Dennis franz memorial day speech8/16/2023 “I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion,” Garfield began, and then continued to utter them. Garfield, a Civil War general, Republican congressman from Ohio, and future president. Some 5000 people attended on a spring day which, The New York Times reported, was “somewhat too warm for comfort.” The principal speaker was James A. Grant presided over the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery-which, until 1864, was on Confederate General Robert E. In 1868, future president James Garfield delivered a very, very long speech on the importance of Memorial Day. In 1971, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act shifted Memorial Day from May 30 to the last Monday in May. The states of the former Confederacy were unenthusiastic about a holiday memorializing those who, in General Logan’s words, “united to suppress the late rebellion.” The South didn’t adopt the May 30 Memorial Day until after World War I, by which time its purpose had been broadened to include those who died in all the country’s wars. Most northern states had followed suit by the 1890s. New York was the first state to designate Memorial Day a legal holiday, in 1873. Federal Memorial Day, established in 1888, allowed Civil War veterans, many of whom were drawing a government paycheck, to honor their fallen comrades without being docked a day’s pay.įor the rest of us, our holidays were enacted state by state. While there have been 11 federal holidays created by Congress-including Memorial Day and Juneteenth-they apply only to federal employees and the District of Columbia. Library of Congress/GettyImagesĬalling Memorial Day a “national holiday” is a bit of a misnomer. President Harding speaks on Memorial Day. Although many towns claimed the title, it was Waterloo that won congressional recognition as the “Birthplace of Memorial Day.” 2. Waterloo, New York, began holding an annual community service on May 5, 1866. The ceremony gave Carbondale its claim to the first organized, community-wide Memorial Day observance. In the same month, in Carbondale, Illinois, 219 Civil War veterans marched through town to Woodlawn Cemetery in memory of the fallen, where Union hero Major General John A. Two years later, women from Columbus, Mississippi, laid flowers on the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. The next year, a group of women decorated the graves of soldiers buried in a Vicksburg, Mississippi, cemetery. In 1864, women from Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, put flowers on the graves of their fallen soldiers from the just-fought Battle of Gettysburg. The tremendous loss of life and its effect on communities led to several spontaneous commemorations of the dead. Memorial Day was a response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War.
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