Tuesday, May 21, 2013
The Demeaning of Memorial Day
OP ED
Waterloo 's flags were
lowered to half-staff, and draped with evergreen sprays and black mourning
ribbons on May 5, 1866. Local civic societies and residents marched to the
village's three cemeteries, where ceremonies were held and the graves were decorated.
In 1868, Waterloo
joined other communities in holding their Decoration Day observance on May 30,
as the GAR's General Logan had urged.
This
year Memorial Day will be celebrated on Monday, May 27. With its roots deep in
the Civil War, for more than a century this solemn holiday was traditionally
observed on May 30. Ever since 1971, however, in a concession to expediency and
a rebuke to tradition, Congress shifted Memorial Day to the last Monday in May.
Thanks to the Uniform Holidays Act, the holiday can now fall on any of the
eight days between May 24 and May 31.
On this coming Monday, May 27 at Arlington National Cemetery Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery
Its
origins virtually forgotten, for many Americans Memorial Day is no longer a day
of remembrance. Instead, it’s just another three-day weekend holiday--an
occasion for barbecues, picnics and shopping mall sales. Regrettably, the number of communities that
celebrate the holiday in the old-fashioned way with colorful parades grows
smaller each year, especially among cities and larger communities. Manhattan ’s time-honored parade up Fifth Avenue Long Island .
In Westchester ,
the parade tradition is also still strong. Parades were held last year in
Ardsley, Bedford Hills, Bronxville,
Dobbs Ferry, Eastchester, Elmsford, Harrison, Irvington ,
Mount Kisco ,
New Castle , New Rochelle ,
Pelham, Pleasantville, Scarsdale , Tarrytown, White Plains , and the Crestwood and Ferncliff Manor
sections of Yonkers
Lest We Forget
Some
620,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, 60 percent of them on the Union side and
40 percent on the Confederate side, making it the bloodiest event in U.S.
history, and exceeding by more than 50 percent the military deaths in World War
II.
Until
the Korean War, the death toll of the Civil War nearly equaled the total number
killed in all previous U.S.
wars. If the same percentage of Americans had died in the Vietnam War as died
in the Civil War, four million names would be on the somber black wall of Vietnam
Memorial in Washington .
By
the Civil War’s end, hardly an American family had not been touched by its
appalling death toll. About 6 percent of white males of military age in the
North and about 18 percent of their southern counterparts died in the war.
Virulent infectious diseases--typhoid fever, dysentery and pneumonia--killed more
than twice the number of battle deaths.
Death
on such a grand scale cried out for meaning and emotional justification. Well
before the Civil War ended, women on both sides had begun rituals of
remembrance with processions to local cemeteries to decorate the graves of
Civil War veterans. Thus was born the national holiday of Decoration Day that
would later be called Memorial Day.
In 1866, veterans who had
served in the Union Army formed an organization called the Grand Army of the
Republic (GAR). The following year, Gen. John A. "Black Jack" Logan was elected its
national commander.
With a membership approaching a
half-million, for many years to come the GAR would be a major national
political force. Its final encampment was held on August 31, 1949, with six of
the 19 living Union Army veterans in attendance. The GAR disbanded in 1956,
after the death of Albert Woolson, the last surviving veteran, at age 107.
On May 5,
1868, General Logan proclaimed Decoration Day as a holiday and set the first
official observance for May 30, closing his General Oder No. 11 to the GAR
"with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year."
Celebrated for the first time on May 30 of 1868, the date was chosen because it
was not the anniversary of a
specific battle.
Some two dozen communities have
since claimed to be the birthplace of the holiday. Evidence also supports the
claim that Southern women were decorating graves of their war dead even before
the end of hostilities.
How the Holiday Began
On April
25, 1866, in Columbus , Mississippi ,
a group of women visited a cemetery to place flowers on the grave of
Confederate soldiers killed at the battle of Shiloh .
Nearby were the graves of Union soldiers. Concerned over the bare gravesites,
the women also placed flowers on their graves.
Additional
claimants include Macon and Columbus in Georgia ,
and Carbondale , Illinois Carbondale
was the wartime home of General Logan.
In 1966,
after much research, the Erie Canal village
of Waterloo
On May
26, 1966, just in time for that year's celebration, President Lyndon B. Johnson
signed a presidential proclamation recognizing Waterloo as the birthplace of the holiday.
In the
summer of 1865, Henry C. Welles, a Waterloo
druggist, suggested that the Civil War dead in local cemeteries should be
remembered by placing flowers on their graves. Nothing came of this until the
following spring, when he brought his idea to Seneca County
Despite New York ’s claim, the
tiny central-Pennsylvania hamlet of Boalsburg insists the custom of honoring
Civil War dead began there in 1864, while the Civil War still raged. On a
pleasant October Sunday that year, a teenage girl named Emma Hunter brought
flowers to the Zion
Lutheran Church
Nearby,
Elizabeth Meyer was placing flowers on the grave of her son, Pvt. Amos Meyer,
who had died on the final day of battle at Gettysburg . Emma put a few of her flowers on
Amos’s grave. In turn, Mrs. Meyer placed some of her flowers on Dr. Hunter’s
grave.
United by
loss, the two women agreed to meet the next year on the Fourth of July to
repeat the ceremony and also to place flowers on undecorated graves. On that
date, they were joined by other residents. Dr. George Hall, a local clergyman,
offered a prayer, and every grave in the cemetery was decorated with flags and
flowers. The custom became an annual event, soon copied by neighboring
communities.
. In the
beginning, the South refused to recognize the May 30 federal holiday, and
honored Confederate dead on other dates, including the birthdays of Gen. Robert
E. Lee, January 29, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, June 3. Michigan made Decoration
Day an official state holiday in 1871. By 1890, every other northern state had
done the same.
The Holiday Today
Memorial Day, the alternative name of the
holiday, was first used in 1882, but did not displace Decoration Day until
after World War II. It became the official name of the holiday in 1967.
The following year, Congress made
wholesale changes in four holidays to take effect at the federal level in 1971.
In addition to shifting Memorial Day from May 30 to the last Monday in May,
Washington's Birthday was moved from February 22 to the third Monday in
February (and celebrated as Presidents Day), and Columbus Day was changed from
October 12 to the second Monday in October.
Formerly called Armistice Day, Veterans Day
was also shifted from November 11 (the
date hostilities of World War I ended in 1918) to the fourth Monday of
October. Congress moved this
holiday back to November 11 in 1978 because too many other nations continued to
celebrate the original date.
The late Sen.
Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), a Medal of Honor recipient who lost an arm
fighting in Italy
during World War II, introduced a bill in the Senate in 1999 to restore the
Memorial Day holiday to its original date, May 30. His bill and subsequent
bills introduced by him at each session of Congress until his death in 2012 were
allowed to die in committee.
Sadly, Memorial Day in America
