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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today, of course, is Memorial Day. While I'm sure you know you get a three-day weekend, and I'm sure you know that the real purpose of the day is to honor our nation's war dead, most Americans probably don't know the origins of Memorial Day, and we're going to talk about that. It was a holiday in some states before others. There's a kind of alternative Memorial Day in some places still, very controversial and offensive, and that it wasn't even called Memorial Day, originally, the holiday had a different name.

Let's observe Memorial Day by learning all about this with one of America's favorite history teachers, Kenneth C. Davis, best known as author of the Don't Know Much About History series, and most recently, Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy. Thanks for joining us for Memorial Day, Ken. Welcome back to WNYC.

Kenneth C. Davis: Hello, Brian, always a pleasure to be with you. I'm always reluctant to say happy Memorial Day. I suppose we can say happy Memorial Day weekend so everyone can enjoy it, but it is certainly not about the weekend and the picnic and the barbecues.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you certainly can't say happy Memorial Day. In fact, I made that mistake the very first year I was hosting this show. I just wished people a happy Memorial Day because the weekend was coming up, and a listener called in and got very angry. That listener was right. Because, obviously, it's not a happy kind of holiday. It's to memorialize the nation's war dead, so I never said happy Memorial Day again. Tell everybody which war gave rise to it originally?

Kenneth C. Davis: Well, Brian, this grew out of the ashes of the Civil War and the caller who chastised you was absolutely correct. It was a day that was created to memorialize and remember the men who had given their lives in the Civil War. Specifically, the date that we mark as Memorial Day began as Decoration Day in 1868, May 30, 1868. Specifically, it was meant to honor those who had given their lives to the Union cause, very important distinction that was made. Of course, as time went by, some of the former Confederate states decided they would have their own decoration days.

Now, why Decoration Day? It was meant to be a day where families would go to the cemetery, and literally put fresh flowers on the graves of the fallen soldiers. This is a day that we now set aside to remember all those who have died in service to America in all of its wars, those who gave what Abraham Lincoln famously described as the last full measure of devotion.

Brian Lehrer: If it was originally called Decoration Day, why did it get changed to Memorial Day?

Kenneth C. Davis: It was changed gradually as time went by. Partly because fewer and fewer people actually went to cemeteries to decorate graves. Although when I was a kid, I have to say, it was still called Decoration Day. Was flip-flopping between Decoration Day, many people said Memorial Day.

This was not a national holiday, certainly even at its beginning in 1868 when the general issues this famous speech, this document, which was known as General Order No. 11. He was doing it as the head of a fraternal organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, a very powerful, primarily Republican at that time, veterans unit. This had none of the weight of an official government announcement. It's really only a state-by-state progression that made this day May 30, originally, a national holiday. It was a state-by-state holiday.

As I said, when I was a kid, I remember this being, in many ways, more important in some respects than the Fourth of July. First of all, it occurred during the school year. School was let out for Memorial Day, which always fell on May 30th. All of the kids marched in the parade, whether it was as a school group, or the Boy Scouts, or the Girl Scouts, or the Cub Scouts, which I was at the time. You actually took part in this parade.

It was much more of a civic, patriotic, formality ceremony than the Fourth of July was, which, of course, comes in the middle of summertime and it's really about the fireworks. It was very meaningful, I think, to most of us as children. I think what happened, two things happened. First of all, they did make it a federal holiday or a national holiday in 1971, and they moved it to Monday.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, 1971, that recently?

Kenneth C. Davis: That's correct. Before that, it was widely celebrated, but really as a statewide celebration, for the most part. It's only in 1971, after the so-called Uniform Holiday Act, that Memorial Day is established as a national holiday and set on the last Monday in May. Many people have complained since then, more than 50 years later, that moving the day from its traditional May 30th date to a Monday holiday helped to lessen its importance and its significance as this really solemn occasion.

I'm not sure that's true. If you go back and look at the history of the early Decoration Day began after the Civil War, as I mentioned, and again, 600,000, at least, Americans dead in the Civil War, probably that number is much higher, perhaps 2% of the American population at the time. There was no town or city in America that was not affected by the death toll in the Civil War. That's why the holiday was very, very profoundly meaningful in the late 19th century, but by the turn of 20th century, it had already become sort of a picnic holiday. Going out to the cemetery to decorate the graves of the fallen soldiers had really become, "Let's pack a picnic and go off for the day," and that's one of the reasons it changed from Decoration Day to Memorial Day.

There's something else very important here that we should point out when we talk about this as a civil war holiday. Going back to that first declaration by General John Logan, he talked about this as being a day to honor those whose deaths were a tattoo of a rebellious tyranny and a revelry of freedom to a race in chains.

The 1868 proclamation for the first Decoration Day really does make this a holiday that's about slavery and the end of slavery in the Civil War and what the Union had been fighting for, not only to preserve the Union but ultimately to end slavery. In these times, in which talking about slavery has become so contentious when we talk about teaching American history, it's really important to go back and look that we can't separate the roots of this holiday from that essential meaning.

Brian Lehrer: For you who talks to many different kinds of audiences, including audiences of kids, how do we talk about the true origins of Memorial Day rooted in the Civil War and slavery in a politically divided country, where some people want to avoid difficult conversations or avoid making students feel "ashamed"?

Kenneth C. Davis: Well, as George W. Bush once put it, and I don't often quote George W. Bush, but he said, "A great nation does not hide its history." We cannot hide our history, certainly when it comes to this holiday. If we are teaching in school what this holiday means, and it's very solemn meaning, that people have died, men and women have died to win us the rights that we enjoy, the freedoms we enjoy. That's a heavy responsibility and a heavy thought to think about on this day, but it really still comes out of the nation's very, very divisive past, and the role that slavery played in creating the country, bringing about the Civil War, and in the long history of division and unhappy racial strife that this country has lived with for far too long. I don't think, as a historian, we can do anything but tell the truth.

Brian Lehrer: Kenneth C. Davis, historian with us for this Memorial Day as we talk about the holiday itself. You mentioned that southerners or those who lost family members in the Confederate side of the Civil War did not observe Memorial Day, originally, it was more of a northern holiday, can you talk about what the southerners did instead?

Kenneth C. Davis: Well, many of them created their own Confederate Memorial days or Confederate Decoration days, some of which were placed on, for instance, Robert E. Lee's birthday or the birthday of Jefferson Davis, so moving them away from this May 30th date, which was deemed a Yankee holiday, a Northern holiday.

In fact, the day is not specifically important in terms of any battle in the Civil War or any specific event, it's believed that it was picked as a day by the early believers in this idea, because it was the day that the most flowers would be in bloom in the north, so there would be plenty of flowers available to go out and decorate the graves of the fallen. There were a variety, some still practice a Confederate Decoration Day, although, again, this is the moment that we are in these become much more contentious questions.

Brian Lehrer: I read that South Carolina and North Carolina have an official Confederate Memorial Day to this day. This is from the Snopes website. It says Mississippi and Alabama also observe General Robert E. Lee's birthday jointly with the birthday of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., outrageously to my eye, but I guess they do because they're both in January, as well as close government and court offices for an official Confederate Memorial Day in late April, says Snopes, and there are others too. Do they do that in April? Did that just go by? It certainly didn't make the news in New York.

Kenneth C. Davis: Yes. There are many states that celebrated or marked, I should say, more appropriately marked their own version of Confederate Memorial Day, Confederate Decoration Day, and this controversy lives on into our day. We've had the arguments over Confederate monuments as we know, but just this year, Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi declared the month of April as Confederate Heritage Month.

He said that this is the month when the American Civil War began between the Confederate and Union armies. He also went on to say there was no systematic racism in America. This holiday, on which we are really honoring the supreme sacrifice is yet one more instance of how divisive, how contentious, how bitter this aftermath is even to this day.

Early on in the history of Decoration Day or Memorial Day, they would actually place guards at Arlington to keep any families of Confederate soldiers-- there are some Confederate soldiers buried in Arlington Cemetery. They would be posted there that day to keep any Confederate families out of Arlington on that day.

You have to look back again to what was said at the time in 1871, a few years after this holiday was established, Frederick Douglas actually goes to Arlington and he says, "I am no minister of malice, I would not strike the fallen, I would not repel the repentant, but may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict." Though he was making a distinction between those who fought for slavery, and those who fought for liberty and justice.

That was the reason why these different memorial days got established. Interestingly, by the turn of the 20th century, all of that bitterness had really been forgotten, or at least papered over, and this had become a picnic holiday, as I mentioned, and it's only with World War I, and the losses in 1917 and 1918 that the meaning of Memorial Day begins to change, and Memorial Day becomes a holiday, not just to focus on the Civil War, but to focus on all of those who died in service to the United States in all of its wars, and that's what it continued to grow and become.

Brian Lehrer: To focus for a minute more on the war that originally inspired the holiday and to recognize the enormity of the loss, how deadly was the Civil War compared even to other US wars like World War II?

Kenneth C. Davis: The numbers have been played with, I don't mean to say that glibly, considerably over the years. For a long time, the number of about 600,000 was widely used, more recent estimates when you look at records of insurance, and when you go back and look at census records, the idea is that it was probably much larger, especially when you consider the loss of civilians. I've seen numbers in recent years going upwards of 700,000 to even 800,000.

Again, we have to think about it in terms of percentages. We're talking about 2% of the American population dying, approximately, roughly. What would that mean today? We'd be talking about 7 millions of people dying in a war of that enormity. That's why this war touched every place in the country. There were really nowhere in America that wasn't touched by the Civil War and the loss.

That's why to this day, if you go around towns and whether you're in New England, or in the former Confederacy, most towns will have a statue honoring the fallen in the Civil War. It's just such an epic part of our history.

Of course, we still fight over it. We've had the argument in the past decade or so about the Confederate monuments, an argument that seems to finally have been decided in favor of removing most of those monuments to people who actually, in the case of Robert E. Lee, broke his oath of office to the United States, and was essentially a traitor. There were certainly people at that time who thought he should be tried for treason.

Andrew Johnson, who was sympathetic to the Confederate cause in some respects, he was Vice President to Abraham Lincoln and became president when Lincoln was killed, he was the one who really pushed off the idea of bringing to justice Lee or most of the other Confederate generals.

Brian Lehrer: I see that a few towns in the United States claim to have held the very first Memorial Day like it broke out locally, or I guess Decoration Day at the time. Waterloo, New York is one of them in New York state. Other states, some localities I should say, or towns and cities say, "Oh, we were the first". An article in the Washington Post last year reports that one possible first observance of the holiday was the ceremony organized by the recently freed Black community in Charleston, South Carolina in 1865, that early. Are you familiar with that history?

Kenneth C. Davis: Yes, I am. James McPherson, a prominent Civil War historian, and more recently, David Blight, another extraordinary historian, have both referred to this incident in which young emancipated children were brought to a parade in which they were going to remove the dead Union soldiers from a place where they had been buried to a more formal cemetery.

This ceremony and the laying of flowers on their graves, both Blight and McPherson had referred to as the first Decoration Day, and that was in 1865. There are other cities that lay claim to it. One city I point out to in my writing and research about this is Petersburg, Virginia. Petersburg, Virginia also had similar kind of ceremonies as many cities north and south did of laying flowers on the graves.

In Petersburg, Virginia, which is just below Richmond, Virginia, which was the capital of the Confederacy, and a place where the Union Army had laid siege for an entire year, they also had a ceremony to honor the dead that took place on June 9th. This was simply one of those ceremonies where flowers were laid on graves, and there were both Confederate and Union graves in that cemetery.

The importance of the connection to the Memorial Day, Decoration Day, we know is that the wife of General Logan was in Petersburg, and saw this, and wrote a letter to her husband, talking about this ceremony and how moving it was. It was that letter that led to General Logan then writing his now-famous proclamation, General Order Number 11, calling for a date to decorate the grave.

The Charleston ceremony is very, very significant. I think that it's not so important to say who did it first as to understand first the meaning of this holiday, but specifically, its meaning in connection to the role that slavery played both in the birth of America and the coming of the Civil War and the fact that those deep, deep divisive wounds are still not healed.

Brian Lehrer: Last question, how did we become so casual about the solemn holiday that commemorates war dead to have lots of Memorial Day sales and things like that, how did it become a consumer thing?

Kenneth C. Davis: What holiday hasn't become that? Certainly, in the immediate aftermath of most wars, I think, or while we are in the midst of the war, these days become more extraordinarily meaningful, and certainly, for those who have experienced loss in their family, these days are very, very meaningful.

I remember I was referring back to being a kid and how important Memorial Day was. I also remember that around Memorial Day, the veterans would come into our schools and they would bring the little poppies, paper poppies at that time, to sell, and you put down your quarter and you got a paper poppy to wear on Memorial Day. The poppy is a vestige of World War I, where a famous poem was written called In Flanders Fields, which begins, "In Flanders Fields, the poppies blow between the crosses row by row," and because of that poem, the poppy became the symbol of loss and remembrance from World War 1.

I think when we're close to these events, we feel a little closer to them and their essential meaning. As I mentioned, some people think making it a Monday, a three-day weekend holiday has diminished Memorial Day in some respects. Interestingly, also, during the Vietnam War, Memorial Day had become politically less palatable in some respects because the war had become so unpopular, and it took quite a while, maybe until the first Gulf War before Vietnam vets were really given the-- and the creation of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington before Vietnam vets were given their due and the Vietnam war dead were given their due on Declaration Day.

I should also point out still many, many people ask me, "Well, what's the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day?" Memorial Day is specifically to honor those who died in fighting for the country in all its wars, Veterans Day, a vestige of World War I, marks the day on which the war ended, November 11th, 1918. That eventually was known as Armistice Day. Armistice meaning the ceasefire that ended the war, only eventually did it become known as Veterans Day.

Both of these holidays became more meaningful to the country after first World War I and then Korea. Still to this day, I think we tend to not think about what its essential meaning is. Congress asks us to do one thing on Memorial Day, you don't have to do too much, but at three o'clock, 3:00 PM local time, you're supposed to have a moment of silence.

I always think it's a great day also to read Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a couple of 100 words, only takes a couple of minutes, but Lincoln summed up to me what this holiday is supposed to represent.

Brian Lehrer: All right, listeners, marching orders for some time during your picnic or barbecue today, or between shopping stops, read the Gettysburg Address, which is very short, and maybe a moment of silence at three o'clock if we can pull it off.

Kenneth C. Davis, author of the Don't Know Much About History series, and most recently Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy. His website is don'tknowmuch.com. Ken, thank you so much.

Kenneth C. Davis: It's always a pleasure, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay with us.

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