Memorial Day (originally known as Decoration Day) is a federal holiday in the United States for honoring and mourning the U.S. military personnel who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. From 1868 to 1970, it was observed on May 30. On June 28, 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved four holidays, including Memorial Day, from their traditional dates to a specified Monday in order to create a convenient three-day weekend. The change moved Memorial Day from its traditional May 30 date to the last Monday in May. The law took effect at the federal level in 1971.
A variety of cities and people have claimed origination of Memorial day. Some claims relate to documented events, occurring before or after the Civil War. Other claims stem from general traditions of decorating soldiers’ graves with flowers, rather than specific events leading to the national proclamation. Other claims may be less respectable, appearing to some researchers as taking credit without evidence, while erasing better-evidenced events or connections.
In April of 1865, following Lincoln’s assassination, commemorations were widespread. The more than 600,000 soldiers of both sides who fought and died in the Civil War meant that burial and memorialization took on new cultural significance. Under the leadership of women during the war, an increasingly formal practice of decorating graves had taken shape. In 1865, the federal government also began creating the United States National Cemetery System for the Union war dead.
By the 1880’s, ceremonies were becoming more consistent across geography as the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic) provided handbooks that presented specific procedures, poems, and Bible verses for local post commanders to utilize in planning the local event. Some towns had their post assembled and then they marched to the local cemetery to decorate the graves of the fallen. Then a simple and subdued graveyard service involving prayers, short patriotic speeches, and music and at the end—a rifle salute.
The Ladies’ Memorial Association played a key role in using Memorial Day rituals to preserve Confederate culture. Various dates ranging from April 25 to mid-June were adopted in different Southern states. Across the South, associations were founded, many by women, to establish and care for permanent cemeteries for the Confederate dead, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor appropriate monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate dead. The most important of these was the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Changes in the ceremony’s hymns and speeches reflect an evolution of the ritual into a symbol of cultural renewal and conservatism in the South.
By the 20th century, various union memorial traditions, celebrated on different days, merged, and Memorial Day eventually extended to honor all Americans who fought and died while in the U.S. military service.
Memorial Day speeches became an occasion for veterans, politicians, and ministers to commemorate the Civil War and, at first, to rehash the “atrocities” of the enemy. They mixed religion and celebratory nationalism for the people to make sense of their history in terms of sacrifice for a better nation. People of all religious beliefs joinedand the point was often made that German and Irish soldiers—ethnic minorities which faced discrimination in the United States—had become true Americans in the “baptism of blood” on the battlefield.
In 1913, one Indiana veteran complained that younger people born since the war had a tendency to forget the purpose of Memorial Day and make it a day for games, races, and revelry, instead of a day of memory and tears. In 1911, the scheduling of the Indianapolis 500 was opposed by the elderly GAR. The state legislature in 1923 rejected holding the race on the holiday. But the new American Legion and local officials wanted the big race to continue, so Governor Warren McCray vetoed the bill and the race went on.
Memorial Day endures as a holiday which most businesses observe because it marks the unofficial beginning of summer. The Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War (SUVCW) advocated returning to the original date. The VFW stated in 2002 that “changing the date merely to create three-day weekends has undermined the very meaning of the day.” No doubt, this has contributed a lot to the general public’s nonchalant observance of Memorial Day.
In 2000, Congress passed the National Moment of Remembrance Act, asking people to stop and remember at 3:00 p.m.
On Memorial Day, the flag of the United States is raised briskly to the top of the staff and then solemnly lowered to the half-staff position, where it remains only until noon. It is then raised to full-staff for the remainder of the day.
Since 1868, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, has held an annual Memorial Day parade which it claims to be the nation’s oldest continuously running. Grafton, West Virginia, has also had an ongoing parade since 1868. However, the Memorial Day parade in Rochester, Wisconsin, predates both the Doylestown and Grafton parades by one year (1867).
In 1915, following the Second Battle of Ypres, Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a physician with the Canadian Expeditionary Force, wrote the poem, “In Flanders Fields”. Its opening lines refer to the fields of poppies that grew among the soldiers’ graves in Flanders.
In 1918, inspired by the poem, YWCA worker Moina Michael attended a YWCA Overseas War Secretaries’ conference wearing a silk poppy pinned to her coat and distributed over two dozen more to others present. In 1920, the National American Legion adopted it as its official symbol of remembrance.
(Marcus had its Poppy Lady, Elsie Slagter, for years that encouraged and sold poppies to all that she saw.)