Guest Columnist — David M. Kennedy: A reprise of dark times

Friday, Nov. 2, 2001 | 5:05 a.m.

David M. Kennedy is a historian whose most recent book, "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945," won a Pulitzer Prize in 2000.

Adrift in a sea of troubles, the United States seems in danger of coming unmoored from its own historical identity. Americans have been pounded by the surprise attacks of Sept. 11 and beset by anxieties about anthrax. Their righteous anger is not matched by conviction of eventual victory. They are little comforted by the still-inconclusive raids against Afghanistan, nor are they fully assured that their leaders are up to the job of protecting them from whatever horrors the future might hold. They are unaccustomedly edgy and off balance. For history's most secure, self-confident and forward-looking people, these are disquietingly unfamiliar feelings.

Yet some Americans can still remember the anxieties that plagued the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Popular culture recollects a people resolute and energized in the wake of the Japanese surprise attack. But in fact the mood of America in the weeks after Dec. 7, 1941, was baffled, frightened and grim.

Panic seized the West Coast in late 1941 in expectation of imminent Japanese bombardment and invasion. Radio stations went off the air, lest their signals serve as navigational beacons to enemy aircraft. Jumpy officials moved the Rose Bowl game out of harm's way, from Pasadena to North Carolina. Japanese-Americans were accused of plotting to poison water supplies and blow up power plants.

Apprehension gripped the Eastern Seaboard as well, as German U-boats in early 1942 began sinking U.S. ships off the Atlantic coast before the eyes of horrified spectators on shore. Submarine predation nearly choked off the convoys of food and war materiel to Britain. Teams of German saboteurs came ashore in Florida and New York.

A bleaker, more hopeless, picture is difficult to imagine. Yet we know how that story ended. Less than four years after Pearl Harbor the United States had vanquished its foes. Its presumably enfeebled industries disgorged an avalanche of weaponry. Americans robustly revived their flagging factories and in the process transformed their country from a peripheral, isolationist state into the solar plexus of the international system and the engine of the global economy. Though it has become commonplace to think of that outcome as inevitable, few could have predicted it in 1941.

It is unlikely that the struggle against terrorism will prove as pervasively transformative as World War II, the defining event of the modern era. But the nation's response to Pearl Harbor demonstrated the enduring truth that while Americans can surely be flummoxed and discouraged, they remain in the end prodigiously resourceful, resilient and creative.