The Poppy Lady

Poppies symbolize remembrance throughout the world. Last year, thousands stood in silent contemplation of the controversial Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red art installation at Windsor Castle. A ceramic poppy symbolizing each of the 888,248 war dead of the United Kingdom in World War I ringed the castle in crimson.

How did the poppy become a symbol of remembrance?

It all started with a poem and a teacher from Georgia.

Moina Belle Michael grew up on a plantation. At fifteen, Moina (pronounced Mow-EE-na) started teaching in her rural town’s school, and when years of bad weather ruined crops and bankrupted her family, her teaching paid the bills. Eventually the family got back on its feet and Moina continued teaching, becoming over thirty years an admired educator and influential professor at the University of Georgia.

When World War I began, Moina was in Germany, halfway through a European tour. As she wrote in her autobiography The Miracle Flower, “the very foundations of our world were shaken by a radical student who threw a bomb into the carriage of an Austrian archduke.” Moina’s group returned to the US on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that had rescued survivors of the Titanic two years earlier. Moina returned to Georgia, where she resumed teaching at the University of Georgia. But she ached to do something to help the war effort.

After a two-year search, Moina took the only position open to her as a 47-year-old woman with no medical training: working for the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries organization in New York City. While working at a conference, Moina read Canadian Lt. Colonel John McCrae’s poem “In Flanders Fields” in The Ladies’ Home Journal. McCrae, a Canadian surgeon, had written the poem after performing a burial service for one of his students killed in action. Scarlet poppies, one of the few flowers to thrive in disturbed earth, ringed the battleground.

“In Flanders Fields” moved Moina to write a poem in response, “We Shall Keep the Faith.”

Moina also did something that I don’t think many men would have done: she rushed to Wanamaker’s Department Store and bought up the entire stock of red silk poppies. She pinned one to her coat and distributed the others at the conference, asking delegates to wear a poppy as a remembrance of those who died in Flanders Field. Because of this, she became known as “The Poppy Lady.”

At the same YMCA conference, Anna Guerin saw Moina’s poppy pin and brought the idea to France. After the war, Guerin sent poppy sellers to England to sell paper poppies to raise money for French war orphans. The poppy-as-remembrance idea spread across Great Britain. Moina’s poppy was the small seed that flowered years later into the acclaimed Windsor Castle art installation.

In the United States, Moina’s project struggled to gain traction until several veterans’ organizations, chiefly the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, adopted the idea. Now, millions of small paper poppies are distributed each year.

Almost one hundred years after the United States entered World War I, Moina’s poppy remains a small but poetic tribute to the fallen. Moina believed that the poppy symbol transcended mere sentimentality, and by the simple gesture of wearing one she would honor the memory of the soldiers lost.

“In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

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.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

“We Shall Keep the Faith” by Moina Michael

Oh, you who sleep in Flanders Fields,

Sleep sweet – to rise anew!

We caught the torch you threw

And holding high, we keep the Faith

With All who died.

We cherish, too, the poppy red

That grows on fields where valor led;

It seems to signal to the skies

That blood of heroes never dies,

But lends a lustre to the red

Of the flower that blooms above the dead

In Flanders Fields.

And now the Torch and Poppy Red

We wear in honor of our dead.

Fear not that ye have died for naught;

We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought

In Flanders Fields.

How do you celebrate Memorial Day?