Nevertheless they are heard … / They say, Our deaths are not ours: they are yours: they will mean what you make them. — Archibald MacLeish, “The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak” (1940)
One thing I look forward to on Memorial Day is the airing of the National Memorial Day Concert on PBS, normally hosted by Gary Senise, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and featuring performances by the National Symphony Orchestra, various singers and enactments of events in the lives of those who gave their lives in service to our country.
Memorial Day has come to mark the unofficial start of summer in the United States. It is a day set aside to honor those who died while in uniform on some battlefield.
Like most holidays, Memorial Day also has rocky beginnings prior to it becoming what it is now, and its history still remains shrouded in mystery.
In July 1866, a New York newspaper reported on a “grand gathering” of Union veterans in Salem, Illinois. General John A. Logan, head of the fraternal group Grand Army of the Republic, delivered a speech, railing against the defeated Confederates and urging rights and protections for freed enslaved people.
He also angrily noted that “traitors in the South have their gatherings, day after day, to strew garlands of flowers upon the graves of Rebel soldiers.”
He was bothered by reports that in towns across the South, women were decorating the graves of dead Confederates.
Two years later, he proposed the same idea. On May 5, 1868, Logan ordered the first nationwide public holiday on May 30, then known as “Decoration Day,” to honor war dead. A national day honoring American men and women who have died while serving in the military has been observed ever since.
On Monday, millions of Americans will mark Memorial Day again with parades, picnics and cemetery visits.
Officially, Memorial Day started in Waterloo, New York: that is according to a 1966 law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. And there was definitely a local observance of war dead there in 1866.
But here is the thing - there is no evidence Logan was inspired by or even aware of Waterloo’s observance when he pitched his plan.
Contemporaneous coverage does not credit Waterloo either. In 1868, New York Times stated: “The ladies of the South instituted this Memorial Day. They wished to annoy the Yankees; and now the Grand Army of the Republic in retaliation and from no worthier motive, have determined to annoy them by adopting their plan of commemoration.”
So, if the South had “their gatherings, day after day,” as Logan once complained, who in the South started it? The answer to that is complicated; according to Department of Veterans Affairs, there are more than two dozen cities, mostly in the South, that claim to be the “birthplace of Memorial Day.”
There is Macon, Georgia, and Richmond, Virginia. And Columbus, Mississippi., which claims women there decorated the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers on April 25, 1866, inspiring the poem “The Blue and the Gray,” which was published in the Atlantic the following year.
Some historians, including Yale’s David W. Blight, argue that African Americans invented Memorial Day in the spring of 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, when they reinterred the bodies of Union prisoners of war and decorated their graves.
There is no evidence, however, that this commemoration led to others or was more than a one-off event.
Recently, historians have argued that who did it first is not what is most important; it is who originated the celebrations Logan learned about, was annoyed by and subsequently co-opted.
That is the thesis of a 2014 book, The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America, by Daniel A. Bellware and Richard Gardiner. They trace it back to a woman named Mary Anne Williams in another city named Columbus - Columbus, Georgia. In March 1866, she sent an open letter to newspapers, saying that women in her area had been cleaning and decorating the graves of “our gallant confederate dead,” but that they thought “it is an unfinished work unless a day be set apart annually for its especial attention.”
She suggested April 26, the day Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee near Durham, North Carolina.
The letter was picked up in papers across the South and arrangements were made in a number of towns and cities, Bellware and Gardiner wrote.
In Columbus, Mississippi, they got the date wrong, celebrating a day earlier - thus its claim of being the birthplace of Memorial Day.
But the honor really belongs to the Columbus in Georgia, Bellware and Gardiner wrote, because that is where Williams came from, and because it was all of the Confederate grave-decorating across the South that drew Logan’s attention and - temporary - disdain.
With this in mind, in 2016, the mayor of Columbus, Georgia, signed a resolution proclaiming that it, too, is the “true” birthplace of Memorial Day.
This year, the most geopolitically ominous since World War II, do something that is, we should admit, rarely done on Memorial Day: remember.
Those who fly in or out of Reagan National Airport, across the Potomac from the nation’s capital, are reminded, if only fleetingly. The more than 400,000 gleaming white headstones that, row on row, lace Arlington National Cemetery’s green fields actually do speak. Their silent eloquence tells us what we usually forget to remember - the price paid for what we have. I have been there more than once. It is a stark reminder of what this nation stands for and what freedom means.
Which includes the freedom to forget how menacing the world is becoming. And how fast dangers multiply, the more we forget.
From Flanders to the Philippines, the globe is girded with United States military cemeteries. The one above the Normandy beaches contains only one soldier who did not die during the Normandy campaign. In 1955, Quentin Roosevelt (son of President Theodore Roosevelt), killed while a World War I pilot, was reinterred next to his brother, General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who suffered a fatal heart attack in France five weeks after leading United States troops at Utah Beach.
As you read this, Navy vessels are underway, on and under the oceans in 22 of 24 time zones, often close to being in harm’s way. To glimpse the demanding tempo of naval operations, read Mark Helprin’s 2023 novel The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, a War Story, a Love Story. It, like Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, is a celebration of the military virtues that the nation regularly decides have become dispensable anachronisms - until, suddenly, it cannot survive without them. Thus, the importance of Helprin’s many literary reminders of what he calls “the eternal presence of battle.”
For Memorial Day viewing, try Apple TV Plus’s new nine-episode “Masters of the Air.” It is a worthy successor to the lacerating realism of the 1998 movie “Saving Private Ryan,” and HBO’s 10-part 2001 miniseries “Band of Brothers,” about the actual experience of Easy Company of the 101st Army Airborne from Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge and beyond.
One wonders how many, if any, of today’s cosseted young critics of Israel’s conduct of its war to destroy Hamas have even an inkling of what war inevitably involves. And what the Allied war aim of unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan meant for civilians in Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
South Dakota Senator George McGovern, who is buried in Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery, was eligible for burial nine miles away in Arlington. Two decades before he became a leading opponent of the Vietnam War, he flew 35 B-24 bomber missions over German-held territory in a war where United States bomber crews suffered higher casualties than did Marines on the Pacific islands. McGovern had standing to speak his mind about a war.
Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier received its first remains in 1921, on Armistice Day, as it was then generally known: November 11. The unidentifiable soldier had been killed on the Western Front in what was called the Great War until a greater one arrived. Perhaps in 1921 it was presumed that this unknown soldier would be the only one in the Tomb. Then, on Memorial Day, 1958, it received two remains, from World War II and the Korean War. In 1984, an unknown from the Vietnam War was added, but his identity was later established. He was reburied in Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis, and the tomb’s Vietnam crypt has been left empty, to honor the missing from that war.
Forty percent of those who died to prevent the nation from fracturing - the Union dead in the Civil War - were never identified. “Nevertheless,” as Archibald MacLeish wrote of all young dead soldiers, “They are heard in the still houses …”
Rick Atkinson - the nation’s finest military historian, living or dead - has written of the 291,557 American lives lost in World War II combat: “Each death is as unique as a snowflake or a fingerprint. The most critical lesson for every American is to understand, viscerally, that this vast host died one by one by one; to understand in your bones that they died for you.”
Remember this, and also the mostly young military men and women who this day, as every day, are in peril on the sea, and under it, and elsewhere.
That is, truly, what Memorial Day is all about.
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