5 things you should know about the Memorial Day holiday in the US

Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen servicemen, but it has come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on everything from mattresses to lawnmowers. grass.

But for people like Manuel Castaneda Jr., the day is very personal. He lost his father, a U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, in a 1966 accident in California while his father was training other Marines.

“It’s not just about the specials. It’s not just about the barbecue,” Castañeda told The Associated Press in a Memorial Day discussion last year.

Castañeda also served in the Marine Corps and Army National Guard, where he met men who died in combat. But he tries not to judge others who spend the holidays differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like it?”

1. Why is Memorial Day celebrated?

It is a day of reflection and remembrance for those who died while serving in the United States Armed Forces, according to the Congressional Research Service. The holiday is observed in part for the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.

2. What are the origins of Memorial Day?

The holiday has its origins in the American Civil War, in which more than 600,000 service members (both Union and Confederate) died between 1861 and 1865.

There is little controversy about the first national celebration of what was then called Decoration Day. It occurred on May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans asked to decorate war graves with flowers, which were in bloom.

The practice was already widespread locally. Waterloo, New York, began a formal celebration on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed the birthplace of the holiday.

However, Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traces its first celebration to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. And women in some Confederate states decorated graves before the end of the war.

David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when up to 10,000 people, many of them black, held a parade, heard speeches, and dedicated the graves of the Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.

A total of 267 Union soldiers died in a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. After the war, members of black churches buried them in individual graves.

“What happened in Charleston has a right to claim first, if that matters,” Blight told The Associated Press in 2011.

In 2021, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel cited the story in a Memorial Day speech in Hudson, Ohio. Ceremony organizers turned off his microphone because they said it was not relevant to honoring the city’s veterans. The event’s organizers subsequently resigned.

3. Has Memorial Day always been a source of controversy?

Someone has always lamented that the holiday deviates from its original meaning.

As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focused more on pomp, dinner parties and oratory.

In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared that Americans were forgetting the impetus of the Civil War (slavery) when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.

“We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this turf stood between the nation and its destroyers,” Douglass said.

Their concerns were well-founded, said Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Although approximately 180,000 black men served in the Union Army, the holiday in many communities would essentially become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South, Railton told the AP in 2023.

Meanwhile, the way the day was spent (at least by the nation’s elected officials) could come under scrutiny for years after the Civil War. In the 1880s, then-President Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing, and “people were shocked,” Matthew Dennis, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Oregon, told the AP last year.

In 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its inaugural race on May 30, attracting 85,000 spectators. A report by The Associated Press made no mention of the holiday or any controversy.

4. How has Memorial Day changed?

Dennis said the potency of Memorial Day was diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked the end of World War I on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday in 1938 and passed to be called Veterans Day in 1954.

An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30 to the last Monday in May in 1971. Dennis said the creation of the three-day weekend recognized that Memorial Day had long been transformed into a more generic memory of the dead, as well as a day of leisure.

In 1972, Time magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day national rampage that appears to have lost much of its original purpose.”

5. Why is Memorial Day linked to sales and travel?

Even in the 19th century, funeral ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnics and foot races, Dennis said.

The holiday also evolved along with baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week and summer vacation, according to the 2002 book “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

In the mid-20th century, a small number of businesses began defiantly opening during the holiday.

Once the holiday moved to Monday, “traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” wrote authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran.

Today, Memorial Day sales and travel are deeply ingrained in the nation’s muscle memory.

Jason Redman, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the AP last year that he honors the friends he lost. He has thirty names tattooed on his arm “for every man I knew personally who died.”

He wants Americans to remember the fallen, but also to have fun knowing that lives were sacrificed to create the holiday.

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