Although New York had already won the National Football League’s Eastern Championship two weeks earlier, more than fifty-five thousand Giants fans turned out on Sunday, December 7, to cheer their team against the rival Brookyln Dodgers. The Giants were favored to beat Brooklyn and go on to play the winner of that day’s Chicago Bears-St. Louis Cardinals game for the world title. The Sunday New York Times assured, JAPAN RATTLES SWORD BUT ECHO is PIANISSIMO, while its sports page observed, “the attention of fans and players is bound to be distracted a bit by the Bear-Cardinal battle in Chicago.”
The crowd that filled the Polo Grounds was also there for Tuffy Leemans’s Day. The veteran carrier for New York, Alphonse “Tuffy” Leemans, was honored with a silver tray inscribed by his fellow Giants, as well as a watch and fifteen hundred dollars in defense bonds. Tuffy then made a short speech in gratitude, and Mrs. Leemans received a rose bouquet in equal tribute from the boys on the line.
In the game that followed the presentation, the saluted veteran struggled for only eighteen yards, hemmed in as he was by Brooklyn’s rugged defense. Pug Manders and Ace Parker…each born “Clarence”—ruined Tuffy’s day, with Brooklyn’s Bruiser Kinard clearing the way for the carriers. Manders’s ninety yards and three touchdowns were more than the Giants’ offense managed all day. The Dodgers led 21 to 0 with twenty-three seconds remaining when New York finally scored to make a slightly less humbling loss of the game.
The radio audience had been following Ward Cuff’s return of a Brooklyn kickoff at 2:26 P.M. when a news bulletin broke in to announce that the Japanese had bombed a place called Pearl Harbor. At the Polo Grounds they knew only that a Col. William J. Donovan had been paged over the RA. system for a call from Washington. This caused “ominous buzzing around Coogan’s Bluff,” noted the Times reporter, but failed to rob the events in Chicago of their urgency. As the Dodgers and Giants were leaving the field, officers and enlisted men in the Army were ordered to their stations over the RA. The results from Chicago still had not come in.
To Set the World on Fire
Even more people that afternoon were listening to a CBS broadcast of the New York Philharmonic when the news came. The orchestra had begun with an already scheduled rendering of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the radio audience was awaiting a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 1 to be conducted by Artur Rodzinski at Carnegie Hall when the announcement was made. The live Carnegie Hall audience learned the news at the conclusion of the performance from the announcer Warren Sweeney, who then asked for the anthem to be played again. Arthur Rubinstein, that day’s scheduled piano soloist, joined in playing, and the audience, which had hummed and mumbled in observance the first time, now sang at the top of their voices.
The popular song of that week was a sweet little ballad called “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” Among the other chart hits of 1941 that might have been playing that Sunday were “Blues in the Night,” “Take the A Train,” “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” and “Elmer’s Tune,” the work of a Chicago undertaker’s assistant named Elmer Albrecht.
The book trade seemed more geared for war. Of the year’s ten nonfiction best sellers lying around people’s living rooms that afternoon, seven dealt with war and preparation for it. William L. Shirer’s Berlin Diary, a reporter’s sketch of Nazi Germany, sold 450,235 copies through bookstores and the Book-of-the-Month Club. The White Cliffs, Alice Duer Miller’s epic poem to England, was second among nonfiction titles. Lower down were the speeches of Winston Churchill and You Can’t Do Business With Hitler, by Douglas Miller. Irvin S. Cobb’s Exit Laughing was the single humorous entry on the nonfiction list.
Fifth on the year’s fiction sales list, behind The Sun Is My Undoing, by Marguerite Steen, was Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, his first great seller. His noble account of struggles in the recent civil war in Spain suited the reading public’s mood, which seemed less escapist even in its choice of novels.
On Broadway, Sons o’ Fun, displaying the vivid Carmen Miranda, had opened its run of 742 performances at the Winter Garden Theater December 1. Over at the Imperial, Danny Kaye and Eve Arden had been singing Cole Porter’s new songs in Let’s Face It since the end of October. This show, which also included Mr. Kaye’s manic patter explorations, would survive well into the new year.
Hollywood Jumps the Gun
That year’s Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper as the simple blacksmith who went from plunking turkeys in the woods of Tennessee to dropping Huns in the Argonne Forest in the Great War, drew criticism from an ad hoc committee of Senate isolationists. So did Charlie Chaplin’s satirical assault on Adolf Hitler, The Great Dictator. Senators Gerald P. Nye, Bennett Champ Clark, and Burton K. Wheeler ran the hearings and made judgments on films they’d never seen, declaring the nation’s seventeen thousand movie houses places for “mass meetings for war.” On average, the senators pointed out, war pictures lost money; only the propagandistic war aims of “foreign-born” producers kept these films coming out of Hollywood. “Foreign-born” was, of course, a euphemism in the mouths of committee members. “If anti-Semitism exists in America,” asserted Senator Nye at one point, “the Jews have themselves to blame.”
The bombing silenced the Senate committee, and the national America First Committee disbanded on December 11. The bigger story in movies that month was the release of Greta Garbo’s new comedy, Two-Faced Woman, on the thirty-first. It would turn out to be her last film.
Beginning of the End
When war came at last, most Americans couldn’t identify exactly where it had come. The baseball writer Robert W. Creamer recounts how a boy ran home to the family’s Brooklyn apartment to explain to his mother and stepfather, “We’re at war. The Japanese have bombed Belle Harbor [at Coney Island].”
“I first heard the news from the elevator man in the National Press Building,” the journalist I. F. Stone wrote later that week. “The ticker at the Press Club, normally shut off on Sunday, carried the first flash telling of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was a beautiful late-autumn Sunday, the sky clear and the air crisp.”
“We are going into this war lightly,” Stone concluded, “but I have a feeling that it will weigh heavily upon us all before we are through. The vast theater on which the struggle between this country and Japan opens makes the last war seem a parochial conflict confined to the Atlantic and the western cape of the Eurasian continent. This is really world war, and in my humble opinion it was unavoidable and it is better fought now when we still have allies left.”
The day before the attack that compelled him to ask for a declaration of war, Franklin Roosevelt secretly approved money for the project that would end it: the atomic bomb.
