The Melodramatic Style

On the night of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st Century took place today.” As early as mid-afternoon on 9/11, many politicians, journalists and news commentators were comparing the day's attacks to Pearl Harbor and claiming that it was a new “day that will live in infamy.” Despite the proliferation of this comparison there were fundamental distinctions between the two attacks, and they were articulated through different genres of political discourse. The tenor of political discourse had shifted throughout the intervening sixty years, and these changes had implications both for the representation of political events and for the expansion of violent state action that followed them. This essay investigates how these changes formed a melodramatic genre of American political discourse.

President Roosevelt's speech the day after Pearl Harbor was grave. In his first nationwide radio speech, he called December 7, 1941 “a day that will live in infamy.” He proclaimed the attack's “unprovoked” nature and catalogued Japan's deceptions leading up to it. His assessment, however, was not depicted through a trans-historical narrative pitting goodness against evil. Instead, in an even-keeled voice it listed examples of Japanese hostilities to the US and other nations, each example tied to a specific action and political grievance. The speech contained few descriptive adjectives for the Japanese or the attack. The prose was relatively dry, lacking emotive expressions or a detailed description of the suffering on the ground in Pearl Harbor. Describing the effects of the attack, FDR only states: “[I]t caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that many American lives have been lost.” Roosevelt argued that the “American people in their righteous might will win through absolute victory,” but he did not categorize the upcoming struggle through categories of victimhood or villainy. His speech the following day would be more moralist, more adjectival, more stirring in its announcement to an isolationist nation that it was going to war; the term “evil” is mentioned, but only once, and is used to describe a wartime tactic, not a fixed moral position or an inherent quality of the attackers.