Memorial Day 2022

Memorial Day has undergone several serious changes since I was a boy. For one thing, it had a different name: when I was growing up, the holiday was mostly called Decoration Day. (The idea was that people went to the graves of soldiers who died in the course of our nation’s wars and decorated them with flowers and other kinds of suitable symbols.) And it had a fixed date, too: Decoration Day was May 30 from Civil War times up until 1970 when Congress voted both formally to change the name to Memorial Day and to fix its annual occurrence on the last Monday of May regardless of that day’s actual date.

But the single biggest shift has been the slow move away from seeing the day as a somber day on which to acknowledge the more than 1.3 million Americans who have died in in the service of our country by visiting their graves or by otherwise acknowledging their supreme sacrifice to one mostly celebrated, to extent it is celebrated at all, as a day for giant blow-out sales and as the unofficial first day of summer. Is that fair to say? It feels like that to me: each year the President participates in a somber wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington and the rest of everybody goes to the beach.

Where that strange ambivalence comes from, who can say? To some extent it has to do with the pride earlier generations took in the bravery displayed by the men and women of our Armed Forces in the Spanish-American War, in World Wars I and II, and in Korea, and the confused set of emotions that inheres even today in the legacy of Vietnam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor has the legacy of the Civil War been a simple one to negotiate: to expect the citizens of our Southern states to mourn the loss of those soldiers who died defending the integrity of the Union but not the scores of thousands of Confederate soldiers from their own states who died in their leaders’ vain effort to dismember the Union and to tear it asunder by force—that seems like a battle best not fought at all. Nor is this in any sense not a competition: for years, April 26 was observed across the South as Confederate Memorial Day for years and the practice has never fully died out—Confederate Memorial Day is still a holiday in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama—nor is it rooted in sentiments that have fully and completely died out (to which fact the ongoing kerfuffle over statues memorializing Confederate leaders and soldiers unambiguously testifies).

So we Americans bring a mixed bag of emotions to the table as we arrive at Memorial Day each year. Still, you would think there could be a way to move past the politics and to grieve nationally for the well more than a million young men and women who died in our nation’s service without becoming inextricably tangled up in extraneous details. Yes, you are allowed to think our incursion into Iraq was foolish and ill-conceived. And you are certainly allowed think—as I certainly do—that the soldiers who fought to dismantle the Union during the 1860s were, to say the very least, misguided in their zeal. I have my own complex set of emotions about Vietnam. (I would have more or less definitely been drafted in February of 1972 if Congress hadn’t voted to end the draft at the end of January of that year.) But the challenge of Memorial Day should not be decisively to resolve all these complicated issues, but rather to encourage the citizenry to set them aside and to think instead of the endless thousands of young people whose lives were cut short because of their willingness to take the ultimate risk in the service of their—our—nation. Focusing on the circumstances of their deaths would be, in this specific context, both pointless and counterproductive. Our nation has grown to its position of stature and power in the world because of those who served and serve. And if honoring those whose lives were cut short requires looking past politics to honor virtues like courage, patriotism, selflessness, and virtue, then so be it.

In 1882, the most celebrated and beloved of our national poets was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He led a remarkable life too, one I enjoyed reading in detail about in Charles C. Calhoun’s book, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life, which I came across a few years ago and recommend to all. He spent his life teaching first at Bowdoin College in Maine (where he had himself earlier on gone to school and been classmates with Nathaniel Hawthorne and future president Franklin Pierce) and at Harvard. And he was incredibly productive, producing in the course of his lifetime some sixteen volumes of poetry, countless translations (including the first American translation of Dante), as well as many novels and plays.

At the very end of his life, shortly before his death in March of 1882, Longfellow wrote one of his last poems, “Decoration Day.” Was he was prompted by some preternatural sense that he wouldn’t live until the end of May and so needed to write his poem while he still could? No one can say, but he did write his poem and he finished it too, then sent it into The Atlantic, a magazine he had earlier on helped to found, where it was published in the June issue of that year. More than any other work I know, Longfellow expresses exactly the twin sentiments I was describing above: that sense that people who die in their nation’s service deserve to be honored for their readiness and willingness to serve, and that the political climate that led to the war or to the conflict that led to the battle that led to that person’s death need not be part of the story at all. He ignores all that, not even deigning to nod in that direction. Instead, he addresses the young dead lying in their earthen graves and tells them that their service is complete and their task done, and that they have earned the right to rest in peace.

And so, in honor of Memorial Day this year I would like to offer to you Longfellow’s great poem, “Decoration Day.”

Decoration Day

by

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

Sleep, comrades, sleep and rest

On this Field of the Grounded Arms,

Where foes no more molest,

Nor sentry’s shot alarms.

Ye have slept on the ground before,

And started to your feet

At the cannon’s sudden roar,

Or the drum’s redoubling beat.

But in this camp of Death

No sound your slumber breaks;

Here is no fevered breath,

No wound that bleeds and aches.

All is repose and peace,

Untrampled lies the sod;

The shouts of battle cease,

It is the truce of God.

Rest, comrades, rest and sleep!

The thoughts of men shall be

As sentinels to keep

Your rest from danger free.

Your silent tents of green

We deck with fragrant flowers

Yours has the suffering been,

The memory shall be ours.