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May 29, 2006
A History of Memorial Day
Christine Gibson, former editor of American Heritage, explains how Memorial Day, which developed immediately after the Civil War, rather quickly became both an opportunity for reconciliation and for picnics and barbecues. Read her full essay; here's a tidbit:
Beginning in the 1870s, Federals and Rebels came together in Northern and Southern cemeteries for joint Memorial Day ceremonies. President Rutherford B. Hayes attended one such exercise in Tennessee in 1877, and members of one Richmond veterans’ organization traveled to observances in at least seven Northern cities in the 1880s and hosted delegations from four more. Financial leaders rejoiced as commerce between Northern and Southern states began to free up. As a former Confederate major announced at a Memorial Day ceremony in Chicago in 1895, "We invite you to invade us again, not this time with your bayonets, but with your business."
After a full century of sectional strife, however, reconciliation required some strenuous philosophical gymnastics. Southerners promoted the idea of the Lost Cause—-the Confederacy had been a noble experiment, defeated not by a lack of competence or morals but by a shortage of resources—-which allowed them to return to the Union on an equal footing with the North, emotionally at least. Politics, they held, not slavery, had started the war. Northerners, as a whole never particularly supportive of full equality for blacks, swallowed that line so the country could move on. The new, non-contentious Memorial Day depended upon a nationwide amnesia. On a day consecrated to remembering, most Americans chose to forget. . . .
The same original impulse that made way for reconciliation—-the lessening of grief—-transformed Memorial Day from somber duty to carnival of national recreation. But when the public, no longer so acutely despondent over Civil War casualties, began to show less interest in Memorial Day ceremonies, local veterans’ chapters relied on an old standby to draw crowds. Richmond held its first Memorial Day parade in 1875, and Chicago followed suit three years later. Observers now celebrated the war itself, rather than the dead, through these parades, showing what the Chicago Tribune in 1893 called "the inbred delight the American citizen has for the pomp and circumstance of war."
By then, Chicago’s annual Memorial Day bicycle race drew more viewers than the cemetery services did. Five years earlier, President Grover Cleveland had gone fishing on Memorial Day rather than visit Civil War graves. Veterans excoriated him for it, but he was really just riding the cutting edge of a national trend. After Congress declared Memorial Day a federal holiday, in 1887, more and more Americans took the opportunity to enjoy the fine May weather with picnics and baseball games. The officers at GAR headquarters fumed. Decrying "indulgences in public sports, pastimes and all amusements on Memorial Day," they urged local posts to "let no idle merry-making mar its consecrated hours." . . .
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