29 pages • 58 minutes read
Franklin D. RooseveltDay of Infamy Speech
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1941A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Consonance
FDR’s use of consonance (the repetition of similar consonants in adjacent words) is particularly noticeable in recordings of his address. A practiced public speaker, FDR punctuates his points through his steady, deliberate delivery, pausing frequently before uttering harsh consonants at the beginning or ends of words. These pauses make the consonants he utters sound even more harsh and disruptive than they would otherwise, echoing the disruption that the coming war will cause in American lives. FDR uses consonance to greatest effect at the beginning and end of his address. When he is referring to the Japanese attacks, his consonants land on words directly related to Japanese violence or falsehood, where they might be seen as echoing the sound of bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. Toward the end, consonance dominates words like “determination” and “triumph,” emphasizing his optimism about the US’s ability to disrupt Japan’s violence and win the war.
Contrast
Throughout his address, FDR highlights the supposed contrasts between the United States and Japan, focusing mostly on Japanese duplicity and “infamy” and Americans’ “righteous might.” FDR builds up this contrast by first establishing the Japanese as untrustworthy enemies and then introducing citizens of the United States as the antithesis, or opposite, of their now-official enemies. This contrast not only heightens the sense of Patriotism and National Identity that he is trying to build by defining Americans in opposition to Japanese people. This initial contrast aims to inspire his listeners to make other, unspoken contrasts and to show War as a Fight Between Good and Evil. If the Japanese are sneaky liars, Americans must be honest and direct. If Americans are righteous, the Japanese must be evil. Positioning the Japanese as irredeemable enemies stoked anti-Japanese racism (See: Background) and caused WWII-era Americans to dehumanize Japanese individuals in an effort to justify not only domestic concentration camps but also the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima.
Juxtaposition
At the beginning of his speech, FDR makes the case that the Japanese government is duplicitous and therefore untrustworthy by juxtaposing Japan’s diplomatic and military actions on the day of the Pearl Harbor attacks. Juxtaposition is a literary device whereby two unlike things or ideas are placed alongside one another to emphasize the contrast between them. In this case, the difference between the Japanese government’s words (ongoing peace negotiations) and actions (secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor) heightens the contrast FDR draws between the Japanese and American governments. While he does not directly say that Americans are more honest than the Japanese, the structure of his speech implies that the national character of the US is antithetical to that of Japan.
Repetition
Within his brief address, FDR uses repetition to heighten his audience’s sense of Japan’s violence without going into extensive detail about the damage caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Instead of enumerating the troops lost and materials destroyed, he lists the targets hit with the repeated phrase, “Last night Japanese forces attacked” (Paragraph 5). This repetition reaches the level of anaphora, an ancient rhetorical technique wherein a speaker repeats a word or phrase at the beginning of every sentence. This technique is most common in religious texts like the psalms. Beyond forging a close connection between Japan and violence, this quasi-religious format reinforces the religious overtones of FDR’s “Day of Infamy” speech and other wartime messaging that characterized War as a Fight Between Good and Evil.
