Memorial Day Monday Open Comments

Arlington National Cemetery

Austin Bay on Memorial Day 2023:

Memorial Day emerged from America’s most deadly and destructive war: the Civil War.

Agreed, social, political and moral divisions are wracking and weakening contemporary America. But no external or internal challenge quite compares to the Civil War — at least not yet.

Measured by soldiers and civilians killed in combat and by war’s derivative killers — starvation, disease and exposure — the Civil War has no rival.

Physical, economic and social destruction are more relative terms, and comparing them in different historical eras is tricky.

The Union’s best generals, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, targeted Confederate economic productivity. They knew the South’s ability to supply its armies prolonged the war. Sherman’s vow to “make Georgia howl” expressed the strategy succinctly.

Blue and Gray armies burned farms and factories. The Confederate and border states (Kentucky, Missouri, even Maryland) suffered terrible devastation from both armies. This assertion is debatable, but I think it has merit. It took the Deep South 90 years (and the unifying effects of two world wars with international enemies) to overcome its economic backwardness, in comparison to the Yankee Northeast and Midwest.

and,

This is a Memorial Day column. Decoration Day was a Union observance. Union survivors set aside a day in May for “decorating” the graves of dead soldiers with flowers. The website usmemorialday.org notes that Southern states “refused to acknowledge the day, honoring their dead on separate days until after WWI.”

Yes, a unifying effect. After World War I the day changed from honoring just those who died fighting in the Civil War to honoring Americans who died fighting in any war.

Memorial Day became a national day, a healing day of remembrance to say “thanks,” no matter an individual’s personal history.

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I linked to this special 2022 Memorial Day column by Austin Bay last year at this time describing his memories of this holiday as a boy in Houston in 1950s. It certainly resonated with me.  Here is his bio.

Four days a year a special American flag flew from a tall loblolly pine in my family’s front yard.

Every Memorial Day, Flag Day, Independence Day and every Veterans Day, my father would get up early then wake me, my sisters and younger brother.

We would traipse into the front yard, yawning in Houston’s early morning humidity, in summer standing barefoot on St. Augustine grass, on Veterans Day wearing shoes in November’s cooler weather.

Then Dad would tie the flag to the rope, one of us would give the rope a pull, and the huge wall of red, white and blue cloth would rise and billow as it rose, the only sound a pulley 35 feet up the pine creaking with each tug.

Hands covered hearts and we’d salute. Two minutes later, we kids would head back to bed. Dad might get a cup of coffee then oil the lawn mower. By 10 o’clock the mower and I would be cutting grass below the flag.