Posting #29: The Story of Memorial Day

The story:  Memorial Day is a day set aside by the federal government to remember and honor those in the armed forces who have died protecting the United States.  It was designated a federal holiday to give workers the day off so they could engage in this day of remembrance.  Occurring as it does at the end of May, Memorial Day also signals the unofficial beginning of summer and so is celebrated with parades and picnics.

My take on the story

I’m thinking about this story because I happened to be in DC this past Memorial Day.  In making my travel plans, I’d forgotten that the day would be a holiday, and a federal one at that.  DC is constantly bustling and full of tourists whenever in the year I visit, so as I walked around the Capitol Building that morning under skies threatening rain, the city didn’t seem more or less busy than any other day.  There were few indications that the tourist part of the city was shut down.   But I and my two walking companions—my husband and our younger daughter (who lives and works in DC)—were reminded it was a holiday and reminisced about our experiences of the day.

Coming from a large, military family which had us moving frequently and overseas, I have always known the day as “Memorial Day” and, at most, it meant a family picnic if we happened to be living near other parts of our family or we weren’t in the process of moving.  What it did not mean were parades or shopping or even grave-decorating.  My husband’s family, however, has always called this day “Decoration Day,” a day that to them, living in the western United States, meant putting flowers on the graves of all their loved ones, not just those who had perished in service to the nation.  The little family that my husband and I created together usually spent the holiday uneventfully: the two adults recovering from an intense college year and preparing to work for the summer on research and writing, and our three kids readying to end their school year and start a summer free from schedules.  No parades, no grave decorating, no picnics, not even any Memorial Day shopping.

Curious about the difference between “Decoration Day” and “Memorial Day,” I looked into it. 

Here’s what I found:

Origins of Decoration/Memorial Day

Unofficially, what has come to be called a day of remembrance began after the Civil War.  The 750K dead from this war necessitated establishing national cemeteries, which totaled 30 by the war’s end and included Arlington National Cemetery. Given that most of the fallen were buried in these cemeteries, most of the remembering happened in those sites.

Called “Decoration Day,” it was intended as a day to decorate graves with flowers, wreaths, and flags of those who had died in service to the country.  Decorating had occurred informally across the nation but the first known instance happened only weeks after the Civil War had ended, in May, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina.  Thousands of formerly enslaved Black community members decorated the individual graves of 260 Union soldiers previously buried in a mass grave. “The war was over,” writes Yale historian David W. Blight, “and Decoration Day had been founded by African Americans in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. The war, they had boldly announced, had been all about the triumph of their emancipation over a slaveholders' republic, and not about state rights, defense of home, nor merely soldiers' valor and sacrifice.”  However, Waterloo, New York has been declared the birthplace of the tradition because on May 5, 1866, “it hosted an annual, community-wide event, during which businesses closed and residents decorated the graves of soldiers with flowers and flags.” 

Decoration Day became a more formal practice on May 30, 1868—a date chosen for it’s not being the anniversary of any Civil War battle—when it was observed at Arlington National Cemetery. Following a speech by Ohio congressman James Garfield, 5000 volunteers decorated the graves of more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried at Arlington.  In 1873, New York had designated Decoration Day a state holiday; by 1890, all the Union states had made Decoration Day a state holiday.  The southern states, on the other hand, honored the Confederate dead on other days until after World War I.

Memorial Day Now

It was not until after the two world wars that “Decoration Day” became equally known as “Memorial Day” in a gesture to acknowledge the deaths of US servicemembers from many US wars, not only the Civil one.  But the day of remembrance—whatever it was called—continued to be held for a hundred years on May 30^th until 1968, when the US government passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.  This Act both put three major holidays—Washington’s birthday, Memorial Day, and Veterans’ Day—on specific Mondays every year to give federal employees predictable three-day weekends.  It also formally designated the last-Monday-in-May federal holiday, “Memorial Day.”

Notably, though, President Johnson’s statement as he signed the Act emphasized convenience and leisure more than honoring the dead:

This will mean a great deal to our families and our children. It will enable families who live some distance apart to spend more time together. Americans will be able to travel farther and see more of this beautiful land of ours. They will be able to participate in a wider range of recreational and cultural activities.

Some report that it was this 1968 switch from mourning to schedulable convenience that has produced Memorial Day as we know it now: not only parades and picnics but also widespread Memorial Day sales.  Voice of America , however, quotes Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon, saying “Memorial [Decoration] Day's potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I's end on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed [in the United States but not other countries] Veterans Day in 1954.”  But Voice also cites Time magazine’s calling Memorial Day in 1972 “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.”  Now, Voice says, Memorial Day has “come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on everything from mattresses to lawn mowers.”

Others claim that even in the late-19^th century, the somber day of remembrance was giving way to “uplifting tunes rallying around pride for country.”   The advertising agency McNutt and Partners claims some Americans lamented this change.  “After Decoration Day in 1875, the New York Tribune wrote, ‘The old pathos and solemnity of the act have vanished…,’ and then in 1878, ‘It would be idle to deny that as individual sorrow for the fallen fades away the day gradually loses its best significance’.”  The agency says that the 1968 Act meant a guaranteed and predictable three-day weekend for workers, which naturally means travel.  “And what does travel mean?” the agency asks. “Spending money.”  But even if one does not travel,

a day off from work means a day, in the eyes of retailers, for people to shop. Increasing commercialization of the Memorial Day holiday started with this shift to it being a three-day weekend in the 1970s. From there, the public image of the holiday for many became more about vacation and retail and less about commemorating the dead—especially for those with no ties to the military.

The agency has a good point: when less than 1% of the American population serves the nation in uniform, many fewer people have a connection to the military.  Consequently, it might be too much to expect on Memorial Day more than picnics, parades, and retail shopping to occupy Americans’ day off from work and school.  

So what?

I was reminded of what I thought was the day’s solemn significance, though, with three events on that day in DC. I walked down the Mall, around the Tidal Basin, and envisioned Arlington Cemetery just across the Potomac River, a site where my father has been buried for 35 years and where my niece would be laying a wreath on that particular Memorial Day in commemoration of her young husband who died in service to the country.

First, as I walked down the Mall toward the Tidal Basin, I witnessed numerous high school bands from all over the country camped out under the Mall’s trees, waiting to march in the Memorial Day parade on Constitution Avenue.  I’m sure the musicians welcomed the overcast skies and cooler temperatures, garbed as they were in woolen or polyester uniforms.  But I was also struck by the incongruity of the martial airs they were practicing, incongruous because the tunes seemed more celebratory, more meant for marching, and more a call to arms than a solemn memento of “the ultimate sacrifice.”

At the same time, I was reminded by my walking companions that we had been in DC years before on Memorial Day and witnessed hundreds of Vietnam War veterans on motorcycles parading—in formation—their way down the streets around the Mall.  This deafening spectacle was called “Rolling Thunder,” per the Vietnam War’s aerial bombardment campaign from 1965-1968. It, too, was not solemn but was known as a Vietnam veterans’ military “demonstration” or "parade," a practice concluded in 2020.

In fact, I’ve learned, the nation’s capital did not host a Memorial Day parade for over 60 years—so, since World War II—and it was only the dedication of the World War II Memorial in 2004 that brought this parade back to the Mall.  For instance, in his 1956 Memorial Day Proclamation, President Eisenhower makes no mention of a parade, only that “I, Dwight D. Eisenhower, President of the United States of America, hereby call upon the people of this Nation to observe Memorial Day, May 30, 1956, as a day on which all of us, in our churches, in our homes, and in our hearts, may beseech God to guide our steps into the paths leading to permanent peace.”  That there was no parade until after 9/11 and the (highly controversial) building of the World War II memorial means that the martial parades often associated with Memorial Day are a relatively new thing, not an age-old tradition.

Second, we walked around the Tidal Basin—better known as the place where the cherry trees blossom in the Spring—where we toured the Jefferson, FDR, and MLK memorials. Unlike the martial, marching tunes we’d heard the high school bands readying to play in the parade or Eisenhower’s call to Americans to pray for peace, the memorials’ inscriptions seemed to match the solemnity of the day.

·      “Laws and institutions” I read at the Jefferson Memorial, “must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times” (emphasis added).  This colored for me the Supreme Court originalists insisting on their singular, “original” interpretation of the Constitution.  One of our “founding fathers” apparently disagreed, saying in the quote that context—“the times”—is everything.  Perhaps the martial music of the parade suggests our “times” necessitate a celebration of militarism. 

·      “I have seen war,” I read at FDR’s Memorial. “I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded...I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed...I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.” I thought of how the Palestinian Gazans and Ukrainians are now experiencing this horror…and we Americans are a part of that.

·      And at MLK’s Memorial, I read the two most pointed inscriptions for Memorial Day.  First, “It is not enough to say ‘We must not wage war.’  It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but the positive affirmation of peace.”  And second, “I oppose the war in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart, and above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.”

There were not many other tourists at these memorials, and those few who were there seemed more intent on getting selfies than on reading the inscriptions. Why not read, on Memorial Day?

And third, I knew that on Memorial Day my mother typically visited my father’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery.  But this day, my niece (with one of her two young children) was also in the city to solemnly lay a wreath at Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  She was there to honor her recently deceased, 30-something, servicemember husband who had died of a service-connected toxic exposure cancer.  Later, she wrote “Memorial Day has always been a reflective time for those of us connected to the military, and this year is no different. It is the one day we ask all Americans to pause, honoring the ultimate sacrifices made by so few on behalf of so many.”  

These three events left me feeling uneasy about the holiday, wondering why a day I had always thought was designated to honor and mourn the deaths of people in service to the nation seemed rather, at the nation’s heart—the Mall—with the parade a festive celebration of militarism.  Meanwhile, the more solemn sites of commemoration that I came across seemed physically and emotionally peripheral, on the Tidal Basin and across the river at Arlington.  There were far fewer people at those sites than the 10,000 marching in the day’s parade, let alone the numbers of spectators. 

Why do the parades, picnics, and shopping prevail now on Memorial Day?   I suspect it’s not only because, since the end of the draft in 1973, a miniscule portion of the US population serve in the armed forces, as the ad agency above suggests, and so the vast majority of Americans have no connection to the military. 

More than that disconnect, I think we Americans don’t want to think about the dead or the possibility of dying as a consequence of service.   If we think of them or that possibility, we are reminded that when we agree to fund our military at such high rates and when we are willing to send our servicemembers into war and when we think “Thank you for your service” is all we can or should do…we are culpable. Thinking about the dead—my father, who died at 58 years old from exposure to Agent Orange or my niece’s husband, who died in the prime of his life from exposure to toxic compounds—is too painful. 

Better to go to death-concealing parades, picnics, and shopping.