So Help Us God

I got an email from an old friend of my father, I call him Uncle Jim. It was about a trip that was made to see the WWII monument that was recently dedicated in Washington D.C. The email was written from the perspective of a younger person, someone who was of the Baby Boomer generation who had not been present during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous “Infamy Speech”. He was enjoying the inscriptions that had been carved into the monument, allegedly the entire context of that speech, when he overheard an older woman exclaim that she had noticed a very important omission in the words from that speech.

“She was suddenly angry. "Wait a minute, she said, They left out the end of the quote."They left out the most important part. Roosevelt said "so help us God." "You're probably right," her husband said. "We're not supposed to say things like that now."

"I know I'm right," she insisted. "I remember the speech." The two shook their heads sadly and walked away.

Listening to their conversation, I thought to myself, "Well, it has been 50 years. She's probably forgotten.", quoting directly from the email message.

Rather than take the information as gospel, I decided to research the famous speech. I went to The University of Oklahoma Law Center web site and read the entire speech and sure enough, parts of the original speech had been omitted from the memorial.

” With confidence in our armed forces - with the unbounded determination of our people - we will gain the inevitable triumph - so help us God.”

Another interesting point; I also had checked out a site, “History Matters” and found that they had their own “cliff notes” version of the speech, which purportedly was a transcript of the very same speech, but never mentioned the weightier parts of that speech at all.

It would seem that History can only be entrusted to those who care enough to include God; those who would have it their way are changing it at every opportunity. I would hope that such changes, when noticed, will shoot up yet another red flag to those who care about such things, “so help us God”!