse to heal the world.
How could we? The offspring of immigrants, we have optimism coursing through our bloodstreams. Our forebears gambled that, by uprooting their families from villages in County Cork, along the banks of the Vistula and in the hills of Sicily, their children would have a shot at a better life in America. The pessimists stayed at home.
Similarly, we will not give up on spaceflight because of the shuttle disaster. Americans mourn, but we are not melancholy by nature. When things break, our impulse is to fix them. We are incurable tinkerers.
So as we remember in our prayers the seven lost astronauts–among them a friend from Israel and an immigrant from India–be assured that others will step forward to take their place. Recall that they were not alone but stood at the head of a long line of hot-rod visionaries and alley mechanics that stretches back through that Chicago cabdriver-turned-battlefield inventor to a pair of brothers from small-town Ohio.
Those two guys were bicycle repairmen with a dream of a better way to travel. A century ago come this December, Wilbur and Orville Wright hauled the product of their imagination to the sand dunes of North Carolina. The contraption looked more like a kite with a motor stuck on it than what we think of as an airplane. Still, one of them climbed aboard and there, on America’s eastern shore, they gave mankind its first few seconds of soaring freedom from the confines of this planet.
