What the History of
Memorial Day Teaches
About Honoring the
War Dead
By ADAM COHEN,
Editorial Observer, NYTimes on the Web, May 28, 2007
Memorial Day got its start after the
Civil War, when freed slaves and abolitionists gathered in Charleston, S.C., to
honor Union soldiers who gave their lives to battle slavery. The holiday
was so closely associated with the Union side, and with the fight for
emancipation, that Southern states quickly established their own rival
Confederate Memorial Day.
Over the next 50 years, though, Memorial Day changed. It became a tribute
to the dead on both sides, and to the reunion of the North and the South after
the war. This new holiday was more inclusive, and more useful to a
forward-looking nation eager to put its differences behind it. But
something important was lost: the recognition that the Civil War had been
a moral battle to free black Americans from slavery.
In “Race and Reunion,” his masterful book about historical memory, David Blight,
a professor at Yale, tells the wistful story of Memorial Day’s transformation —
and what has been lost as a result. War commemorations, he makes clear, do
not just pay tribute to the war dead. They also reflect a nation’s
understanding of particular wars, and they are edited for political reasons.
Memorial Day is a day not only of remembering, but also of selective forgetting
— a point to keep in mind as the Iraq war moves uneasily into the history books.
Many of the early Memorial Day commemorations, Professor Blight notes, were like
Charleston’s, paying tribute both to the fallen Union soldiers and to the
emancipationist cause. At a ceremony in Maine in 1869, one fiery orator
declared that “the black stain of slavery has been effaced from the bosom of
this fair land by martyr blood.”
Less than a decade later in 1877 — when Reconstruction ended in the South — at
New York City’s enormous Memorial Day celebration, there was much talk of union,
and almost none of slavery or race. The New York Herald declared that “all
the issues on which the war of rebellion was fought seem dead,” and noted
approvingly that “American eyes have a characteristic tendency to look forward.”
There were dissenting voices. Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist
leader, continued to insist that Memorial Day should be about the battle between
“slavery and freedom, barbarism and civilization.” But the drive to make
the holiday a generic commemoration of the Civil War dead won out.
The new Memorial Day made it easier for Northern and Southern whites to come
together, and it kept the focus where political and business leaders wanted it:
on national progress. But it came at the expense of American blacks, whose
status at the end of Reconstruction was precarious. If the Civil War was
not a battle to determine whether a nation “dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal” could “long endure,” as Lincoln declared in the
Gettysburg Address, but a mere regional dispute, there was no need to continue
fighting for equal rights.
And increasingly the nation did not. When Woodrow Wilson spoke at
Gettysburg on the 50th anniversary of the battle, in a Memorial Day-like
ceremony, he avoided the subject of slavery, Professor Blight notes, and
declared “the quarrel” between North and South “forgotten.” The ceremony
was segregated, and a week later Wilson’s administration created separate white
and black bathrooms in the Treasury Department. It would be another 50
years before the nation seriously took up the cause of racial equality again.
Since 1913, Memorial Day has changed even more. It has expanded — after
World War I, it became a tribute to the dead of all the nation’s wars — while at
the same time fading. Today, Memorial Day is little more than the start of
summer, a time for barbecues and department store sales. Much would be
gained, though, by going back to the holiday’s original meanings.
When Memorial Day began, the war dead were placed front and center. The
holiday’s original name, Decoration Day, came from the day’s main activity:
leaving flowers at cemeteries. Today, though, we are fighting a war in
which great pains have been taken to hide the nearly 3,500 Americans who have
died from sight. The Defense Department has banned the photographing of
returning caskets, and the president refuses to attend soldiers’ funerals.
Memorial Day also began with the conviction that to properly honor the war dead,
it is necessary to honestly contemplate the cause for which they fought.
Today we are fighting a war sold on false pretenses, and the Bush administration
stands by its false stories. Memorial Day’s history, and its devolution,
demonstrates that the instinct to prettify war and create myths about it is
hardly new.
But as the founders of the original Memorial Day understood, the only honorable
way to remember those who have lost their lives is to commemorate them out in
the open, and to insist on a true account.
(Emphasis Added)
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