President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” Speech

At 7:55 a.m. on December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers and torpedo planes attacked the U.S. Pacific fleet anchored at Pearl Harbor, catapulting the United States into World War II. In less than 2 hours, the fleet was devastated, and more than 3,500 Americans were either killed or wounded.

Just hours after learning of the attack, President Franklin D. Roosevelt dictated this speech to his assistant “without hesitation, interruption or second thoughts,” as she later recalled. The next day, before a joint session of Congress, the President asked for a declaration of war against Japan, pronouncing December 7, 1941 to be “a date which will live in infamy.” Congress responded by immediately declaring war, and the United States entered World War II.

This short, seven-minute speech “represents the tipping point, the actual moment when the United States was transformed from an isolationist nation to a global superpower and leader of the free world,” according to Roosevelt Library Directory Paul Sparrow. In recognition of the 75th anniversary of the attack, the U.S. Senate’s copy of President Roosevelt’s speech is on display in the “Featured Documents” exhibit in the East Rotunda Gallery of the National Archives in Washington, DC, from November 10, 2016 through January 4, 2017.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy Speech
National Archives, Records of the U.S. Senate

Click here to download a high-resolution copy of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech from the National Archives’ online catalog.

Past Featured Records

Title IX
An Act of June 23, 1972, Public Law 92-318, 86 STAT 235, to Amend the Higher Education Act of 1965, the Vocational Educational Act of 1963, the General Education Provisions Act (Creating a National Foundation for Postsecondary Education and a National Institute of Education), the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, Public Law 874, Eighty-First Congress, and Related Acts, ...
Court-Martial record of Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin, March 10, 1778.
On March 10, 1778, Lieutenant Frederick Gotthold Enslin became the first U.S. soldier court-martialed for “attempting to commit sodomy” with another soldier. His sentence was to be literally drummed out of the Continental Army by its regiments’ fifes and drums. Enslin was told “never to return.” More than 230 years after Enslin’s court martial, gay men, lesbians, ...
Indictment for illegal voting, 1872
Susan B. Anthony devoted more than fifty years of her life to the cause of woman suffrage. After casting her ballot in the 1872 Presidential election in her hometown of Rochester, New York, she was arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted for voting illegally. At her two-day trial in June 1873, which she later described as "the greatest judicial outrage ...
Sylvia Mendez and the Struggle for Mexican American Civil Rights
Friday, September 13, 2024 - Wednesday, October 2, 2024East Rotunda Gallery Gonzalo and Felicitas Mendez moved to Orange County, California, with their children Sylvia, Gonzalo Jr., and Jerome in 1944. When they tried to enroll in the majority-white school near their home, they were instead sent to a segregated school for Hispanic students. The Mendez family filed a ...
A President Resigns – 50 Years Later
Thursday, August 1, 2024 - Thursday, September 12, 2024East Rotunda Gallery “I have never been a quitter. To leave office before my term is completed is abhorrent to every instinct in my body. But as President, I must put the interest of America first.” –Richard M. Nixon, August 8, 1974 During the night of June 17, 1972, five ...