Speak, memory

When the "harvest of death" became a picnic

We’re on our way into a holiday weekend — the weirdest one on our calendar, because its origin is specifically in war and death.

It was at first specific to the Civil War, as Decoration Day. America had seen a few wars before that but apart from the revolution, extraordinary in so many ways, those wars had been the old-fashioned kind — though there’d been volunteers (there had to be!) they had been led by professional men at arms with notions of honor and military conduct not much different from those of Europeans. In the case of the Mexican War, which Lincoln disliked, there was much less sense of moral mission or even score-settling than of imperial conquest.

The Civil War, on the other hand, was missionary (Down with the traitor, and up with the star!). It was also massive and disfiguring. It chewed up hundreds of thousands of men — including America’s first conscripts — and touched every corner of life on both sides. As Drew Gilpin Faust wrote in The Republic of Suffering:

In the Civil War the United States, North and South, reaped what many participants described as a “harvest of death.” By the midpoint of the conflict, it seemed that in the South, “nearly every household mourns some loved one lost.” Loss became commonplace; death was no longer encountered individually; death’s threat, its proximity, and its actuality became the most widely shared of the war’s experiences. As a Confederate soldier observed, death “reigned with universal sway,” ruling homes and lives, demanding attention and response… for those Americans who lived in and through the Civil War, the texture of the experience, its warp and woof, was the presence of death.

There are a remarkable number of Civil-War-related monuments across the country, and several quite grand ones here in Washington. The war gave the federal government the much bigger direct role in national life it retains today, and one is tempted, if of a certain frame of mind, to think the DC monuments are Washington’s way of celebrating its elevation. But I think that at least in part these were erected because the whole nation had gone through a near-death experience and needed to make sense of it, and statuary is a familiar recourse.  

So with Decoration Day. The Jason Isbell song of that name is about the War as a blood feud, but the first observances to take the name were tributes to the fallen, to make at least their memories blessed. The first national Memorial Day was declared in 1868, not by the President, but by the U.S. Army Commander in Chief John Logan, and his General Order is sere and casts a cold, unforgiving eye on future generations who might, in their depravity, spend the holy day burning gas and barbecuing:

Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten, as a people, the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull and other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remains in us.

How came we, then, to celebrate our fallen men with a short parade and a long weekend? Well, the war was a long time ago, and one of the blessings of liberty is, or should I say used to be, the march of labor and the Uniform Monday Holiday Act that made Memorial Day the anchor lap of a three-day break.

Another blessing of liberty, relatively recent in vintage, is the freedom to choose whether or not to pay your respects at all without getting hassled for it — not only to the Defenders of the Union, but also to any or all of our fallen in all the wars since, including those of the Vietnam War whose memorial I visited this time last year.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, Americans’ historical memory is shit, and if we’re not going to teach the kids history and civics (as we damn well should), we must expect some slippage in our once-common understanding of how we got to be America in the first place. Like FDR said, those who have long enjoyed such privileges as we enjoy forget in time that men have died to win them. Sometimes I think our government wouldn’t be so moth-eaten by grift, and the resulting holes stuck with irredeemable IOUs, if the once-young had ever realized how precious the gift they sold for a mess of pottage was.

On the other hand, it is that sold-out and moth-eaten, and maybe it’s like the AA guys say and we have to bottom out as a nation (which we’re certainly doing!) before we can take seriously the necessity of rehabilitation. All may feel the need but not all will heed it; some will just stuff the gap with burgers and beaches and sales; some will try to ineptly fill it with rightwing retvrn fash fantasies; some will hearken to the Battle Cry of Freedom. Then we’ll see whether Memorial Day stirs some of the right sort of memories. I’ve always thought America was lucky; maybe our luck hasn’t quite run out yet. Let us hope!