[Before a series on Decoration Day, the holiday that preceded and evolved into Memorial Day, a special post on shifting our collective memories of the holiday’s histories.]
On what we don’t remember about Memorial Day, and why we should.
In a long-ago post on
the Statue of Liberty, I made a case for remembering, and engaging
much more fully, with what the Statue was originally intended, by its French
abolitionist creator, to symbolize: the legacy of slavery and
abolitionism in both America and France, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln
and the memories of what he had done to advance that cause, and so on. I tried
there, hopefully with some success, to leave ample room for what the Statue has
come to mean, both for America as a whole and, more significantly still, for
generation upon generation of immigrant arrivals to the nation. I think those
meanings, especially when tied to Emma Lazarus’ poem and its
radically democratic and inclusive vision of our national identity, are
beautiful and important in their own right. But how much more profound and
meaningful, if certainly more complicated, would they be if they were linked to
our nation’s own troubled but also inspiring histories of slavery and
abolitionism, of sectional strife and Civil War, of racial divisions and those
who have worked for centuries to transcend and bridge them?
I would say almost exactly the same thing when it comes to the history of Memorial Day. For the
last century or so, at least since the end of World War I, the holiday has
meant something broadly national and communal, an opportunity to remember and
celebrate those Americans who have given their lives as members of our armed
forces. While I certainly feel that some of the narratives associated with that
idea are as simplifying and mythologizing and meaningless as many others I’ve
analyzed here—“they died for our freedom” chief among them; the world would be
a vastly different, and almost certainly less free, place had the Axis powers
won World War II (for example), but I have yet to hear any convincing case that
the world would be even the slightest bit worse off were it not for the more
than 50,000 American troops who lives were wasted in the Vietnam War (for
another)—those narratives are much more about politics and propaganda, and
don’t change at all the absolutely real and tragic and profound meaning of
service and loss for those who have done so and all those who know and love
them. One of the most pitch-perfect statements of my position on such losses
can be found in a song by (surprisingly) Bruce Springsteen; his “Gypsy Biker,” from Magic (2007), certainly
includes a strident critique of the Bush Administration and Iraq War, as seen
in lines like “To those who threw you away / You ain’t nothing but gone,” but
mostly reflects a brother’s and family’s range of emotions and responses to the
death of a young soldier in that war.
Yet as with the Statue, Memorial Day’s original meanings and
narratives are significantly different from, and would add a great deal of
complexity and power to, these contemporary images. The holiday was first known
as Decoration Day, and was (at least per the thorough histories of it by scholars
like David Blight) originated in 1865 by a group of freed
slaves in Charleston, South Carolina; the slaves visited a cemetery for Union
soldiers on May 1st of that year and decorated their graves, a quiet
but very sincere tribute to what those soldiers have given and what it had
meant to the lives of these freedmen and –women. The holiday quickly spread to
many other communities, and just as quickly came to focus more on the less
potentially divisive, or at least less complex as reminders of slavery and
division and the ongoing controversies of Reconstruction and so on,
perspectives of former soldiers—first fellow Union ones, but by the 1870s
veterans from both sides. Yet former slaves continued to honor the holiday in
their own way, as evidenced by a powerful scene from Constance Fenimore
Woolson’s “Rodman
the Keeper” (1880), in which the protagonist observes a group of
ex-slaves leaving their decorations on the graves of the Union dead at the
cemetery where he works. On the one hand, these ex-slave memorials are parallel
to the family memories that now dominate Memorial Day, and serve as a beautiful
reminder that the American family extends to blood relations of very different
and perhaps even more genuine kinds. But on the other hand, the ex-slave
memorials represent far more complex and in many ways (I believe) significant
American stories and perspectives than a simple familial memory; these acts were
a continuing acknowledgment both of some of our darkest moments and of the ways
in which we had, at great but necessary cost, defeated them.
Again, I’m
not trying to suggest that any current aspects or celebrations of Memorial Day
are anything other than genuine and powerful; having heard some
eloquent words about what my Granddad’s experiences with his fellow soldiers
had meant to him (he even commandeered an abandoned bunker and
hand-wrote a history of the Company after the war!), I share those
perspectives. But as with the Statue and with so many of our national
histories, what we’ve forgotten is just as genuine and powerful, and a lot more
telling about who we’ve been and thus who and where we are. The more we can
remember those histories too, the more complex and meaningful our holidays, our
celebrations, our memories, and our futures will be. Next Decoration Day post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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