![]() ![]() Why is Memorial Day tied to sales and travel?Įven in the 19th century, grave ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnicking and foot races, Dennis said. In 1972, Time Magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.” 5. Dennis said the creation of the three-day weekend recognized that Memorial Day had long been transformed into a more generic remembrance of the dead, as well as a day of leisure. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.Īn act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30th to the last Monday in May in 1971. How has Memorial Day changed?ĭennis said Memorial Day’s potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I’s end on Nov. A report from The Associated Press made no mention of the holiday - or any controversy. In the 1880s, then-President Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing - and “people were appalled,” said Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon.īy 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its inaugural race on May 30, drawing 85,000 spectators. Meanwhile, how the day was spent - at least by the nation’s elected officials - could draw scrutiny for years after the Civil War. Even though roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, the holiday in many communities would essentially become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South, Railton said. His concerns were well-founded, said Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. “We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers,” Douglass said. In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus - enslavement - when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery. Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning.Īs early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory. Has Memorial Day always been a source of contention? The ceremony’s organizers turned off his microphone because they said it wasn’t relevant to honoring the city’s veterans. Army lieutenant colonel cited the story in a Memorial Day speech in Hudson, Ohio. “What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters,” Blight told The Associated Press in 2011. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves. And women in some Confederate states were decorating graves before the war’s end.īut David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.Ī total of 267 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. Yet Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday’s birthplace. The practice was already widespread on a local level. It occurred May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom. There’s little controversy over the first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day. The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members - both Union and Confederate - between 18. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. military, according to the Congressional Research Service. It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. What is the official purpose of Memorial Day? But he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?” 1. ![]()
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