What the People Said

In Milwaukee lead clouds hung over the city, blotting out the sun. A raw wind whipped in from the south, bringing whitecaps and foam on Lake Michigan, chilling the children who wandered with their parents down Wisconsin Avenue to look at the Christmas toys in the windows of the department stores. In Chicago it was cold and overcast with a threat of snow which began as night fell.

Elsewhere the mildest season reached from coast to coast. Warm in southern California, a perfect day for swimming in the Pacific, unseasonably warm in Kansas City, cloudy in the morning when the city went to church, sunny by the beginning of the tragic midday. In San Antonio "the day was coolish and switched from grey to clear. . . . Out in wooded Bracken-Park, kids were riding the ferris wheel and flying jenny; babies were being held in swings; miniature trains were tooting and whistling as kids were whirled by adoring parents. . . . The main streets were pretty full of wistful-eyed window shoppers. . . ." It was December 7, and the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor and Manila.

What did the people say when the news of the bombing broke on the quiet Sabbath:

December 7: The First 30 Hours (Knopf; $2) is the first attempt to draw together in a single volume a nationwide reaction to a major historical event. Written in a little over 30 hours by 50 journalists--"50 working reporters called from golf courses and football games, from unfinished mid-day dinners and symphony concerts and favorite radio programs"--it is a collection of shorthand notes recording the emotion that swept the U.S. in a tidal wave as the Arizona burned, the Oklahoma capsized and U.S. soldiers & sailors died in action for the first time in 23 years. The reporters: the News Bureau Staff of TIME, LIFE, and FORTUNE. Their assignment: the people of the U.S. Public-opinion polls could record the shift of ideas on the great issues of neutrality, of isolation, of war and peace. The task of the writers of this book was to record "what the People were seeing and doing; how they felt and what they said about a new America, a new way of living." Quickly, without conscious art, with no opportunity to choose words or measure judgments, they flashed their views of what happened in 30 American cities stunned at the word that came.

December 7 Begins: Washington wire from Wilmott Ragsdale at the State Department, 1 p.m.--Japanese envoys asked for an appointment with Hull. . . . The book ends, 202 pages later, with the scene of Congress declaring war: "There were no tears. . . . There was no prayerful silence. . . . It was just the American Congress, its neck bowed, its back arched, and itself buckled down to the job of giving 'blood, sweat and tears' in any volume necessary to defeat the most audacious attack of the aggressors."

Between these pages the correspondents, reporting from 30 U.S. communities, noted the words or actions of:

> The President, ten Cabinet officers, five State Department officials, five Ministers, including the Dutch, Thai and British.

> Six Secret Service officials. > 51 Congressmen, six radio announcers, five Mayors, seven Governors, 76 newspapermen.

> Five Admirals, five Generals, nine lesser Army officers.

> Six pastors, six Japanese consuls, 907 Japanese civilians, seven housewives, three waitresses, two newsboys, two taxi drivers.

> Two nightclub entertainers, a nurse, two chippies, two labor leaders, one movie producer, a newsreel cameraman, four draftees.

> 80 experts on Far Eastern affairs, 2,500 America Firsters assembled in a meeting, 2,000 New Orleans citizens who assembled outside the Japanese consulate on St. Charles Avenue, 2,500 moviegoers in the Majestic Theater in Dallas, a score of reporters outside Secretary Hull's office, 20 correspondents in the pressroom of the White House.

> 25 top-ranking officers in the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics ("Gentlemen, we have work to do"), Army, Navy and Congress leaders in Speaker Sam Rayburn's office, "a great throng . . . looking west across San Diego harbor, and out beyond Point Loma to the Pacific. . . ."

The Silent. Some of the people said nothing. "Two Japanese masks walked out of Hull's office. . . . 'Is this your last conference?' they were asked. No reply."

At the Cleveland Country Club, the round-table discussion of the Institute of Pacific Relations was beginning when news of the attack broke. "There was dead silence for two minutes. In those 120 seconds, 80 different opinions were resolved. It was unanimously agreed, as one delegate put it, that 'Japan has handed America its long-needed unity on a silver platter.' "

When the news did come, "it didn't hit Los Angeles with a bang. It leaked in to the supercurious and the shut-ins, who even on a perfect day can stay by their radios. It got around at first almost by word of mouth. . . . It moved through backyard gardens, across golf courses, into bars . . . and finally to the beaches of the fateful Pacific. . . ."

In Washington, "thin sharp remnants of the afternoon's cold wind dither across bleak LaFayette Square directly in front of the White House; tree limbs stick up bare and stark above the scant light of the posted lamps. . . . There is a silent deliberation in the movement of the cars. . . . Hundreds of pedestrians in a steady flow ease past the tall, iron picket fence separating the White House grounds from the avenue. . . . They move along quietly, talking if at all in whispers, subdued whispers. Silence on the avenue, despite the mob of cars, the mass of people, is apparent, deep enough to gnaw at the nerves."

. . . When Congress assembled: "There was nothing to be seen except the hard grey walls of the Capitol, bright and solid in the clear, pale noonday sun. . . . Yet the face of every individual, the faces of all those huddled over the radios, were turned directly toward the towering pillars of the Capitol. There was a churchlike hush, a sullen, angry silence. . . . What was the silence of shock last night, today was the cold, determined hatred of an outraged people. There was something of the tension of a lynching mob, a mob where there are no masks, where each individual is happy to be identified with the purpose of the assembly."

The Profane. The strongest impression communicated by December 7 is that the Japanese attack, coming when it did, calculated to stun and sicken the people by outraging the season that stands for a symbol of peace, to wreak the maximum psychological havoc by undoing a time so beloved and gracious, unleashed emotions with which both the friends and enemies of democracy will have to reckon in the future. There was a telephone call to a Minneapolis radio station: "Why those sons of bitches!" There was a Kansas hunter: "I guess our hunting will be confined to those God damned slant-eyed bastards from now on." In Phoenix: "How many of the yellow so and so's have we killed?" A San Francisco motorist: "Down the street I almost ran over a Jap on a motorcycle. Maybe I should have hit him."

The Eloquent. Throughout the U.S. the telephone calls poured in to the newspaper offices, to the radio stations, frantic, choked, inarticulate, the broken cries of distress like the woman in Detroit who said only, "Now he will probably get shot."

There is no oratory in December 7. Twenty-eight years ago last week, as World War I began, Sir Edward Gray, tall, elegant, elegiac, looked out on a darkening London on the darkest day of his life and murmured the phrases that will live longer than his works. "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." Like a thin spire of a phrase left standing from another epoch, the words ominously summed up the mood of the pre-War world.

History and men's memories saved some other speeches at that war's beginning. There was the 39-year-old Winston Churchill who listened as Mr. Asquith announced to Parliament: "Great Britain is now at war," then burst into tears. There was Tsar Nicholas who said, "We invoke prayerfully the Divine blessing for Holy Russia." There was the Kaiser who looked to the East as he proclaimed: "With God's help. . . ."

These conscious speeches, the heritage of an educated order, springing from the Christian tradition which reached across the battlefields, are absent from December 7 as they were absent from the first reports of the war's beginning that reached the U.S. from Europe.

What the People said in the Europe of 1914, in the Europe of 1939, was what the Spokesmen said--and as stirring as were their words, they were words as conscious, as grave, as ordered and educated as those of Edward Gray. No agency existed in the hot midsummer of 1914 to span the teeming continent of Europe to take the pulse of the people who were to be the casualties, the heroes, the victims--or the survivors. No backward look by the autobiographers, the novelists, the poets, could bring clearly into view the first impact of war upon the sufferers.

The Laconic. When the most gifted of the post-war novelists rebuilt the first hours of the war it was with imaginations darkened by the memory of the 900,000 English, the 1,385,000 Frenchmen, the 1,600,000 Germans, who were dead in battle. The agony of Verdun, the bogs of suffering in the Masurian Lakes, the memories of starvation, wounds, cruelties, riots, assassinations, broken families and broken lives haunted the minds of men even while they compelled them to try to bring an intellectual order out of war's chaos.

The magnificent collection of documents in the Hoover Library on War, Revolution and Peace has no single over-all survey of the public mind of Europe on Aug. 1, 1914. Where groups or individuals analyzed public reactions it was with a thought of their use, of their conscious manipulation to achieve a foreknown effect for the benefit of the group doing the manipulating. This was as true of Lenin, stunned that the German Social Democrats supported the war, as it was of Pareto, brooding over the "residues" of primitive impulses that lay beneath the conscious purposes of the masses.

The eloquent speakers in December 7 are the laconic, who marked their feelings as they said, "Well, it's here," or the heartbroken who said nothing at all. There is a simplicity in the reactions of the people which must seem childish to the Nazis, infantile to the Japanese. For when the news of war broke on the cities that were already turning into armed camps, the soldiers and the folks at home alike asked the most warlike question of them all: "Will Christmas leaves be canceled?"

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