Opinion and Commentary
It is Memorial Day. Go visit a cemetery. Take flowers.
If we thought about the origins of Memorial Day more, maybe we would be more sober about it. It should be a day of mourning, not celebration.
It is hard to realize now, but before we invented perpetual care cemeteries if you wanted your loved one’s grave looked after you had to do it yourself.
This need spawned a tradition, centuries old, of communities cleaning their cemeteries every spring—mowing, removing old dead flowers, sprucing them up and placing new flowers on the graves.
You remember your dead, and everything they were, when you clean their grave every year with your own hands.
Origins in the Civil War
This tradition took on new and urgent importance after the Civil War.
In a few short years this country lost 2% of its population to war—750,000 dead.
How does a society handle and come to terms with such a vast number of dead? Nobody wins a war. Everybody loses.
When people today call for a second civil war or a revolution, I shudder.
If such a war were to break out tomorrow, and we had a similar casualty rate, 6.8 Million Americans would be dead in 4 years.
How does a society deal with such a tragedy?
The Need to Remember
One of the first recorded responses to this tragedy was in Columbus Mississippi April 25, 1866 when a group of women went to the local cemetery to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers who had been killed at the Battle of Shiloh.
Disturbed by the sight of the neglected graves of the Union dead also buried there, the graves of the enemy, the women decorated those graves with flowers as well.
Similar spontaneous events sprung up around the country before and after this one. There are around 25 places in the country who claim they held the first Memorial Day ceremony.
Grief and Remembrance
Which one it really was hardly matters. The outpouring of grief and the decoration of the graves of the war dead sprung up spontaneously, without any design or plan.
It was born out of the grief of the whole nation to deal with its tragedy and loss. In Lincon’s words, it demonstrated the desire of ordinary people to “bind up the nation’s wounds.”
In 1868 the Union Veterans Association the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) declared May 30 as Decoration Day and organized a large observance at Arlington National Cemetery. After speeches by President Grant and other dignitaries at Arlington House, children from the Sailors and Soldiers Orphans Home placed flowers on the graves of the Union and Confederate dead.
By the beginning of the Twentieth Century “Decoration Day” observances were being held all across the nation. Eventually it came to be a day of remembrance for all who had fallen in any war.
It was not declared an official National Holiday until 1971. That is when it was affixed to the last Monday in May. In some places it is still called Decoration Day.
What Does It Mean Today?
What strikes me most about this holiday is how it began. It did not come from the top down. It began with simple people, far from the centers of power, showing compassion for the fallen who had no one to take care of their graves.
People in the North and the South recognized and decorated the graves of their enemies.
In this era where most of us have lost touch with the reality and devastation of war, to remember takes effort, study and thought. It was fresh in the thoughts and experience of the people who began decorating the graves.
Few of us have lost loved ones in war. I guess that is why we glorify our military so much these days, to assuage our guilt.
We do not believe in the reality of war. We are convinced it will never happen to us. So we wave flags and grill hamburgers. As a people we have very short memories and prefer to forget. Forgetting on Memorial Day is a lot easier than remembering.
