Is it a surprise that Americans still mark Memorial Day?
To some who were around when Memorial Day was still new, the answer may be “yes.”
“Not long ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up Memorial Day, and it set me thinking of the answer.” So begins a Memorial Day address by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr – in 1884.
The folks behind the website archive.org have posted more than 50 Memorial Day speeches, some going back all the way to the early post-Civil War years.
Although today one thinks of Memorial Day as a contemplative and somber occasion, this does not seem to have always been the case. One 1912 Memorial Day speech, for example, thundered against those “treasonable” expressions coming from some quarters that the Civil War was really the fault of the North, and was the result of aggressive designs against the South on the part of President Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet.
In 1869, Schulyer Colfax (President Ulysses S. Grant’s VP) gently warned against a different kind of Memorial Day excess – excessive flourishes in speechmaking. “No eloquence can be as commanding as the eloquence of these graves,” he said on Memorial Day, “no flowers of rhetoric as appropriate as these flowers of Spring with which we honor the remains of the patriot dead.”
Purple prose remains the rule on Memorial Day, despite Colfax’s admonition. But one old practice that seems to have gone out of style is the reading of Memorial Day-themed poetry.
President Obama had no problem delivering a 1,500-word Memorial Day speech today. However, I venture to guess that even he would go into a cold sweat at the thought of reading aloud, before an audience, even a few stanzas from the poem read in public at Arlington National Cemetery on the very first Memorial Day in 1868. It included the following lines:
No war-clouds rise and frown along the sky;
No trumpet for the deadly charge is blown,
No lightning-glare of red artillery…
At Appomattox, Lee surrenders all,
At Durham, Johnston bends the suppliant knee.
Send the glad shout o’er earth’s revolving ball;
Slavery is crushed! Our noble land is free!
You can read the full text of this poem (plus the speeches delivered at that 1868 Memorial Day ceremony) here. According to the record of the event, future U.S. President James Garfield observed in his address that:
“With words, we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death; and in that act they resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.”
I think Garfield had it right. Beyond epic poems, long speeches or passionate diatribes about history, there is a higher tribute one can pay today to the fallen – that being a wordless, heartfelt gratitude for their sacrifices, and for their patriotic love of the Republic.
