Every holiday owns a history, and Memorial Day, which is being celebrated today, is no different. I had never heard it called anything but Memorial Day until I was an adult at a funeral in Illinois, where relatives called it “Decoration Day.” Thinking about that this weekend, I wondered what the difference was. It turns out there is no difference. The two terms are synonymous, although the federal government tipped the balance toward “Memorial Day” by making it a federal holiday.
Whether it is called “Memorial Day” or “Decorations Day,” the day itself is a day to remember and honor all military personnel who died in the line of duty. There is a federal statute that requires it to be held “the last Monday in every May.” 36 U.S.C. § 116(a). Among other things, the statute requires the President of the United States to issue a proclamation “calling on the people of the United States to observe Memorial Day by praying, according to their individual religious faith, for permanent peace."
Memorial Day did not exist until shortly after the Civil War. According to the website for the National Cemetery Association for the Veteran’s Administration, the Ladies Memorial Association in Columbus, Georgia started a campaign to clean up the city cemetery, which was in disarray, and announced the date to do so as April 26, 1866. In a letter to the local paper, the secretary of the Ladies Memorial Association said their purpose was “to set apart a certain day to be observed...and be handed down through time as a religious custom of the country, to wreathe the graves of our martyred dead with flowers.” In one of those odd flukes of history, the city of Columbus, Mississippi, held a similar event that same year on April 25, 1866.
The first national event, according to the same website, took place on May 30, 1868, at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, where around 11,250 Union soldiers and 350 Confederate soldiers were buried, over half of them unknown. The state of New York was the first state to recognize Memorial Day as an official holiday. After World War I, celebrations of Memorial Day expanded to honor all the nation’s fallen service members, not just those from the Civil War. Memorial Day was first recognized by statute as an “official” federal holiday in 1971, although Congress had passed earlier resolutions requiring proclamations from the president on May 30 at least by 1950.
One of the best expressions of the purpose of Memorial Day was one of the earliest. The leader of a veteran’s group in 1866 issued a general order for a Memorial Day which included the following language: “Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.”
I hope you have had a good Memorial Day weekend, and that in the middle of it all, you had time to stop and reflect on what it means.
I remember my parents referring to it as Decoration Day when I was little. We would buy flowers and go out to decorate family graves. Not just fallen military members of the family but all our ancestors who were buried locally.
ReplyDeleteAnnette, I am so glad you shared that, because that was the impression I got from my Illinois relatives, that Decoration Day was the day to decorate all graves, but the Internet research only mentioned Decoration Day as synonynous with Memorial Day.
Deletei remember my grandparents calling it Decoration Day. And today, we remember.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Heather.
DeleteAs children, we distributed red poppies, collecting donations for veterans' causes, in honor of the fallen. We often got five- and ten- dollar bills, and people wore the poppies proudly on their lapels. They were inspired by Flanders Field, a burial ground for many in WWI.
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful memory. Maybe someone somewhere still does so...
DeleteAs a Boy Scout, we planted small flags on the grave sites of all veterans, regardless of whether they had given their last full measure of devotion, as Lincoln called it, or had simply served by volunteering or responding to a draft.
ReplyDeleteThat's wonderful. Every person's service is a sacrifice for them and for their loved ones.
DeleteI remember the Memorial Day parade with veterans marching. Exciting as a child (Dad could have marched but chose not to) but as an adult, I witnessed Vietnam veterans booed and was ashamed.
ReplyDeleteYes, Margaret, the treatment of Vietnam veterans was less than ideal. I never saw a parade of veterans, so I bet that was something to see when you were a child.
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