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"From These Honored Dead:" Memorial Day and Veterans Day in American History
by Kenneth T. Jackson
Director, Herbert H. Lehman
Center for American History and Jacques
Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences, Columbia
University
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| "Colored Man Is No Slacker," WWI poster, 1918 (GLC 06134) |
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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought
forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty
and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created
equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether
that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated
can long endure. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field, as a final resting place for those who here
gave their lives that the nation might live. It is altogether
fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot
consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men,
living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated
it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world
will little note nor long remember what we say here, but
it can never forget what they did here. It is for us,
the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought so nobly advanced. It is for
us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before
us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to the cause for which they gave the last full measure
of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God,
shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government
of the people, by the people, for the people shall not
perish from the earth.
Abraham Lincoln
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, 1863
No one, before or since, has spoken as eloquently as President
Lincoln on the debt that a grateful nation owes to young
men who lose their lives in battle while fighting under
its flag. As the wartime leader promised, "from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to the cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion."
Gettysburg was no ordinary battle, and Lincoln's address
at the cemetery was no ordinary speech. But words alone,
even those of a beloved and martyred President, were not
enough, especially considering the tragic human cost of
the Civil War. Approximately 370,000 Union soldiers died
in the conflict; another 250,000 perished on the Confederate
side. The carnage was particularly unbearable because
the nation was as yet small and underpopulated. In fact,
more Americans died in combat between 1861 and 1865 that
in all other American wars before 1960. What could the
United States do to recognize such sacrifice?
Memorial Day
Decoration Day, later designated Memorial Day, began in
the North on May 5, 1866, when the small town of Waterloo
in Seneca County, New York, organized an entire day of
remembrance for its lost sons. The idea caught on, and
exactly two years later, on May 5, 1868, Major General
John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of
the Republic, the organization of Union Army veterans,
issued General Order No. 11, designating May 30, 1868,
"for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise
decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense
of their country." Logan added that he inaugurated
the observance "with the hope that it will be kept
up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains
to honor the memory of his departed comrades."
But earlier, on May 1, 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina,
in the midst
of ruins in at the war's end, 10,000 African American
former slaves and
some white Union army allies inaugurated Decoration Day
in an
extraordinary parade on the planters' old race course
(horse track).
Some 260 Unions soldiers had died in an open-air prison
at the race
course, and black Charlestonians buried them properly,
marched with
armloads of flowers, sang national hymns and spirituals,
read from
scripture, and were the first to practice what became
Memorial Day in a
ceremony of such scale. For them it was more than an official
honoring
of the dead; it was a declaration of the meaning of the
war and of their
own freedom.
By 1890, all of the Northern states recognized May 30
as a special day to remember their fallen heroes. In the
nineteenth century, however, most Southern states refused
to go along with the holiday, preferring instead to have
their own special day to honor Confederate war dead --
January 19 in Texas; April 26 in Alabama, Florida, Georgia,
and Mississippi; May 10 in South Carolina; and June 3
in Louisiana and Tennessee. After World War I, however,
virtually the entire United States accepted Memorial Day
(later designated as the last Monday in May) as the primary
occasion to remember all those who had died in battle.
Veterans Day
Armistice Day, later to be called Veterans Day, had a
different origin and a different purpose than Memorial
Day. Between 1914 and 1918, Europe was awash in blood,
as a titanic struggle consumed most of the continent and
spilled over to Africa and Asia. The resulting trench
warfare and the persistent suicidal charges into "no-man's
land" ultimately took the lives of more than ten
million men. Known variously as the Great War or the War
to End All Wars, it ended in 1918, at the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Exactly one
year later, on November 11, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson
proclaimed the first Armistice Day by asking Americans
to "be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of
those who died in the country's service." His idea
was that all activity and business throughout the United
States would stop for two minutes, beginning at exactly
11 a.m.
Armistice Day grew in importance in 1920, and not because
of anything that happened in the United States. Rather,
people in both Great Britain and France used the occasion
of the second anniversary of the cease-fire to recognize
in an imaginative way the many hundreds of thousands of
their countrymen who perished in four years of machine-gun
and heavy artillery fire. Each nation went to enormous
effort and expense to collect an "unknown soldier"
from every important battlefield of the war. From those
choices, an ordinary soldier selected one corpse for the
entire nation to honor. Because no one could know whose
body was in the coffin, every bereaved parent or spouse
or child could imagine that it was his or her husband
or son or father who occupied the coffin and was the focus
of unprecedented attention. In London, on November 11,
1920, King George V, accompanied by his field marshals,
admirals, and senior ministers, walked slowly and respectfully
behind a flag-draped, horse-drawn casket toward Westminster
Abbey. There, amid all the pageantry and ceremony that
the British Empire could muster, "a soldier of the
Great War, known but to God," was buried among the
kings with full military honors and posthumously awarded
the nation's highest decoration for valor, the Victoria
Cross. Meanwhile, in Paris at exactly the same time, a
French unknown soldier was buried in that nation's highest
place of honor, the Arc de Triomphe. A perpetual flame
was lit, as all of France paused, and wept.
Inspired by those examples, the United States designated
its unknown soldier in 1921. The process was complex.
First, officials disinterred four unidentified bodies
from American cemeteries at Belleau Wood, Romagne, Bony,
and Thiaucourt. Then, in Chalons, France, Sergeant Edward
F. Younger of the United States Fifty-Ninth Infantry chose
from among the four caskets by walking around them three
times before finally placing a bouquet of white roses
on the second one. After saluting the coffin he reported
that he had completed his mission. A waiting American
warship, the USS Olympia, then brought the body
home to Washington, where it lay in state for three days
in the rotunda of the Capitol and was posthumously awarded
the nation's most coveted award for valor, the Congressional
Medal of Honor. On November 11, 1921, at precisely 11
a.m., the casket was lowered into a special white marble
tomb in Arlington National Cemetery beneath this inscription:
"Here Rests In Honored Glory an American Soldier
Known but to God." The memorial is now designated
as the Tomb of the Unknowns, and it includes unidentified
Americans from both World War II and the Korean War.
Congress officially designated November 11 as Armistice
Day in 1926 and made it a national holiday in 1938. It
would likely still be known as Armistice Day except that
World War II put more than sixteen million Americans in
uniform. Thereafter, a holiday honoring veterans only
from the 1917-1918 period seemed unnecessarily restrictive.
So in 1954, Congressman Edwin K. Rees of Kansas proposed
that November 11th honor all veterans, and not just those
who had served in World War I. President Dwight D. Eisenhower
promptly signed the legislation, and Armistice Day became
Veterans Day that same year.
Although Americans often forget whom or what we honor
on Memorial Day and on Veterans Day, general usage now
is that Memorial Day recognizes those who have died in
their country's service, while Veterans Day recognizes
everyone who has worn the uniform of his or her country.
In the end, holidays and monuments are unable to capture
the enormity of even a single life taken before its time.
Instead, words, whether from Abraham Lincoln's "Gettysburg
Address," or John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields,"
or Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," remain the
best memorials. In essence, these different expressions
of sentiment all boil down to what is said in Laurence
Binyon's "For the Fallen," which was written
in September 1914:
They shall not grow old, as we that are
left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
| For more information
about Veterans Day, Memorial Day, the "Unknown
Solider," and other topics mentioned
in this article,visit our Additional
Resources Page |
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