War not only wounds, maims and kills a nation’s soldiers, it does the same for its soul.
In 1866, just a year after the end of the Civil War, the people in cities across the North and South understood the need to start the healing of the collective psyche by setting aside a day to tend to and decorate soldiers’ graves. In Waterloo, N.Y., that first day was on May 5 and since then, the idea has grown.
In 1868, Gen. John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic, an organization of former sailors and soldiers, declared Decoration Day for May 30.
In the next 30 years, communities across the country made their own Decoration Day events, and following World War I, the observances expanded to include all the dead in all of America’s wars. In 1971, Congress formalized the name as Memorial Day and made it a national holiday on the last Monday in May.
The day has spawned a number of traditions, including:
• In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the veteran’s graves, a practice that has been adopted around the country, including by local Scout groups.
• In 1915, inspired by the poem “In Flanders Fields,” Moina Michael penned:
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.
She then conceived of an idea to wear red poppies on Memorial Day. Later a French woman learned of the custom and made artificial red poppies to raise money for war-orphaned children and widowed women. This tradition spread to other countries.
Unfortunately, the healing lessons of Memorial Day are as needed today as they were in 1866.
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