June 14 marked Flag Day and the 250th Anniversary of the United States Army. Both events were commemorated last week with a military parade in Washington, D.C., overseen by President Donald Trump.
The parade attracted mass derision from critics of the president, with some notable exceptions. One was Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman, who said the parade celebrated “the very best of us.”
Millions of Americans attended “No Kings” protests the same day, many of whom dubbed the event “fascist.” Others compared it to events in dictatorial regimes such as North Korea and accused the celebration of covertly marking Trump’s birthday. (RELATED: Cameras and Cash Fuel ‘No Kings’ Protests Against Trump)
However, such criticism of the event from the media and political figures has not covered the long history of American military parades.
The search term “military parade” yields over 90,000 results on newspapers.com for the 19th century alone. Nor were they unique to victory. “Everybody wants a downtown military parade,” reported the Chicago Tribune in 1892, when war was a generation away in memory.
The National Park Service records that almost countless parades have occurred in the nation’s capital alone throughout American history. Regular military pageantry once commemorated Independence Day and Veterans Day.
For The Republic
Abraham Lincoln and the republic’s most difficult days have loomed large in the background of the Trump era, from intellectual analysts to the man himself. Though Lincoln had been slain by the conclusion of the American Civil War, his recent death was honored at Washington, D.C.’s first such parade.
The first national military parade was a two-day extravaganza between May 23 and 24, 1865, to commemorate victory in the Civil War. Over 200,000 men clad in the blue uniforms of the Union marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. An Ohio newspaper regaled it as akin to what “the old Romans gave their victorious legions as they marched home from glorious conquest.”
The audience included a box very similar to the box Trump maintained with several other leading government officials last Saturday. The box “decked out in stars-and-stripes” held President Andrew Johnson and leading figures such as Gens Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. Sherman went on to write in his diary of his men’s “glittering muskets … like a solid mass of steel, moving with the regularity of a pendulum.”
Also among those participating in the parade were future presidents Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Rutherford Hayes, and James Garfield.
Reconstructive Peacetime
The unification and reconstruction of America following the Civil War brought on a high tide of patriotism. North and South alike united in a shared national identity, and military parades became a regular means of celebrating renewed national unity.
The Spanish-American War brought on a new wave of military celebration. Over 7,000 marched in the commemorative parade for victory in the war in Buffalo, New York. This number in a mid-tier American city is as large as the national parade held last week that drew such ire.
Many examples of military demonstrations as a generic patriotic celebration abound in the following years. In 1906, Baltimore fired off cannons and marched soldiers down its streets to mark the installation of fifteen thousand electric lights.
Hartford, Connecticut, held a military parade to commemorate the opening of a new bridge in 1908. The mayor of Omaha and governor of Nebraska organized a military parade in 1909 with thousands in attendance that served to impress visiting Japanese dignitaries.
Against Fascism
Early 20th-century conflicts saw celebrations of the armed forces, such as a grand march for returning troops upon victory in World War I. However, their popularity saw a downturn likely attributable to the Great Depression and a rise in anti-militarist sentiment during the interwar years.
In any case, the attack on Pearl Harbor brought military parades roaring back. Two million Americans watched a half-million marchers raise the national spirit in a grand parade in 1942, meant to raise morale on the home front. Held in New York, the march was the largest of wartime.
The end of the war brought the last grand national phenomenon of military parades. The 82nd Airborne Division led the largest victory parade in New York in 1946. Others were held from Texas to California.
After the Second World War, the scale of the conflict left many Americans fatigued with the military and infrastructural costs mounted, contributing to the decline in military parades. With the controversies surrounding the Vietnam War, the practice largely fell out of fashion.
Victory in the Middle East
The most recent military parade in D.C. occurred in 1991 to cheer for troops returning home from victory in Kuwait following Operation Desert Storm. Over 800,000 Americans attended the celebration led by President George H. W. Bush and Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf.
Eight thousand soldiers marched in this parade, alongside armored vehicles such as M1 Abrams tanks, some of the same models showcased at the 2025 parade. Passing throngs of admirers, they traveled down streets from the White House to Arlington National Cemetery.
Protestors proved a significant nuisance in 1991 as well. One woman climbed a tank, another splashed red paint on a parked jet, and other critics found themselves up in arms at the twelve million dollar cost of the event. Five million had been covered by donations.
The costs and damage done to D.C. streets likely had less to do with delaying another parade than the transformation of American warfare from short infernos to slow-burning embers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our troops today enter into an uncertain and unprecedented era of warfare with the horrors of drones. The same streets that met their boots greeted their fellow American soldiers of old, who freed slaves and saved the Union.
Our military is not rooted in the perils of modernity, but in the heritage of the nation they fight to protect.
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