Memorial Day and its traditions may have ancient roots.
While the first commemorative Memorial Day events weren’t held in the United States
until the late 19th century, the practice of honoring those who have fallen in
battle dates back thousands of years. The ancient Greeks and Romans held annual
days of remembrance for loved ones (including soldiers) each year, festooning
their graves with flowers and holding public festivals and feasts in their
honor. In Athens, public funerals for fallen soldiers were held after each
battle, with the remains of the dead-on display for public mourning before a
funeral procession took them to their internment in the Kerameikos, one of the
city’s most prestigious cemeteries. One of the first known public tributes to
war dead was in 431 B.C., when the Athenian general and statesman Pericles
delivered a funeral oration praising the sacrifice and valor of those killed in
the Peloponnesian War—a speech that some have compared in tone to Abraham
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
One of the earliest commemorations was organized by recently
freed African Americans.
As the Civil War neared its end, thousands of
Union soldiers, held as prisoners of war, were herded into a series of hastily
assembled camps in Charleston, South Carolina. Conditions at one camp, a former
racetrack near the city’s Citadel, were so bad that more than 250 prisoners
died from disease or exposure, and were buried in a mass grave behind the track’s
grandstand.
Three weeks after the Confederate surrender,
an unusual procession entered the former camp: On May 1, 1865, more than 1,000
people recently freed from enslavement, accompanied by regiments of the U.S.
Colored Troops (including the Massachusetts 54th Infantry) and a handful of
white Charlestonians, gathered in the camp to consecrate a new, proper burial
site for the Union dead. The group sang hymns, gave readings and distributed
flowers around the cemetery, which they dedicated to the “Martyrs of the Race
Course.”
The holiday’s 'founder' had a long and distinguished career.
In May 1868, General John A. Logan, the
commander-in-chief of the Union veterans’ group known as the Grand Army of the
Republic, issued a decree that May 30 should become a nationwide day of
commemoration for the more than 620,000 soldiers killed in the recently ended
Civil War. On Decoration Day, as Logan dubbed it, Americans should lay flowers
and decorate the graves of the war dead “whose bodies now lie in almost every
city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land.”
According to legend, Logan chose May 30
because it was a rare day that didn’t fall on the anniversary of a Civil War
battle, though some historians believe the date was selected to ensure that
flowers across the country would be in full bloom.
After the war Logan, who had served as a U.S.
congressman before resigning to rejoin the army, returned to his political
career, eventually serving in both the House and Senate and was the
unsuccessful Republican candidate for vice president in 1884. When he died two
years later, Logan’s body laid in state in the rotunda of the United States
Capitol, making him one of just 33 people to have received the honor. Today,
Washington, D.C.’s Logan Circle and several townships across the country are
named in honor of this champion of veterans and those killed in battle.
Logan probably adapted the idea from earlier events in the
South.
Even before the war ended, women’s groups
across much of the South were gathering informally to decorate the graves of
Confederate dead. In April 1886, the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus,
Georgia resolved to commemorate the fallen once a year—a decision that seems to
have influenced John Logan to follow suit, according to his own wife. However,
southern commemorations were rarely held on one standard day, with observations
differing by state and spread out across much of the spring and early summer.
It’s a tradition that continues today: Nine southern states officially
recognize a Confederate Memorial Day, with events held on Confederate President
Jefferson Davis’ birthday, the day on which General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson
was killed, or to commemorate other symbolic events.
It didn’t become a federal holiday until 1971.
American’s embraced the notion of “Decoration
Day” immediately. That first year, more than 27 states held some sort of
ceremony, with more than 5,000 people in attendance at a ceremony at Arlington
National Cemetery. By 1890, every former state of the Union had adopted it as
an official holiday. But for more than 50 years, the holiday was used to
commemorate those killed just in the Civil War, not in any other American
conflict. It wasn’t until America’s entry into World War I that the tradition
was expanded to include those killed in all wars, and Memorial Day was not
officially recognized nationwide until the 1970s, with America deeply embroiled
in the Vietnam War.
It
was a long road from Decoration Day to an official Memorial Day.
Although the term Memorial Day was used
beginning in the 1880s, the holiday was officially known as Decoration Day for
more than a century, when it was changed by federal law. Four years later, the
Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 finally went into effect, moving Memorial
Day from its traditional observance on May 30 (regardless of the day of the
week), to a set day—the last Monday in May. The move has not been without
controversy, though. Veterans groups, concerned that more Americans associate
the holiday with first long weekend of the summer and not its intended purpose
to honor the nation’s war dead, continue to lobby for a return to the May 30
observances. For more than 20 years, their cause was championed by Hawaiian
Senator—and decorated World War II veteran—Daniel Inouye, who until his 2012
death reintroduced legislation in support of the change at the start of every
Congressional term.
More than 20 towns claim to be the holiday’s 'birthplace'—but
only one has federal recognition.
For almost as long as there’s been a holiday,
there’s been a rivalry about who celebrated it first. Boalsburg, Pennsylvania,
bases its claim on an 1864 gathering of women to mourn those recently killed at
Gettysburg. In Carbondale, Illinois, they’re certain that they were first,
thanks to an 1866 parade led, in part, by John Logan who two years later would
lead the charge for an official holiday. There are even two dueling Columbus
challengers (one in Mississippi, the other in Georgia) who have battled it out
for Memorial Day supremacy for decades. Only one town, however, has received
the official seal of approval from the U.S. government. In 1966, 100 years
after the town of Waterloo, New York, shuttered its businesses and took to the
streets for the first of many continuous, community-wide celebrations, President
Lyndon Johnson signed legislation, recently passed by the U.S. Congress,
declaring the tiny upstate village the “official” birthplace of Memorial Day.
Wearing a red poppy on Memorial Day began with a World War I
poem.
In the spring of 1915, bright red flowers
began poking through the battle-ravaged land across northern France and
Flanders (northern Belgium). Canadian Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, who served as a brigade surgeon for an
Allied artillery unit, spotted a cluster of the poppies shortly after serving
as a brigade surgeon during the bloody Second Battle of Ypres. The sight of the bright red flowers against
the dreary backdrop of war inspired McCrae to pen the poem, "In Flanders
Field," in which he gives voice to the soldiers who had been killed in
battle and lay buried beneath the poppy-covered grounds. Later that year,
a Georgia teacher and volunteer war worker named Moina Michael read the poem
in Ladies' Home Journal and wrote her own poem, "We Shall
Keep the Faith" to begin a campaign to make the poppy a symbol of tribute
to all who died in war. The poppy remains a symbol of remembrance to this
day.
Memorial Day traditions have evolved over the years.
Despite the increasing celebration of the
holiday as a summer rite of passage, there are some formal rituals still on the
books: The American flag should be hung at half-staff until noon on Memorial
Day, then raised to the top of the staff. And since 2000, when the U.S.
Congress passed legislation, all Americans are encouraged to pause for a
National Moment of Remembrance at 3 p.m. local time. The federal government has
also used the holiday to honor non-veterans—the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated
on Memorial Day 1922.
Thanks to History.com for sharing this knowledge!