State of the Union AddressesRoosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
History
State of the Union Addresses
Roosevelt, Franklin D. (Franklin Delano)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
The response of the American people has been instantaneous, and it will be
sustained until our security is assured.
Exactly one year ago today I said to this Congress: "When the dictators. . .
are ready to make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on
our part. . . . They--not we--will choose the time and the place and the
method of their attack."
We now know their choice of the time: a peaceful Sunday morning--December
7, 1941.
We know their choice of the place: an American outpost in the Pacific.
We know their choice of the method: the method of Hitler himself.
Japan's scheme of conquest goes back half a century. It was not merely a
policy of seeking living room: it was a plan which included the subjugation
of all the peoples in the Far East and in the islands of the Pacific, and
the domination of that ocean by Japanese military and naval control of the
western coasts of North, Central, and South America.
The development of this ambitious conspiracy was marked by the war against
China in 1894; the subsequent occupation of Korea; the war against Russia
in 1904; the illegal fortification of the mandated Pacific islands
following 1920; the seizure of Manchuria in 1931; and the invasion of China
in 1937.
A similar policy of criminal conquest was adopted by Italy. The Fascists
first revealed their imperial designs in Libya and Tripoli. In 1935 they
seized Abyssinia. Their goal was the domination of all North Africa, Egypt,
parts of France, and the entire Mediterranean world.
But the dreams of empire of the Japanese and Fascist leaders were modest in
comparison with the gargantuan aspirations of Hitler and his Nazis. Even
before they came to power in 1933, their plans for that conquest had been
drawn. Those plans provided for ultimate domination, not of any one section
of the world, but of the whole earth and all the oceans on it.
When Hitler organized his Berlin-Rome-Tokyo alliance, all these plans of
conquest became a single plan. Under this, in addition to her own schemes
of conquest, Japan's role was obviously to cut off our supply of weapons of
war to Britain, and Russia and China--weapons which increasingly were
speeding the day of Hitler's doom. The act of Japan at Pearl Harbor was
intended to stun us--to terrify us to such an extent that we would divert
our industrial and military strength to the Pacific area, or even to our
own continental defense.
The plan has failed in its purpose. We have not been stunned. We have not
been terrified or confused. This very reassembling of the Seventy-seventh
Congress today is proof of that; for the mood of quiet, grim resolution
which here prevails bodes ill for those who conspired and collaborated to
murder world peace.
That mood is stronger than any mere desire for revenge. It expresses the
will of the American people to make very certain that the world will never
so suffer again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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