Memorial Day
is more than just a three-day weekend and a chance to get the year's first
sunburn. Here's a handy 10-pack of facts to give the holiday some perspective.
1. It started with the Civil War
Memorial Day
was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War, in which some
620,000 soldiers on both sides died. The loss of life and its effect on
communities throughout the North and South led to spontaneous commemorations of
the dead:
• In 1864,
women from Boalsburg, Pa., put flowers on the graves of their dead from the
just-fought Battle of Gettysburg. The next year, a group of women decorated the
graves of soldiers buried in a Vicksburg, Miss., cemetery.
• In April
1866, women from Columbus, Miss., laid flowers on the graves of both Union and
Confederate soldiers. It was recognized at the time as an act of healing
sectional wounds. In the same month, up in Carbondale, Ill., 219 Civil War
veterans marched through town in memory of the fallen to Woodlawn Cemetery,
where Union hero Maj. Gen. John A. Logan delivered the principal address. The
ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide
Memorial Day observance.
• Waterloo,
N.Y., began holding an annual community service on May 5, 1866. Although many
towns claimed the title, it was Waterloo that won congressional recognition as
the "birthplace of Memorial Day."
2. General Logan made it official
Gen. Logan, the speaker at the Carbondale
gathering, also was commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, an
organization of Union veterans. On May 5, 1868, he issued General Orders No.
11, which set aside May 30, 1868, "for the purpose of strewing with flowers,
or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their
country during the late rebellion."
The orders
expressed hope that the observance would be "kept up from year to year
while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed
comrades."
3. It was first known as Decoration Day
From the
practice of decorating graves with flowers, wreaths and flags, the holiday was
long known as Decoration Day. The name Memorial Day goes back to 1882, but the
older name didn't disappear until after World War II. Federal law declared
"Memorial Day" the
official name in 1967.
4. The holiday is a franchise
Calling
Memorial Day a "national holiday" is a bit of a misnomer. While there are 11 10 "federal
holidays" created by Congress—including Memorial Day—they apply
only to Federal employees and the District of Columbia. Federal Memorial Day,
established in 1888, allowed Civil War veterans, many of whom were drawing a
government paycheck, to honor their fallen comrades without being docked a
day's pay.
For the rest
of us, our holidays were enacted state by state. New York was the first state
to designate Memorial Day a legal holiday, in 1873. Most Northern states had
followed suit by the 1890s. The states of the former Confederacy were
unenthusiastic about a holiday memorializing those who, in Gen. Logan's words,
"united to suppress the late rebellion." The South didn't adopt
the May 30 Memorial Day until after World War I, by which time its purpose had
been broadened to include those who died in all the country's wars.
In 1971, the
Monday Holiday Law shifted Memorial Day from May 30 to the last Monday of the
month.
5. It was James Garfield's finest hour—or maybe
hour-and-a-half
On May 30,
1868, President Ulysses S. Grant presided over the first Memorial Day ceremony
at Arlington National Cemetery—which, until 1864, was Confederate Gen. Robert
E. Lee's plantation.
Some 5,000
people attended on a spring day which, The New York Times reported, was
"somewhat too warm for comfort." The principal speaker was James A. Garfield, a Civil War general,
Republican congressman from Ohio and future president.
"I am
oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this
occasion," Garfield began, and then continued to
utter them. "If silence is ever golden, it must be beside the graves of
fifteen-thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose
death was a poem the music of which can never be sung." It went on like that for pages and pages.
As the
songs, speeches and sermons ended, the participants helped to decorate the
graves of the Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.
6. God knows, not even the Unknown Soldier can
avoid media scrutiny these days
"Here rests in honored glory an
American soldier known but to God." That is the inscription on the Tomb of
the Unknowns, established at Arlington National Cemetery to inter the remains
of the first Unknown Soldier, a World War I fighter, on Nov. 11, 1921. Unknown
soldiers from World War II and the Korean War subsequently were interred in the
tomb on Memorial Day 1958.
An emotional
President Ronald Reagan presided over the interment of six bones, the remains
of an unidentified Vietnam War soldier, on Nov. 28, 1984. Fourteen years later,
those remains were disinterred, no longer unknown. Spurred by an investigation
by CBS News, the defense department removed the remains from the Tomb of the
Unknowns for DNA testing.
The
once-unknown fighter was Air Force pilot Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie, whose jet
crashed in South Vietnam in 1972. "The CBS investigation suggested that
the military review board that had changed the designation on Lt. Blassie's
remains to 'unknown' did so under pressure from veterans' groups to honor a
casualty from the Vietnam War," The New
York Times reported in 1998.
Lt. Blassie
was reburied near his hometown of St. Louis. His crypt at Arlington remains
permanently empty. [Image courtesy of VisitingDC.com.]
7. Vietnam vets go whole hog
On Memorial
Day weekend in 1988, 2,500 motorcyclists rode into Washington, D.C., for the
first Rolling Thunder rally to draw attention to Vietnam War soldiers still
missing in action or prisoners of war. By 2002, the numbers had swelled to
300,000 bikers, many of them veterans. There may have been a half-million
participants in 2005 in what organizers bluntly call "a demonstration—not
a parade."
A national
veterans rights group, Rolling
Thunder takes its name from the B-52
carpet-bombing runs during the war in Vietnam.
8. Memorial Day has its customs
General
Orders No. 11 stated that "in this observance no form of ceremony is
prescribed," but over time several customs and symbols
became associated with the holiday.
It is
customary on Memorial Day to fly the flag at half staff until noon, and then
raise it to the top of the staff until sunset.
Taps, the
24-note bugle call, is played at all military funerals and memorial services.
It originated in 1862 when Union Gen. Dan Butterfield "grew tired of the
'lights out' call sounded at the end of each day," according to The Washington Post. Together with the brigade bugler,
Butterfield made some changes to the tune.
Not long
after, the melody was used at a burial for the first time, when a battery
commander ordered it played in lieu of the customary three rifle volleys over
the grave. The battery was so close to enemy lines, the commander was
worried the shots would spark renewed fighting.
The World
War I poem "In
Flanders Fields," by John McCrea, inspired the Memorial Day
custom of wearing red artificial poppies. In 1915, a Georgia teacher and
volunteer war worker named Moina Michael began a campaign to make the poppy a
symbol of tribute to veterans and for "keeping the faith with all who
died." The sale of poppies has supported the work of the Veterans of
Foreign Wars.
9. There is still a gray Memorial Day
Several
Southern states continue to set aside a day for honoring the Confederate dead,
which is usually called Confederate Memorial Day: Alabama: fourth Monday in
April; Georgia: April 26; Louisiana: June 3; Mississippi: last Monday in April;
North Carolina: May 10; South Carolina: May 10; Tennessee (Confederate
Decoration Day): June 3; Texas (Confederate Heroes Day): January 19; Virginia:
last Monday in May.
10. Each Memorial Day is a little different
No question
that Memorial Day is a solemn event. Still, don't feel too guilty about doing
something frivolous, like having barbecue, over the weekend. After all, you
weren't the one who instituted the Indianapolis 500 on May
30, 1911. That credit goes to Indianapolis
businessman Carl Fisher. The winning driver that day was Ray
Harroun, who averaged 74.6 mph and completed the
race in 6 hours and 42 minutes.
Gravitas
returned on May 30, 1922, when the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated. Supreme
Court chief justice (and former president) William Howard Taft dedicated the
monument before a crowd of 50,000 people, segregated by race, and which
included a row of Union and Confederate veterans. Also attending was Lincoln's
surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln.
And in 2000,
Congress established a National
Moment of Remembrance, which asks
Americans to pause for one minute at 3pm in an act of national unity. The time
was chosen because 3pm "is the time when most Americans are enjoying their
freedoms on the national holiday."
