When I think of the Memorial Days of yesteryear, I remember three things. The least relevant, although I would argue not the least significant, was listening to the Indianapolis 500 on the radio (we didn’t have a TV) with my Dad. Neither of us knew anything about auto racing, and neither of us paid any attention to other auto races. But the Indy 500 was special because… well, because we listened to it together. Far more directly related to the day itself was the parade. I watched it for a couple of years as a little boy, then got to march in it as a Cub Scout and subsequently as a Boy Scout. It was a fairly lengthy parade route, starting at the top of the hill in New Paltz, NY, then going down (literally down) Main Street until we took one left turn that led us before long to the fire station, where there were speeches appropriate to the occasion and a 21-gun salute to the brave men who never came back from the war… whatever war.
There were still a couple of veterans from the Spanish-American War and more than a handful from World War I. It made a big impression on me that these men spoke so lovingly of their fallen comrades, all these years later. Most of the vets in attendance, of course, had served in World War II or Korea. The Vietnam conflict had started, but I was an experienced Memorial Day marcher before there were significant American casualties there.
Memorial Day was a time both for somber reflection and for celebration: for a recognition of the sacrifices made by soldiers and sailors past, and for a reckoning of the blessings accorded to the rest of us by their service. The brief ceremony as we stood on the grounds of the fire station, supported by the high school band and pep squad, was more than a little slice of Rockwellian Americana, although it was certainly that. It was a time when we collectively stopped our internal bickering and sought—and found—common ground. For at least a few minutes, we were not Republicans and Democrats, Christians and Jews, blacks and whites. We were Americans, with all the joys and sorrows that entails.
But I promised you three memories. The third happened only once. It was 1973, my senior year of high school. By now, the romantic view of America had eroded more than a little in violence at home and abroad. We’d lived through a tumultuous decade, bookended by the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and the currently mounting evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors associated with the Watergate break-in that would lead to the resignation of another President the following year. We’d seen race riots and police brutality against anti-war protestors, an explosion of drug culture and a new (or at least newly named) phenomenon called the “generation gap.”
Against this backdrop, I, as a 17-year-old just beginning to understand that some of the high school friends I’d made a couple years earlier were now coming home from a war I didn’t support in Southeast Asia in flag-draped boxes, was asked to read the Memorial Day proclamation at the ceremonies in my (new) hometown of Cortland, NY. I had won the American Legion Oratorical Contest for the county that spring, and apparently that made me the appropriate choice for this responsibility. Anyway, I was provided with the speech I was to read—one of the first proclamations of Memorial Day, dating from the period of or immediately after the Civil War.
My recollection is that it was originally written and/or presented by one of the Confederate women often credited with establishing the tradition that became our current holiday. I have tried unsuccessfully to locate the speech. I’m pretty sure I’d recognize it if I saw it, but I don’t remember enough of it to have as much as a keyword to search for. One thing I am certain of is that it wasn’t General Logan’s proclamation (linked below).
What I remember most about the speech was that it was remarkably convoluted. It took me hours of study to figure out what that page-and-a-half-long oration meant, so that my interpretation of it could do it justice. Apparently, the high-schoolers given the same responsibility as mine in years past hadn’t bothered: a number of veterans who had obviously attended these ceremonies for decades thanked me for making that document’s meaning clear to them for the first time. I remember, too, that I had to really project: I was standing behind a makeshift podium in a city park; there was no microphone. It was then, not in the play I’d acted in a few weeks earlier, that I came to realize that there’s a difference between being loud and being heard: a lesson that, at the time, I thought (incorrectly) would never again be relevant in my life.
One thing I found in trying to prepare for that oration was that Memorial Day is one of the most curious of American holidays because no one knows how it really started. There are legitimate claims that the “first Memorial Day” took place in Charleston, SC; in Boalsburg, PA; in Macon, GA; in Carbondale, IL. Indeed, over two dozen towns tout their credentials as the birthplace of the holiday. Officially, i.e., according to a resolution authorized by President Johnson in 1966, the first ceremony took place in Waterloo, NY, a little over an hour from where I stood that May day in 1973. What is clear from all this is the simple fact that, across the country, there was a felt need in the 1860’s for this kind of commemoration: literally dozens of similar ceremonies seem to have sprouted up, completely independent of each other.
The formalization of the observance is generally traced to an 1868 proclamation by General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans organization. The selection of May 30 as Memorial Day (prior to the 1971 move to the last Monday in May—a move many traditionalists still disdain) is thought to have come from two sources: a belief that on that day, fresh flowers would be available all over the country (remember, this is nearly a century before Alaskan statehood), and its correspondence to the French “Day of Ashes,” which marked the return to France from St. Helena of Napoleon’s remains.
What is interesting, however, is that many if not most of the legendary stories about “the first Memorial Day” involve two things: women as prime movers, and a respect for the opposition. The story of Columbus, Mississippi can be taken as exemplary. The city’s official website tells the bare-bones version: “According to local historians it is here that Memorial Day got its start when the young women of the town decorated the graves of fallen soldiers on both sides of that great conflict.” There’s a longer description by “Spook86” on the In from the Cold blog:
More than a thousand men died on each side at Shiloh, and many more were wounded. With few hospitals in the area surrounding the battlefield, scores of wounded men were evacuated to the city of Columbus, 80 miles south of Pittsburg Landing. The lucky ones made the trip by train; the rest made the excruciating journey by wagon, across bumpy roads.There are those who, probably correctly, think that much of the meaning of Memorial Day has been eroded in recent years. That is, perhaps, inevitable. Recent wars—Vietnam and Iraq in particular—have been politically controversial, and not everyone is able to separate the warrior from the war. More specifically, the rhetoric that resonated in my mind as a boy seems more strained now. Dying to make the world safe from Hitler remains a noble sacrifice; dying to prevent Saddam Hussein from doing what he couldn’t have done if he’d wanted to seems more pathetic than tragic.
Given the limits of military medicine during that era, hundreds of wounded soldiers who survived the battle died days or weeks later in Columbus. Many of them were buried in Friendship Cemetery, which remains a local landmark.
By some accounts, the ladies of Columbus visited the cemetery in late April of 1862, decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers who were killed at Shiloh, or succumbed from their wounds after the battle. They resumed the practice on April 25, 1866. Noticing that the graves of Union soldiers went undecorated, the women of Columbus placed flowers on the burial plots of their former enemies.
Columbus wasn't the only American town to remember the war dead in that spring of 1866. But it could be argued that the Mississippi commemoration had the most impact. The simple act of generosity and reconciliation was noted in Horace Greely's New York Tribune and it inspired [Francis] Miles Finch's poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” which became required memorization for generations of school children.
Of course, that changes nothing with respect to how we ought to view our troops themselves, and especially to how we ought to perceive those who made what has tritely but accurately come to be called “the ultimate sacrifice.” But perhaps equally importantly, we need to remember the spirit of those women in Mississippi nearly a century and a half ago. They paid respect to those who fought and died, even those who had been their enemies in doing so. It was a gesture of humility, of grace, and above all of reconciliation. We could use a little of those qualities about now.
I close with a variation on my Memorial Day Facebook status for the past few years. The best way to honor our fallen heroes is to create a nation worthy of their sacrifice: where people matter more than profits; where political battles are won by those with the best ideas, not the best slogans; and where the right to serve is never denied to anyone with the courage, the skill, and the patriotism to do so.
On this Memorial Day, I wish you peace.
