Analysis: How controversial interpretations associated with Memorial Day have developed over time
Memorial Day is meant to be a day of remembrance for the nation’s dead soldiers, but in recent years, it has also come to symbolise the unofficial beginning of summer and a long weekend filled with sales on everything from mattresses to lawnmowers.
With almost 42 million Americans expected to travel 50 miles (80 kilometres) or more during the holiday weekend, auto group AAA warned that it might be “one for the record books, especially at airports.” According to federal officials, the number of passengers flying has already surpassed pandemic-era highs.
But Manuel Castaeda Jr., 58, of Durand, Illinois, outside of Rockford, will have a peaceful day. In an accident in California in 1966, he lost his father, a U.S. Marine who had served in Vietnam, who was being trained by other Marines.
“Memorial Day is very personal,” declared Castaeda, who previously served in the Marines and Army National Guard and knew soldiers who lost their lives in action in those organisations. Not just the specials, either. It goes beyond the BBQ.
He makes an effort, though, to avoid passing judgement on those who celebrate the occasion in a different way, saying, “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?”
What is the recognised PUMemorial Day is meant to be a day of remembrance for the nation’s dead soldiers, but in recent years, it has also come to symbolise the unofficial beginning of summer and a long weekend filled with sales on everything from mattresses to lawnmowers.
With almost 42 million Americans expected to travel 50 miles (80 kilometres) or more during the holiday weekend, auto group AAA warned that it might be “one for the record books, especially at airports.” According to federal officials, the number of passengers flying has already surpassed pandemic-era highs.
But Manuel Castaeda Jr., 58, of Durand, Illinois, outside of Rockford, will have a peaceful day. In an accident in California in 1966, he lost his father, a U.S. Marine who had served in Vietnam, who was being trained by other Marines.
“Memorial Day is very personal,” declared Castaeda, who previously served in the Marines and Army National Guard and knew soldiers who lost their lives in action in those organisations. Not just the specials, either. It goes beyond the BBQ.
He makes an effort, though, to avoid passing judgement on those who celebrate the occasion in a different way, saying, “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?”
What does Memorial Day’s official mission statement say?
According to the Congressional Research Service, today is a time for reflection and remembering those who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. military. The National Moment of Remembrance, which calls on all Americans to halt at 3 p.m. for a moment of quiet, helps to commemorate the anniversary.
What’s the history of the holiday?
The event commemorates the American Civil War, which claimed the lives of more than 600,000 Union and Confederate soldiers between 1861 and 1865.
There isn’t much debate regarding the first nationwide celebration of Decoration Day. Following a call from a group of Union soldiers to adorn war graves with blooming flowers, it happened on May 30, 1868.
Locally, the practise was already well-known. On May 5, 1866, an official celebration was started in Waterloo, New York, which was later recognised as the holiday’s birthplace.
Watch as this memorial for women honours countless “sisters in arms.”
However, Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, claims that October 1864 was the date of its inaugural celebration, according to the Library of Congress. Before the war was over, ladies were even decorating graves in certain Confederate states.
However, according to Yale history professor David Blight, May 1, 1865, saw up to 10,000 people, many of them Black, gather in Charleston, South Carolina, for a parade, speeches, and the dedication of Union dead graves.
A Confederate prison had claimed the lives of 267 Union soldiers, who were all interred in a mass grave. Members of Black churches interred them in separate graves after the war.
“What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be the first, if that matters,” Blight said to The Associated Press in 2011.
In a Memorial Day address in Hudson, Ohio in 2021, a retired lieutenant colonel of the United States Army referenced the incident. His microphone was turned off by the ceremony’s organisers because they felt it was unrelated to the theme of honouring the city’s soldiers. Later, the event’s planners quit.
Has Memorial Day ever been a contentious topic?
There has always been a complaint about how far the holiday has strayed from its origins.
A Confederate prison had claimed the lives of 267 Union soldiers, who were all interred in a mass grave. Members of Black churches interred them in separate graves after the war.
“What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be the first, if that matters,” Blight said to The Associated Press in 2011.
In a Memorial Day address in Hudson, Ohio in 2021, a retired lieutenant colonel of the United States Army referenced the incident. His microphone was turned off by the ceremony’s organisers because they felt it was unrelated to the theme of honouring the city’s soldiers. Later, the event’s planners quit.
Has Memorial Day ever been a contentious topic?
There has always been a complaint about how far the holiday has strayed from its origins.
Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts, indicated that his concerns were valid. Despite the over 180,000 Black soldiers who participated in the Union Army, Railton predicted that the event would ultimately become “white Memorial Day” in many places, especially once the Jim Crow South came into being.
However, for years following the Civil War, how the day was spent, at least by the country’s elected authorities, may come under examination. Grover Cleveland, the then-president, is reported to have gone fishing in the 1880s, and “people were appalled,” according to Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon.
On May 30, 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its first race, drawing a crowd of 85,000 people. The holiday or any controversy were not mentioned in a report by The Associated Press.
What changes has Memorial Day seen?
Dennis claimed that the addition of Armistice Day, which commemorated the conclusion of World War I on November 11, 1918, reduced Memorial Day’s impact slightly. By 1938, Armistice Day had been declared a public holiday, and in 1954 it was changed to Veterans Day.
In 1971, Memorial Day was moved from the final Monday in May to the 30th of each year by an act of Congress. According to Dennis, the three-day weekend was instituted in recognition of the fact that Memorial Day had long since evolved into a more general day of leisure and commemoration of the deceased.
Time Magazine declared in 1972 that the festival had changed into “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.”
Why are Memorial Day sales and travel related?
According to Dennis, funeral rites were still followed by recreational pursuits like picnics and foot races.
According to the 2002 book “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness,” the holiday also developed alongside baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week, and summer vacation.
A tiny number of businesses started to defiantly open on the holiday in the middle of the 20th century.
As soon as the holiday was switched to Monday, “the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” according to authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran.
Memorial Day shopping and vacation are now ingrained in the collective memory of the country. Despite inflation, 2.7 million more people will travel this weekend for the unofficial start of summer than they did last year, according to AAA.
The number of individuals examined by the Transportation Security Administration at airport checkpoints on Thursday was 2.66 million, up roughly 2,500 from last Friday and the most since the Sunday following Thanksgiving in 2019. With more than 51,000 airline flights, the Federal Aviation Administration had estimated that Thursday would be the largest travel day of the holiday season.
In the meantime, Jason Redman, a 48-year-old veteran Navy SEAL who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, said he’ll be thinking of his lost friends. His arm has thirty tattoos, “for every guy that I personally knew that died.”
While keeping in mind that lives were lost to create the holiday, he encourages Americans to honour the memory of the departed while enjoying having fun.
