It’s Memorial Day. Who are we remembering?

There’s an official definition of Memorial Day. And then there’s the way American citizens actually celebrate it.

|
Dave Scherbenco/The Citizens' Voice via AP
Veterans from Dupont Post 189 fire a rifle salute on Sunday, May 29, during a Memorial Day weekend program at The Independent Italian American Cemetery in West Wyoming Pa.

It’s Memorial Day. Who are we remembering?

You’d think that is an easy question to answer, but it isn’t. There’s an official definition of Memorial Day, and then there’s the way American citizens actually celebrate it. The two don’t always mesh.

Memorial Day, to the US government, is the time to remember those who died while serving in the military.

“In observance of the holiday, many people visit cemeteries and memorials, and volunteers often place American flags on each gravesite at national cemeteries. A national moment of remembrance takes place at 3:00 p.m. local time,” reads the Department of Veterans Affairs explanation.

It began as a sectional celebration, with its roots in division, and was known as Decoration Day. Following the end of the Civil War, North and South separately developed the tradition of decorating the graves of fallen soldiers, on separate days.

Some Southern locations held their decoration day (lower-cased in the beginning) on May 10, the anniversary of Stonewall Jackson’s death. Others held it on April 26, the day the surrender of the final Confederate Army in the field truly ended the war, or on June 3, Jefferson Davis’s birthday.

Northerners also generally remembered their war dead on spring days. That was when flowers were available for wreaths and memorial sprays, after all. In 1868, US Army Gen. John Logan, commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the politically powerful organization of Union veterans, issued a general order naming May 30 as a day to mound the graves of the war dead with “the choicest flowers of spring time.”

The melding of regional remembrance into a national one was a gradual process. Following the brief Spanish-American War of 1898, President William McKinley got things started, with a speech in Atlanta in which he said, “Every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American valor.” In the summer of 1913, an encampment of Civil War veterans at Gettysburg, Pa., which included many former Confederates, helped move the two sides further to reconciliation.

But it took further shared suffering to make Decoration Day national. In the wake of the national effort in World War I the regional aspect of the holiday began to fade. Following the armistice most southern regions began to celebrate the May 30 holiday in addition to their local decoration days.

World War II further diminished the Civil War origins of Decoration Day in the collective national memory. In 1967, federal law officially recognized the holiday as “Memorial Day,” the by-then common name. In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which established a number of three-day US holidays. Memorial Day was officially set as the last Monday in May.

Over the years the holiday’s purpose began to change. Its date has made it an unofficial start of summer. For some Americans, its name had made it a time to remember veterans as a whole, not just those who died in uniform.

Veterans’ Day, in November, is the holiday meant to recognize all who served in the armed forces. But how many social media posts today have you seen that mention the military as an institution? We’re betting lots. On its mobile interface, Facebook this morning posted what appears to be an institutional post (company logo in the corner) to that effect, saying that “Today, we remember together . . . those who have served our country.”

It’s not uncommon for holidays to transform a bit – George Washington’s Birthday, the official name of the February holiday, has morphed in the public mind into “President’s Day,” an all-encompassing celebration of all things national chief executive. As we’ve written often over the years, President’s Day, in a national sense, does not exist. Yet there it is, in car and mattress ads in every remaining American newspaper.

Americans develop their own traditions. Our wife’s New England family upholds the Decoration Day aspects of today, but in their own way – it’s traditional for family members to travel around and decorate with flowers the gravesites of all ancestors, whether they served in the military or not.

There’s nothing wrong with that. Memorial Day is what individuals make of it. That’s the kind of freedom our veterans – including those who sacrificed their lives – protected, and our armed forces, including those once again near the front lines fighting the Islamic State, are protecting today.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to It’s Memorial Day. Who are we remembering?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2016/0530/It-s-Memorial-Day.-Who-are-we-remembering
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe