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  • 2004-06-08 (xsd:date)
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  • Missing Words from WWII Memorial (en)
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  • On 29 May 2004, as part of the annual U.S. Memorial Day observances honoring those who died in our nation's service, the long-awaited National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., was formally dedicated. (The memorial had opened for public viewing a month prior to its official dedication ceremonies.) To most Americans — particularly those who lived through World War II itself — no words associated with that conflict are more familiar or more stirring than those delivered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as he stood before Congress on 8 December 1941, the day after the surprise attack by Japanese forces on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and asked for a declaration of war against Japan. Accordingly, no American memorial to World War II would be complete without a reproduction of at least a portion of President Roosevelt's memorable speech. The message quoted below (which looks to be a reworking of an item originally published in the Washington Times on 4 June 2004) claims that an excerpt from FDR's 8 December 1941 speech which is inscribed on the side of the memorial dedicated to the war in the Pacific deliberately excised the words 'so help us God,' as uttered by President Roosevelt that day, because 'We're not supposed to say things like that now': Example: [Collected via e-mail, June 2004] Ironically, this claim is apparently based on some anonymous person's flawed recollection, the very sort of tampering with memory that the message warns us against. Here is the complete text of President Roosevelt's 8 December 1941 address to Congress: Out of that twenty-four sentence speech, only a single sentence (the one highlighted in red above), prefaced by Roosevelt's famous opening words, is inscribed on the National World War II Memorial: The sentence that concludes with the words So help us God (highlighted in blue above) is not the one inscribed on the memorial; it is a completely different sentence that occurred later in the speech. The phrase So help us God was not excised from FDR's speech; it simply didn't appear at all in the single representative sentence from that speech which was chosen to adorn the memorial. As the National Park Service (NPS) noted of the faux controversy: (en)
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