With May 29th marking Memorial Day this year, it only made sense to take a look at the history of the celebration through New Jersey’s newspapers. The holiday, often known as Decoration Day prior to the First World War, emerged after the American Civil War, and it served as a day where honor was to be given to those who fought and died in the conflict. It was after World War I that the holiday shifted to being a general celebration of those who died in America’s conflicts. The exact first Memorial Day celebration is not known. The newspapers we have available, such as the May 24, 1919 Palisadian, point to John A. Logan, leader of the veterans group known as the “Grand Army of the Republic,” who, in 1868, called for May 30 to be “designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.”
Indeed, it is generally agreed that this was the first call for the holiday to be celebrated at the national level and the foundation of the modern holiday, but there were also earlier local ceremonies. In fact, as a May 28, 1915 Five Mile Beach Weekly Journal article notes, similar celebrations for a nation’s dead have existed throughout history in multiple countries. Regardless, the holiday found itself being adopted by the states and eventually it became a national holiday at the federal level, where it has been celebrated on the last Monday of May, rather than May 30, since 1971.
A common form of celebration in these newspaper was to print poems written for the holiday. Featured below are a handful of these compositions.
We can also see the beginning of a Memorial Day tradition in these papers. In 1921, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was unveiled in Arlington National Cemetery. It has since become standard for the President or a proxy to lay a wreath at the site on Memorial Day. An early example of this ceremony can be seen in the pages of the June 13, 1924 Palisadian, featuring a photo of President Calvin Coolidge and two of his cabinet members visiting the site.
It was also around this time that criticism began to emerge. As the holiday began to be celebrated in ways not directly tied to honoring America’s fallen (see the advertisements for Memorial Day programs below, which feature concerts, banquets, and parades), critics began to push back on those who did not celebrate the holiday in its intended manner. As one article in the May 24, 1919 Palisadian noted, “to a large share of our population the day is one for ball games and picnics.” The author of that article encouraged everyone to “give an hour or two of the day to the great lesson of patriotism and self-sacrifice.”
Unfortunately for those critics, the situation has not really changed. Memorial Day is celebrated today as a party to kickoff Summer, and most Memorial Day programs today do not make honoring the dead a priority. Still, there are some traditions, like the aforementioned ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, that put celebrating the sacrifice of United States service members front and center and that are still going strong, so the core idea of the holiday has not yet faded away.
(Contributed by Tristan Smith)
Sources:
Fitzpatrick, Laura. “A Brief History of Memorial Day.” Time, May 24, 2009. https://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1900454,00.html.
“Memorial Day.” Britannica, April 5, 2023. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Memorial-Day.
U.S. Department of Defense. “Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.” Accessed April 24, 2023. https://www.defense.gov/Multimedia/Experience/Tomb-of-the-Unknown-Soldier/.