Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
The flag as seen through a window and a mirror.
I may feel ambivalent about the goodness of my country at times, and especially about its wars. But I never feel ambivalent about the people who have died and need to be remembered.
Monday is Memorial Day here, and I thought it would be a good idea to learn more about exactly what we’re memorializing. I know Veterans Day in November specifically honors the sacrifices of veterans, but is Memorial Day different?
Turns out, the details depend on who you talk to. Different groups come at it from different angles. For many years, as I learned from Wikipedia, the commemorations of lives lost during the Civil War were split into those honoring the Confederate soldiers and those honoring the Union dead.
Here are other things I discovered from the entry.
“Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) is a federal holiday in the United States. … It is observed on the last Monday of May. From 1868 to 1970, it was observed on May 30. … Many people visit cemeteries and memorials on Memorial Day to honor and mourn those who died while serving in the U.S. military. Many volunteers place American flags on the graves of military personnel in national cemeteries. …
“The first national observance of Memorial Day occurred on May 30, 1868. Then known as Decoration Day, the holiday was proclaimed by Commander in Chief John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic to honor the Union soldiers who had died in the Civil War. This national observance was preceded by many local ones. …
“Many cities and people have claimed to be the first to observe it. However, in 2022, the National Cemetery Administration, a division of the Department of Veterans Affairs, credited [Southerner] Mary Ann Williams with originating the idea. … The world wars turned it into a day of remembrance for all members of the U.S. military who fought and died in service. …
“Of documented commemorations occurring after the end of the Civil War and with the same purpose as Logan’s proclamation, the earliest occurred in Charleston, South Carolina.
On May 1, 1865, formerly enslaved Black adults and children held a parade of 10,000 people to honor 257 dead Union soldiers.
“Those soldiers had been buried in a mass grave at the Washington Race Course, having died at the Confederate prison camp located there. After the city fell, recently freed persons unearthed and properly buried the soldiers, placing flowers at their graves. The estimate of 10,000 people comes from contemporaneous reporting,”
Other documented claims of being first, Wikipedia says, come from Virginia, both Jackson and Columbus in Mississippi, and Gettysburg and Boalsburg in Pennsylvania.
Have you ever seen veterans or veterans’ families handing out red paper lapel poppies around this time of year? Here’s the backstory, also from Wikipedia: “In 1915, following the Second Battle of Ypres [in World War I], Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a physician with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote the poem, ‘In Flanders Fields.’ Its opening lines refer to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers’ graves in Flanders.
“In 1918, inspired by the poem, YWCA worker Moina Michael attended a YWCA Overseas War Secretaries’ conference wearing a silk poppy pinned to her coat and distributed over two dozen more to others present. In 1920, the National American Legion adopted it as its official symbol of remembrance.”
As my neighbors headed off to the annual commemoration at the local Veterans of Foreign Wars, and I just went for my daily walk, I thought about one line from the Wikipedia entry that particularly struck me as a person guilty of neglecting the “memorial” part of Memorial Day: “In 1913, one Indiana veteran complained that younger people born since the war had a ‘tendency … to forget the purpose of Memorial Day and make it a day for games, races, and revelry, instead of a day of memory and tears.’ “
“In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow
“Between the crosses, row on row. …
“We are the dead. Short days ago
“We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
“Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
“In Flanders fields.”
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