The spam e-mail from J. Crew gets right to the point: “Memorial
Day Sale at J. Crew — it’s the start of summer and we’re ready to
help you pack up for the pool or beach.” Indeed, Memorial Day has
come to be regarded as the beginning of summer, calendars
notwithstanding, just as Labor Day is heralded as the beginning of
fall. Though most Americans have a general idea of what Memorial
Day is about — remembrance of the country’s war dead — you would
be hard pressed to find many citizens who don’t spend more of their
time thinking about weekend getaways, cookouts, or just the blessed
relief of a long weekend away from work.
The retailers, of course, know this better than anyone. They
have their own patriotic duties to perform, and who’s to blame
them? There are few things as American as commerce, and American
consumerism long ago figured out how to monetize what might be
called our lower case holidays. By these, I mean those days that
are not observed on a specific date like December 25th or July 4th,
but are shoehorned into convenient Mondays to create that venerable
American institution, the three-day weekend. Each holiday seems to
have taken on its own commercial identity. Memorial Day means
summer wear and getaways; Labor Day is for back to school supplies
and fall clothing; Presidents Day is about car sales, with
makeshift Washingtons and Lincolns hawking zero percent financing
on TVs and at dealerships.
With the exception of religious days, there are no American
holidays anymore that do not involve the concept of celebration.
And if we can celebrate Memorial Day, we can celebrate anything.
Originally conceived as Decoration Day, Memorial Day’s solemn
origins go back to the Civil War. It was first observed on May 30,
1868, proclaimed in the General Order of General John Logan,
national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. That year,
flowers were placed on the graves of Confederate and Union soldiers
at Arlington National Cemetery. There is some evidence that the
practice was being conducted in the South even before the end of
the war. At any rate, the holiday was recognized in all the
Northern states before the turn of the century, and in the South
(which continued to honor its dead on separate days) after World
War I. By that time, the day had been expanded to remember those
who died in all of America’s wars.
For a long while, Memorial Day was associated with red poppies,
made famous by the Great War poem “In Flanders
Fields.” Moina Michael, an American war worker inspired by the
poem, wrote a reply:
We cherish, too, the Poppy red
That grows on fields where valor led,
It seems to signal to the skies
That blood of heroes never dies…
Ms. Michael then began wearing red poppies on May 30th of each
year, and sold them to raise money for needy servicemen. If
Americans want to feel a lump in the throat at the way time changes
things, try this: A Frenchwoman, Madame Guerin, heard of Ms.
Michael’s work and sold red poppies in France to benefit war widows
and their children. She later approached the VFW and helped
persuade them to start the Buddy Poppy program, wherein disabled
veterans sold artificial poppies to raise proceeds for
benefits.
May 30th was the date for Memorial Day until 1971, when Congress
passed, and President Nixon signed, legislation ensuring three-day
weekends for a host of Federal holidays — Washington’s Birthday
(which became known as Presidents Day), Memorial Day, Labor Day,
Columbus Day, and Veterans Day. No longer would these holidays be
observed on a specific date, but on a designated Monday nearest the
traditional date on the calendar. Martin Luther King Day, when
instituted in 1986, followed the format. It seemed like a perfectly
innocuous and sensible change. Americans could keep their holidays
and get a long weekend out of the deal, the better to travel, rest,
or consume.
But not necessarily to remember. There is no way to provide
statistical evidence on such matters, but it seems difficult to
deny that the advent of three-day weekends for national holidays
has had a gradually corrosive effect on civic memory. Having a day
of remembrance like Memorial Day fall on a fixed date, whatever day
of the week that may be, creates a very different dynamic than
observing it as part of a three-day weekend, long marked on the
calendar for leaving the office early on Friday to beat the
traffic. When the holidays were observed wherever the calendar
placed them, they made their presence felt more on the American
consciousness. Now, at least in the popular culture, they seem more
like holiday branding than anything else. Between the three-day
weekends and the distortion of the days themselves — at this
point, Columbus Day has become a political battlefield, and
Washington is sharing his birthday with Jimmy
Carter — it’s a wonder we remember anything at all.
There is some reason for hope, however, in the example of
Veterans Day. Like Memorial Day, it began with a specific focus and
grew to encompass a larger idea. It started as Armistice Day, in
honor of the American soldiers from the Great War. After the Korean
War, its mandate was expanded to honor veterans of all American
military service. It too was initially swallowed up in the national
maw of three-day weekends, but here its story diverges. Concerned
at the effect the three-day weekend was having on the day itself,
veterans groups helped pass legislation in 1978 returning the
holiday to its original date: November 11th, Monday or no Monday.
Not coincidentally, Veterans Day seems to have no particular
association with consumer items or events.
A similar effort, to return Memorial Day to its original May
30th observation, was initiated in 1999 by Senator Daniel Inouye of
Hawaii and Rep. James Gibbons of Nevada. The bills have languished
in committee, though, without further action. It is doubtful that
Americans would look kindly upon the effort to restructure what has
now become one of the signature weekends of the year. If the issue
ever came to debate, it is even likely that those who push for
reform would be labeled unpatriotic. A whole generation has been
raised to believe that American freedom means freedom from
responsibility, duty, and remembrance.
It is a long way from Decoration Day and Buddy Poppy to J. Crew
and the beach.
This week, the New York Sun ran its final series of
capsule obituaries of fallen American soldiers from the Iraq
campaign. The paper puts the final tally of dead at 138, a number
severe in human costs but infinitesimal from a military
perspective. In most senses, the campaign could not have gone
better or been less costly to the American military. That small
fatality figure is cause for rejoicing, but it also works in a
cruel way against remembrance. Since the men who died in Iraq are
so few, they can seem like an aberration in the larger tale of
triumph. Their small numbers are, in a sense, as difficult to grasp
and understand as the immense numbers of dead in the World Wars.
Such are the stubborn and sobering realities of war: that the very
success of our military could work against its being
appreciated.
That success, projected over a longer span of time, has won us
freedoms and comforts the rest of the world can only imagine. But
another sobering reality is that the fruits of these freedoms
include a national culture that has enshrined creature comforts as
a civic value. It shouldn’t be too much to ask that we could
observe a day — even when it has the audacity not to fall on
Monday — to remember those who fell for our country.
