Page 17 - Leisure Living Magazine Holiday 2016

Roosevelt, Churchill &
Christmas 1941
By Justice Paul Pfeifer, Ohio Supreme Court
On Christmas Eve 1923, President Calvin Coolidge walked out of the White House, pressed a button, and lit a 48-foot fir tree decorated with 2,500 red, white, and green bulbs. Coolidge thus became the first president to light the National Christmas Tree, an annual tradition he maintained through the rest of his term.
But as Christmas 1941 approached, no one was certain if the tree would be lit. It’s difficult to overstate how
bleak the national
mood was in
December 1941.
Earlier that month
the Japanese
surprise attack
on Pearl Harbor
had killed nearly
3,000 Americans;
now, young men
across the country
were signing up
to join a war that
had already been
raging across
Europe for two years.
Besides Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had attacked American forces in the Philippines and Wake Island, and Hitler had essentially conquered Europe. Only Great Britain stood in defiance of Hitler.
Britain’s Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, understood immediately that Pearl Harbor would bring the United States into the war, which was a welcome relief for the British. Churchill knew America was traditionally slow to enter into war, but once committed, “fought to the last desperate inch.”
After Pearl Harbor, Churchill wasted no time in traveling to America to meet with FDR to plan a master strategy for winning the war. Churchill’s perilous trip across the submarine infested Atlantic was a closely guarded secret,
so his arrival in America on December 22 was a happy surprise to the nation.
With Churchill by his side, FDR – sensing that Americans needed their spirits lifted – decided to proceed with the tree lighting ceremony. And so it was that in the Christmas Eve twilight, more than 20,000 people gathered on the South Lawn, and a nationwide radio audience listened as the president pressed a button, and lit the tree.
When FDR spoke, he began by identifying what many Americans were asking themselves: “How can we light our trees?...How can we meet and worship with love and with uplifted spirit and heart in a world at war, a world of fighting and suffering and death? How can we
pause...even for Christmas Day, in our urgent labor of arming a decent humanity against the enemies which beset it? How can we put aside, as men and women put the world aside in peaceful Continued on page 18
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