God Bless America

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain pays tribute to the fallen of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 as he sings, "God Bless America."


Note to readers: The following column by Congressman Don Manzullo initially published in the Northwest Herald on Sept. 16, 2001.

Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, started like an ordinary day. I rode to the Capitol with Congressman Lee Terry and at 9:30 a.m. crossed the 14th Street bridge, a quarter-mile from the Pentagon.

Ten minutes later, the airplane struck the building. As I entered my office, my staff was watching thick smoke pouring from the Pentagon. I sent them home. With no ride myself, I asked my scheduler and legislative assistant, Katy Whitfield from Crystal Lake, to take me home. As we left, we heard rumors of bombs exploding at the State Department, the Senate and on the Mall. We even heard a rumor that the Sears Tower in Chicago suffered the same fate as the World Trade Center in New York.

Members of Congress and staff moved quickly and silently from the office buildings. The sense of shock was so intense that most people, including myself, felt nothing but a sense of disbelief. We heard what we thought was an explosion, but it could have been a sonic boom from a fighter jet passing over the Capitol.

Members of Congress were summoned to return to the Capitol at 7:15 p.m. Speaker [of the House Dennis] Hastert led us in silent prayer on the Capitol steps. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California started us singing “God Bless America.”

On Wednesday, Sept. 12, I went to the Pentagon to thank the firefighters who responded to the tragedy. I spoke with several of them. There must have been a thousand people representing countless emergency and security agencies. There was even a chapel. I talked to two exhausted firemen who were trying to get some rest. “The American people want to thank you,” I said. “Thank you,” they responded. “We’re tired. We just worked 12 straight hours.” The plane struck the building on its side, one wing up, the other down. It tore open a 200-foot-wide hole. The fire burned for more than 24 hours, reaching up to 1,400 degrees. And, yet, right next to the hole in the building stood a computer, a desk and some filing cabinets unscathed by the fire. The acrid smoke, charred building, and response teams made it look like a war zone. It was.

On Thursday, Sept. 13, the shock had not left and I still couldn’t sleep. I saw Congressman Gary Ackerman from New York. I asked him if he knew how many constituents and friends he had lost. He said he didn’t know; tears poured from his eyes. I embraced him as he told me his intern’s 23-year-old brother perished in the World Trade Center. Congresswoman Nydia Velaquez, also from New York, waited 11 agonizing hours before finding her niece, who worked in the building.

We voted Thursday for emergency funding to help the injured and missing, to rebuild the destruction, and to give our military the resources to wipe our planet clean of the cowardly animals who committed these heinous acts. We also voted to urge Americans to fly their flags. As we were being briefed in the House Chamber, a fire alarm sounded to evacuate us from a bomb threat.

I attended a weekly Bible study with several members of Congress. Our leader, Ted Yates, received the following email (in broken English) from Poland, where Ted and his family ministered for several years:

We are shocked and deep touch of this what happend in last Tuesday in States. I want assure you, and all other American friends about our solidarity, and our prayers which we bring to God’s Throne. Poland is plunge in mourning. President proclaimed national mourning for next 3 days. There are thousands of flowers and ever burning fires next to Amercan Embassy in Warsaw. Polish people had hard history but this kind of brutality stoped our breathing. We are with you.

–Yours in Christ, Piotr P. Waclawik.

Today is a new day. Our nation and our people are forever changed. And we are stronger than ever.

My offices have been flooded with calls from northern Illinois residents offering messages of hope and seeking ways to help. Doctors, nurses, firefighters and truckers offered to drive to New York to help the victims and missing. Seniors on fixed incomes offered cash donations. Thousands stood in line for hours to give blood.

I am overwhelmed by the sense of compassion and patriotism that has grasped our country. While our military protects us, our people will inspire us to heal and rebuild the greatest nation in the world.

God Bless America.

• Don Manzullo of Egan was U.S. Representative of Illinois’ 16th Congressional District when the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred. He remains Illinois’ 16th District congressman today.

9/11 Taught Differently Around The World, Tufts Grad Finds

People all over the world remember the 9/11 attacks. Here, mementos are left at the September 11 Memorial Garden in Grosvenor Square, London, in September 2009. (AP)

When Elizabeth Herman visited her former high school, Newton South, a few years ago, she was surprised to find that its new history textbooks already include sections on 9/11. That got her wondering how textbooks in other countries describe the events of September 11, and that topic eventually became her thesis project at Tufts University, where she graduated in 2010.

Now a Fulbright scholar, Herman is continuing her research on how 9/11 is taught around the world. So far, she has analyzed textbooks from 13 countries. When Herman spoke this week with WBUR’s All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer, she said she has found that a country’s relationship with the U.S. often influences how it teaches about 9/11.

Elizabeth Herman: If the country’s relationship with the United States was a little bit more tense, you saw a much more critical view of the United States. So, for example, I was able to analyze the textbooks in Brazil, India and China, and in those three nations relationships with the United States are a little tense. All of those spoke about the audacity of the United States and its actions post-9/11 and the illegality of the war, specifically of the Iraq War.

Sacha Pfeiffer: And what did you find in textbooks published in Islamic countries?

In textbooks in Islamic countries the focus on the assailants was fairly different. In Pakistan, the textbooks completely omit the identity of the assailants. So in the United States and in western countries, you find that the attackers are talked about as Islamic fundamentalists. They’re identified as such, whereas the Pakistani textbook reads, “On September 11, 2001, American Trade Center and other strategic positions were attacked by unidentified terrorists.” And in Turkey it just omitted their identities as Muslims.

What country presented 9/11 most differently than the way the U.S. presents it?

I would say that the country that presented 9/11 most differently would be China. It mostly spoke about 9/11 as a sign of diminishing American hegemony — and that is not what you see in American textbooks. You see 9/11 being spoken about in American textbooks as a sign of America having been attacked and then having come together.

You found that sometimes there were different words used in different textbooks that seemed like subtle differences, but that you think were significant. For example, describing 9/11 as an “incident” rather than an “attack.” How did you find that that made a difference?

I think that that is what is at the heart of all this. It’s that when you’re thinking about the way that a story is told, you might imagine that one word chosen or substituted for another would not make much of a difference. But when you take all these little changes together, you get a tone that is very well-defined. So, for example, in the way that you would describe the people who executed the attacks of 9/11, whether you call them “attackers” or whether you call them “assailants” or whether you call them “individuals” has very a different connotation and creates a very different image in one’s mind when you’re reading that textbook.

Why do you think it matters that students are getting different perspectives?

This is one of the first generations that has textbooks that have had an event that happened less than a decade ago written into their history textbooks already; that’s new. And so that kind of speed with turning current events into history I think really changes the way the next generation is going to view these events and discusses them. And I think that if students grow up with completely politicized views of these events, then we could run into a lot of trouble.

Do you think there’s ever really an official version of events? Doesn’t it always change depending on where you live and what your political viewpoint is?

Absolutely. And I think that there’s no right way to teach 9/11. I think that the best thing that you can do is provide as many perspectives as possible and help students learn how to synthesize those narratives themselves.

And that’s your goal, I believe: to take all the different versions you’ve come across and create a curriculum that presents all those different viewpoints.

That’s exactly right. You know, originally I did set out on this project imagining that I could come up with the right way to teach this in schools. Over time I’ve realized there’s no way to do that. What I’d really like to do is I have all these narratives from all these different countries. If you hand a student 13 different ways of looking at 9/11 from 13 different countries and ask them, “How is this different from how you’ve learned this in the past? And why do you think it’s different? Why do think that Pakistan tells this story one way and Brazil speaks about it a different way? Who’s writing this history?” I think that that’s the only way that we can actually reach a new understanding of this event.

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