“Dear Heads of Gray, Dear Boys in Blue”: Memorial Day in Greater Los Angeles, 1910

by Paul R. Spitzzeri

As we remember those who sacrificed their lives in service with the armed forces over the history of the country, this post, featuring a program from exercises at Simpson Auditorium in Los Angeles, looks at the observances throughout greater Los Angeles on Memorial Day in 1910. Prior posts here have covered other holiday remembrances from 1909 to 1928 and the origins of what was long called Decoration Day go back to just after the horrors of the Civil War.

It had been just over four decades when communities and their denizens throughout the region gathered on Monday, 30 May in varied settings to honor our soldiers, sailors and others who died in defense of the nation. In Anaheim, for example, residents gathered at the Orange County city’s cemetery, where there was an assembly call; performances by the band of the fraternal society, the Knights of Pythias, a 3rd grade class from a local school and the Anaheim Quartette; a reading of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; the decoration of graves and an oration by a Placentia minister.

At the county seat of Santa Ana, two posts of the veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic, hosted observances at that city’s burying ground in the morning and at the Grand Opera House in the afternoon. As in its neighboring city, residents assembled around the monument to the unknown dead, while flowers, flags and stars were placed on the graves of “old soldiers.”

After an invocation, music and exercises, “the intensely solemn ceremony” was followed by a parade on Fourth Street downtown as “seventy-five old soldiers, men now approaching the end of life, walked to martial music.” Their wives and daughters accompanied them, as did members of groups that were linked to the G.A.R. “representing that great and faithful body of women who gave up their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons to the great war.” Younger veterans were but briefly mentioned, including those who served during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

At the Opera House, after an invocation and a roll call of the deceased, Colonel George W. Wilcox welcomed those in attendance by observing that “we are assembled here in honor of our departed comrades, who touched elbows with us on the march and amidst the smoke of battle a half century ago” while adding that it would be “a few more years and we must turn over this ceremony to you.” Music, conducted by Mrs. Ella I. Fife, comprised war songs redolent of “that strenuous struggle of the ’60’s, that rent North and South and drenched the nation in the blood of its stalwart sons.”

Lawyer William H. Thomas gave the oration and lamented that public schools did not do more to recognize Memorial Day and preferred, rather than to call it a holiday, to see it as a “holy day” which was “set apart to commemorate the sacrifices that were necessary that a united nation and people might exist here today.” He lauded George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley, assassinated at the start of that first decade with 1910 being the end and who “showed in his life how a citizen should live, and in his death how a Christian gentleman should die.”

Observing that America was a nation of wealth, Thomas cautioned that there was a more important inheritance from “our forefathers [who] were poor” in the material sense and urged “a strong public sentiment backed by a true desire for the proper enforcement of law and order,” while asserting “nothing is more effectual and affords us a greater safeguard to American liberty than the proper training of the young.”

The best way to pay tribute to those who gave their lives to the country was the veneration of the flag as “the emblem of liberty” for a nation “founded upon the eternal principle of right and equal opportunity for all.” After intoning that future Americans would “with enraptured vision, view a destiny more exalted and glorious than the world has ever known,” Thomas closed with:

Oh, my fellow citizens, I contemplate with joy the coming of that day when cruel war shall surge and beat upon our shores no more, and when the rivalry between nations will be, not to see which can injure the other most, but to see which can hold highest the light that leads the human race to higher ground.

In Whittier, the Friends Church of the Quakers who established the town during the Boom of the 1880 was decorated patriotically so that it “converted the pulpit into a picture.” Some fifty veterans entered the church “with halting step, and bearing in every lineament the deepening harvest hues of advancing years” reminding that a decade or so hence there would be only history as a reminder of the Civil War rather than a living presence.

Following the invocation and reading of the roll of recently deceased veterans, Thomas Newlin, president of Whittier College, addressed those still living and said that, as he watched them march into the church, tears came to his eyes and he added “there is nothing too good for you that we have in this world.” He reinforced the idea that “the next generation can not witness what we are witnessing here today” and that they would have to be told of how veterans gathered annually “and worshipped together in the cities.”

As did Thomas, Newlin invoked religion in the context of war and patriotism and Christianity as an evolving template “for the government of humanity” and continued that “our Anglo-Saxon civilization has taught us that statesmanship is only the art of interpreting the laws of God and bringing all things into his harmonies.” Calling on the “new nationality” and “new patriotism” as guideposts for the future, the president also referred to that era as “an age of unification” of corporations, trusts and nation states, including “the great German empire” and that of Britain and a united Italy.

Not foreseeing, of course, that, in just four years, the Germans would lead Europe into a conflagration that became World War One, Newlin then asserted that “in our own country, we stand a united and a free people” and then wondered “why not extend and make this one grand federation of states?” This seemed to include other nations like the United Kingdom and Germany, though Newlin put this in the context of onerous taxation for military purposes, including his statement that more than 70% of taxes collected in the United States was for this, but, in his view, it should largely have gone to education and commerce.

The Whittier News, in addition to extensively covering the church ceremony and applauding Newlin’s address, also noted the decoration of graves at the cemetery that is now Founders Park, including the words of a G.A.R. ritual that read, “we meet to honor our dead, and to deepen our reverence for their worth . . . to encourage a more generous charity for our comrades who are sick and in distress” and to further promote patriotism and love of country.

Another Memorial Day event was held by the city’s Odd Fellows lodge, with music from the state school for troubled boys (whose principal several years before was Walter P. Temple’s future attorney and business partner, George H. Woodruff, also a city attorney in the early part of the decade) and a male quartet of singers, among other features. Methodist minister Dr. Alfred Inwood, who observed that “we pause today for a little while in the mad rush of our daily life . . . and pay a tender tribute of love to our honored dead” and added “when a nation forgets its dead it begins to decay.”

Inwood went on that “a nation becomes great through its great men,” mentioning European monarchs (including the sole woman, Catherine the Great of Russia) and Civil War generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, though these latter, he noted, “were but leaders of a vast host equally brave, without whose deeds of daring these great names could not have been.” He followed this with the statement that “our race of heroes are the hosts of the common soldiers” and he dramatically invited his hearers to join him at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in July 1863 where “it is not war; it is slaughter” and 1,800 Union troops were to be captured and taken to the Confederates’ brutal Andersonville prisoner-of-war camp. Inwood also noted that what began as “political expediency” became “a crime against the state” in disunion and the support of slavery.

In Monrovia, a Sunday Baptist church service included an address by its pastor, who, the News pointed out, “paid tribute to the character of the men who composed the armies of the union in the civil war, but he spoke with tender solicitude and sympathy, also of the men of the south, and said that all were imbued with impulses of high patriotism.”

Some forty veterans were in attendance to hear the oration, while, on Memorial Day, a procession gathered on Myrtle Avenue downtown and marched to Live Oak Memorial Park. There, Mrs. Horace Beaman sang “Cover Them Over With Beautiful Flowers” to bridge time during a long wait, while a local minister was praised for a speech “which was a model of eloquence and lofty patriotism. The G.A.R. also supervised the decoration of veterans’ graves.

It was adjudged “a perfect day” in the cooling breezes of Long Beach, while much of the region broiled in unseasonably hot temperatures, as larger than anticipated crowds gathered for a parade that began downtown on Third Street and which included some 200 veterans and proceeded to march to what is now Lincoln Park, established in 1880. The Woman’s Relief Corps and Ladies’ Relief Corps auxiliaries of the G.A.R. assisted, while the Sons of Veterans and Spanish War Veterans were among those involved in gun salutes and other elements.

Mrs. W.A. Law was outfitted as the Goddess of Liberty to welcome the participants and Mildred Carlin was the color bearer who draped the monument of the unknown sailors. The assemblage then marched to the end of the city pier for “the most impressive part of the program” in the casting into the sea of flowers for those sailors. A W.R.C. contingent on a steamship carried bouquets provided by schoolchildren and added them.

At the city auditorium, the Municipal Band and two women soloists provided music, while the typical elements of the invocation, reading of the Gettysburg address, a welcome by the G.A.R. post commander, and the keynote address, given by the Rev. O.H.L. Mason of the First Presbyterian Church. In mid-afternoon, a gathering went to the Municipal Cemetery for veterans’ graves decoration and a Sons of Veterans gun salute.

In Pasadena, some 1,000 persons participated in a parade terminating at Library Park, where a mound represented the final place of rest for the unknown military dead. Graves were decorated at Mountain View Cemetery and the women’s auxiliary of the Sons of Veterans served a lunch after the commemoration there.

Exercises were held at the First Methodist Church and a G.A.R. orator noted that the children of that time would later ask, “what is the meaning of these ceremonies?” The answer was critical then, it was answered, “and will become more necessary every year to keep alive the value of our institutions.” Echoing his colleague from Whittier and, undoubtedly, countless others across the country, J.S. Pitman added “the best teachers are the lives of great men” as the history of the world was basically about them.

In the rapidly growing metropolis of Los Angeles, there were, of course, Memorial Day observances throughout the increasingly sprawling city. The hot weather sent 10,000 people to the end of the Venice Pier for ceremonies which, as in Long Beach, including the spreading of flowers, organized by Mrs. A.S.C. Forbes of Pasadena, in the ocean. Prior to that, in the massive auditorium filled with 4,000 attendees, Charles Edward Locke of the First Methodist Church of Los Angeles focused on America’s naval exploits during his keynote address and Superior Court Judge Curtis Wilbur presided over the exercises. This included the 150-member choir of Locke’s church and the assemblage then marched to the pier for the flower casting.

At the Soldiers’ Home in Sawtelle, veteran residents were joined by citizens from nearby communities and a procession that included 72 children from the local elementary school, a banner titled “California,” and boys dressed as sailors that marched to the facility’s cemetery, where, it was reported by the Los Angeles Times of the 31st, there were almost 2,600 veterans interred. As children decorated graves, the paper noted “that was the most touching sight of all” as “a cluster of angels had gathered to bid them welcome to paradise.”

Later, 600 veterans and guests had an outdoor dinner and then exercises were held at the Home’s Memorial Hall. John D. Fredericks, the county district attorney and future member of Congress, gave the featured address, while veteran resident Martin King displayed a flag “which he states he carried during the entire War of the Rebellion [Civil War.]”

At the San Pedro Plaza, an assemblage which marched from the Fifth Street School heard an oration from Grant Kerr, assistant superintendent of Los Angeles City Schools, after which the procession continued to the end of the thoroughfare for the placing of flowers in the ocean. In the afternoon, special cars from the Pacific Electric Railway ferried people to Wilmington Cemetery for further exercises, while an evening program was held at the Presbyterian Church. Separately, graves of sailors and soldiers were decorated at Harbor View Cemetery.

Graves of veterans were also decorated at such cemeteries as Evergreen in Boyle Heights, where more than 400 such examples were to be found and where schoolchildren were prominent in decoration while Superior Court Judge F.R. Willis spoke; Rosedale, west of downtown, where a bugler sounding “Taps” was overcome with emotion twice during the playing, and 5,000 persons gathered to hear Will A. Knighten speak amid other exercises including hundreds of children singing; and the “Old City Cemetery” on Fort Moore Hill behind Los Angeles High School, where students from California Street School organized the commemoration. An unusual, but unsurprising, coverage of great detail concerned the unveiling on Memorial Day of a monument at Hollywood (Forever) Cemetery to Eliza Otis by her husband, the Times‘ powerful publisher, Harrison Gray Otis, who was a Civil War veteran.

At Central (also known as Sixth Street) Park, renamed eight years later after World War One hero, General John J. Pershing, the Spanish War Veterans and the National Guard conducted exercises having marched from the city’s armory and focused the program at the monument in the park to the veterans of the 1898 conflict. In a rare mention of people of color, the Times added that veterans “were clad as civilians, with the exception of the negroes, who wore their army caps” and one wonders if they had to do so to be recognized as veterans.

Finally, there was the observance at the Simpson Auditorium (sometimes known as the Tabernacle). This followed the Central Park ceremonies and included a march to the Hope Street location, where physician Dr. William A. Bentley, who died at the Sawtelle soldiers’ home in 1920, was presiding and who told the assemblage, “it is well to keep alive the patriotic flames the burn in the breasts of our children and children’s children.”

As with many other programs, this one had a bugle call, reading of the Gettysburg Address, the singing of the national anthem and music, including organ selections and a mass rendition of “America” by the audience. The featured orator was the Rev. Matt Hughes of the Methodist Church in Pasadena, who offered that,

We celebrate not the bloody death, but the sacrificial spirit of those who gave themselves to death. We celebrate not the anguish and suffering of those dark and dismal days, but the devotion that bore the burden on behalf of the American republic.

The glory of the citizen-soldier is found in the cause defended by his arms, in the principles for which he suffered and sacrificed, in the faith that inspired his loyalty and the love of country which he sealed with his blood.

Hughes reviewed the military history to date of the country, reminding listeners that there was no large standing army as found in other major powers and he ended by commenting that the soldiers of the Civil War “fought not for power” as did the Romans “did not fight for glory” as did the French fighters under Napoleon, but “to perpetuate a nation’s existence.” The continuation of the United States constituted, he intoned, “the supreme memorial of the citizen-soldier.”

There is much of interest and instruction in these commemorations of 114 years ago and it is notable to see how much the observance of Memorial Day has changed since 1910.