An excerpt of remarks by William Leuchtenburg, professor of history, delivered at a fundraiser for families of fallen New York City firefighters. A segment of this talk appeared in the News & Observer (Raleigh).

was in Europe on September 11. When, after a week of grieving and anxiety, I was able to return to Chapel Hill, I found countless messages from journalists, and the phone has continued to ring since then... By far the most ubiquitous question—in this country and abroad—has been: Is this another Pearl Harbor?

In a number of respects, yes. Both were attacks on American soil. Both attacks caught us by surprise. Both attacks were regarded as unfair.

But in other respects the situation today is not at all like that in 1941. Hawaii was not then an American state but an overseas possession, more than 2,000 miles from San Francisco. The deaths at Pearl Harbor, terrible though they were, came to men in uniform, already at risk. The deaths on September 11 came in cities all of us know well to men and women going about their rounds on a quiet Tuesday morning, people with whom we readily identify. It takes no special imagination to see ourselves boarding those planes, fastening our seat belts, looking about at our fellow passengers, planning what we will do after the plane touches down. It takes no special imagination to see ourselves heading off to work, going to our office, chatting with our fellow workers, altogether unknowing of what was about to befall.

The circumstances differ, too, in another critical aspect. In 1941, our enemies in the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis were identifiable, and few doubted that, though it would take years and thousands of lives, our enemies would be overcome. Today we face a very different crisis—our enemies hard to find, sometimes hard to identify, and our capacity to secure our homeland in doubt.

One reporter said to me, "People are afraid," and I replied, "They are right to be afraid. They need to have courage, but they are right to be fearful."

Another reporter asked, "Will this crisis change American society?" Yes, and in ways we cannot possibly predict. If there is one generalization a historian can make about the social impact of war, it is that war brings about permanent changes that few intended in declaring war or in recognizing the existence of a state of war. World War I brought us women’s suffrage, prohibition, daylight savings time, and an influenza epidemic that took half a million lives, including that of the president of the University of North Carolina. World War II brought us radar, sonar, penicillin, the atomic bomb, and the withholding tax.

Wars are rife with paradox. World War I helped kill off the progressive movement, but it also resulted in an economic mobilization that was later the main source for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. World War II saw the eradication of Roosevelt’s New Deal agencies but also an economic boom that ended the Great Depression, and so fused did the two events become in the popular mind that in later years Roosevelt was credited with the return of prosperity that had eluded him in the New Deal.

The war against terrorism today, in contrast to the World War II experience, is, instead of bringing full employment, moving us closer to recession. It will wipe out the surplus and result in deficit spending, a situation that both parties have been seeking to avoid but that may, ironically, turn out to be an unintended economic stimulus. Moreover, it would not be surprising if the present crisis gives George W. Bush a legitimacy as president that his disputed election denied him, but at the cost to him of vitiating his effort to reduce the power of the national government. No longer is it being said, in the words of Reagan’s first inaugural, "Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the problem." In Randolph Bourne’s trenchant aphorism, "War is the health of the state."

Since I have written about and taught the history of the United States for more than half a century, it comes naturally to me, when seeking to comprehend our current predicament, to look for guidance in the American past. But in truth I believe my experiences in other countries may be considerably more salient.

o grasp how September 11 is trans-forming America, I think of the early seventies, when I was Harmsworth Professor at Oxford and could not walk into the lobby of a London hotel to buy a newspaper without having to submit to a security check because no one knew where the next IRA bomb would be. I think of the times that I have lectured in Italy. On one occasion in Rome, I drove past the spot where a few days earlier Prime Minister Moro had been assassinated and saw the flowers left there beginning to fade, and I remember even more vividly, when I was lecturing in Bologna, the appalling sight at the railroad station of hundreds of family snapshots of the most attractive faces of the young people whose lives had so cruelly been taken from them by a terrorist bomb, pictures not unlike those heartrending "Have you seen...?" placards in Manhattan today.

America has largely escaped that kind of experience in the past, but, especially as the world’s most conspicuous great power, the United States has no reason to suppose that it has been granted permanent exemption. The people of Israel go to market each day not knowing what may happen. I very much hope that we will not have that same kind of concern, but we cannot help but be alarmed by the prospect of any number of future scenarios in this new century, including biological warfare.

Two final questions from one reporter. The first: Will September 11 change the American psyche permanently? I believe it will. Members of my generation who were children in the Great Depression have carried the effects of that experience with them all their lives—in their attitude toward security, toward government, toward what tomorrow may bring. I think that this event will have a similar lasting effect. For more than two centuries, we lived with the conviction that thousands of miles of ocean safeguarded us from enemies overseas. After September 11, that comfortable sense of dwelling in a warm cocoon has been seriously eroded.

The second question was: "Will any good come out of all of this?" Not much I fear—nothing to match the pain we’ve already experienced and that is likely to come.

But perhaps two things will be gained. One is a greater sense of community in this country. We have been living in a democratic society but in a segmented society. Too often we have not had a great enough sense of our interdependence. That may be changing some. It is unlikely that for many of us the word "firefighter" has had the meaning in the past that it has for us today. The firefighters of New York are burnished in our memory as are others who lost their lives on September 11 while seeking to help: the police, the clerks of the Supreme Court of New York who rushed into the inferno to give aid and vanished, the incredibly valiant men on the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.

There is conceivably one other gain—that we will have a greater sense of recognition of how much we need the friendship and devotion of the peoples and governments of other nations. In recent days, we’ve often heard the question asked, "Why does the rest of the world hate us so much?" A more appropriate question would be, "Why has the feeling of grief, of oneness with America, in the rest of the world been so nearly universal?" Wherever I traveled in central Europe after September 11, I saw black flags of mourning flying—not only on government buildings but also on private institutions. Outside U.S. embassies people had laid wreathes of flowers. On the busiest avenue in bustling Vienna at high noon, the bus driver turned on his radio so that we could hear the announcement of the start of the three minutes of silence—a silence for those slain in America that was observed across Europe.

An editorial writer on the front page of Salzburger Nachtrichten, the independent newspaper of Austria, wrote what many others were writing elsewhere in the world: "In the spirit of the famous sentence of John F. Kennedy—‘Ich bin ein Berliner’—must we say today, ‘We are Americans.’ We sit in the same boat as America. The flying bombs that struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were, without question, aimed at our western civilization."

Perhaps the most moving ceremony of all took place at St. Paul’s in London. After hearing expressions of sorrow, the audience was asked to rise and sing "God Save the Queen" (she was present). But the 2,000 assembled there were told to join in singing lyrics to that melody that would be unfamiliar to them, lyrics they would find in their programs... Imagine these words being sung out by mourners with pronounced British accents:

My country, ‘tis of thee,
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing:
Land where my fathers died,
Land of the pilgrims’ pride,
From every mountainside
Let freedom ring.

Leuchtenburg participates in the Carolina Speakers program; for information, see www.unc.edu/depts/uncspeak/.