by Paul R. Spitzzeri
As noted by the National Cemetery Association of the Veterans Administration, Memorial Day “is the nation’s foremost annual day to mourn and honor its deceased service men and women,” distinct from Veterans Day, which honors the veterans of the nation’s armed forces. There are varying accounts of how the practice began of leaving flowers on the graves of soldiers who died during the Civil War, with women in a Pennsylvania town doing this in October 1864 and a large group of Black and white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina held a program on 1 May 1865, not long after the end of the terrible conflict.
In Columbus, Georgia, the concept of decorating the graves of both Confederate and Union soldiers was developed by a women’s group and there, and in Columbus, Mississippi, events were held on the weekend of 25-26 April 1866, with that in the second location inspiring a poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” that became immediately famous.
The newly formed Grand Army of the Republic veterans organization, formed in Illinois weeks prior, cited an anonymous member who wrote an adjutant general of the practice in his native Germany of placing flowers at soldiers’ graves. This became part of what GAR’s leader, Major General John A. Logan, issued as General Orders Number 11, known as the “Memorial Day Act,” on 5 May 1868, while his wife Mary, took credit for inspiring the orders because of her visit to a Confederate cemetery in Virginia.
The first Decoration Day was on 30 May 1868 at Arlington National Cemetery, with the time of year chosen to take advantage of having the best flowers available in the spring growing season. Five years later, New York became the first state to designate what increasingly was known as Memorial Day as a holiday and others followed, while, following the First World War, the practice was extended for the deceased soldiers of all American wars. The GAR auxiliary, the Women’s Relief Corps, created Memorial Day tablets for cemeteries across the nation, while the Army also established a tablet program.
Federal proclamations recognized Memorial Day each year until Congress, in 1968, passed legislation that established the holiday as being the last Monday of the month, effective in 1971. A quarter century ago, a National Moment of Remembrance was established to have a moment of silence at 3 p.m. local time to silently honor those who died while in service to the country. Crucially, Logan’s orders included the admonition,
Let no 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.
In Los Angeles, the first located reference to Decoration Day is from a telegraphic dispatch in the 21 July 1869 edition of the Los Angeles News, whose co-owner Andrew J. King, an attorney and future judge who long resided in El Monte, was a rabid Confederate supporter during the late war. An account was published that concerned a purported “refusal on that day to allow the Confederate graves in Arlington Cemetery to be decorated” and that those that were were taken away or trampled, though, apparently, a storm that followed included a wind that blew flowers from Union graves and “bestowed them lavishly, tenderly, upon the neglected resting-places of the dead of the ‘Lost Cause.'”
For the News, this report was providential, as it declared,
How little did the cowardly act of stamping like furies upon the tender tributes brought by loving hands to be laid upon the resting places of the Southern dead, avail the unmanly fanatics who paraded Arlington Heights on the 30th of May last! God, in dispensing his blessings, strewed the graves of the insulted dead with the offerings that bigoted man denied them.
The following year, the News offered an editorial from another paper only given as the “Exchange” in its edition of 22 May titled “Patriotic Demagoguism” in which it observed “‘Decoration day’ will soon be here” in which it acknowledged that “it is a beautiful custom when the flowers are placed over the sleeping ones by the hands of kindred and affection.”
It was another matter entirely, however, “when they are disposed there by the hands of demagogues and place-hunters, and the ceremony is made subservient to the aggrandizement of hollow-hearted politicians and the gratification of weak men’s strong vanity,” thereby making the observance “a degraded and unhandsome custom.”
The editorial suggested that the funds used for the ceremonies and decoration of soldiers’ graves instead be devoted in support of the living, “the poor old mothers, the little orphans, and the disconsolate widows of the unfortunate dead, for instance.” The GAR was nothing more than “a political armed conspiracy” filled with “bogus heroes” who sought “to be rewarded with positions and public money” and it was claimed that, when receiving funds for decorating soldiers’ graves, “they are careful to keep their own little bit of cash in their pockets.”
The conclusion of the piece was,
we may hope that the [United States] Senate will adhere to its determination not to make the 30th of May a national holiday, thus giving aid and comfort to the cheapest kind of patriotic demagoguism, at the expense of the business men of the country, and to the detriment of the growing kindliness of feeling between the lately hostile section.
It is significant that nothing was reported in the press during these years of any commemoration whatsoever in greater Los Angeles, where Democrats, strongly sympathetic to the Southern cause during the late war, returned to political dominance during the late Sixties and into the early Seventies.
As national Reconstruction after the war slowly, but surely faded in its goals of rebuilding the South and giving freed Blacks more political involvement and power, there was a discernible change in some reporting about Decoration Day. Meanwhile, this region continued its first development boom with thousands of new settlers in the Angel City and environs, including enough from certain sections of the country so that a notable political shift was underway that would only grow significantly in later years, including the Boom of the 1880s. The new observance, however, was barely mentioned in the early Seventies and only concerning events held elsewhere in the nation.
The Los Angeles Express, a Republican paper formed in 1871, briefly noted that “Decoration Day bids fair to become a sacred national holiday, to be observed as well in the South as in the North, and without discrimination as to the side upon which the dead soldier fought.” From New York came a report that a GAR meeting led to the decision “not to discriminate between Union and Confederate soldiers’ graves on Decoration Day” and a couplet from that aforementioned poem was included: “Under the laurel the Blue [the Union uniform color] / Under the willow the Gray [that of the Confederacy].”
In its editorial on the 29th, noting the holiday the following day, the Express offered that “the custom is a touching one, and every right-thinking man will be glad to know that the beautiful ceremony this year will be confined to no narrow sectionalism.” This meant that “the graves of all who fell in the late war, irrespective of the sides on which they fought, will receive the same tender tributes of respect.”
The paper continued, “this is a noble step for the nation to take” because “in the grave all the animosities and asperities of the past should be buried.” Yet, it added,
We don’t know that there will be any set ceremony at our own cemetery [meaning the City, or Protestant, burial ground at Fort Moore Hill]. Indeed there is no necessity for one. There are graves there, however, that should not be forgotten tomorrow; and it should not be said that in this beautiful vale, Decoration Day should pass without offering some of our choicest flowers upon the little mounds which consecrate and embrace all that remains of men who bravely fought the good fight in behalf of what they considered right.
While it was said that Decoration Day was, by law, a national holiday, this was not the case, though federal offices in the city were closed. The postmaster, Henry K.W. Bent, however, kept the post office open for two separate hours because it was a Saturday and that’s when residents of outlying areas came to town to get their mail.
In its issue of the 28th, the Los Angeles Star, owned by Benjamin C. Truman, but for years run by Henry Hamilton, another vociferous Confederate sympathizer, remarked, “with the full floral sweetness of the Spring and the initial pomp of the Summer comes again to the people of the United States a day fixed upon by a majority thereof for oratorical and decorative exercises in the national cemeteries.” Waxing somewhat poetic, the piece added, “the sweet music of the heart will chant a requiem to departed valor, and then kindly hands will bestrew with flowers the graves of those who fell on behalf of country, section and home.”
Putting aside the debate about the propriety of the holiday “where it perpetuates the memories of a great and deplorable civil war,” the Star commented that “the celebration of it is, nevertheless, a most beautiful one.” There was also the hope that Decoration Day would be part of the diminution of the hard feelings between the two sides as it was nearly a decade since the end of the brutal conflict, though it was also wondered if the holiday would continue as “it derives much of its vitality from feelings not unconnected with sectional pride and partizan [sic] self-seeking on both sides.”
The paper, though, felt that
the loving and the bereaved will doubtless cling to their beloved decoration day in singleness of heart for years to come, and we therefore rejoice to see the evidence on almost every hand of a disposition to tone down all feelings that jar with the proprieties of the occasion—all unseemly bickerings over dead men’s mouldered bones—and to join confraternal hands over the graves of a bloody past.
On Decoration Day, the Star published another lengthy editorial in which it declared that “the custom has already ceased to be a tribute to a cause” and the bitter divisions that very much remained after the war increasingly “are forgotten in the exercise of a graceful and poetic act.” Those whose anger and actions emanating from strong sectional feelings “melt into sympathetic tears as the gaze sadly upon all that is left to remind them of the stately forms which walked the earth with haughty mein [mien], so short a time ago.”
The paper insisted that “the past is past” and “cannot be recalled,” and while it was added that “it were well if it could be forgotten,” it also stated that “for this we may not hope.” What was asked was that wisdom would dictate, through “recollections with the recurrence of this day,” that there is an ultimate “futility of an appeal to passion, while reason yet remains to be the arbiter of their disputes.” The observances of Decoration Day were to be “reminders that never again while the Republic lives, ought any hand be raised to pluck a single star or erase a single stripe from the national banner.”
The Star also offered a poem by “T,” presumably its owner and publisher, simply titled “Decoration Day” in which readers were exhorted,
Bring roses for these narrow mounds,
Hang lilies on these crosses,—
Move sadly through these hallowed grounds,
They speak of bitter losses.
Strew violets on these heroes’ graves,
Nor scan the names above them;
The dead rest here, the living weep
And cannot choose but love them.
What recks [reckons] it, if from East or West,
Or North or South they rallied,—
Or what the cause, at whose behest,
Forth from their homes they sallied? . . .
And kindly hands strew flowers above
The cold sod that enfolds them,
‘Mongst all who once so fiercely strove,
No enemy beholds them?
The hate that crimsoned battle’s tide
Lives not beyond Death’s portal,
Where they who fought, and fighting, died
Clasp hands in Love immortal.
In its Decoration Day edition, the Spanish-language newspaper, La Crónica (later owned and operated by Thomas W. Temple, who, in 1874, was a cashier in his family’s Temple and Workman bank) offered its view on the holiday by commenting that
Today is the day dedicated to paying respectful tribute to the victims of both sides of the American Civil War, decorating their graves with wreaths and flowers. This silent but eloquent expression of the sentiment that should exist in everyone’s hearts for the soldiers who died for their love of their country.
Remarkably, for all that was stated in the Los Angeles press about Decoration Day in 1874, perhaps because of the concerted national efforts to put aside sectional strife in honoring those who sacrificed their lives for the two sides during the Civil War, almost nothing at all was mentioned in the pages of the papers the following year.
This was exemplified by the Star and its most terse of comment in its edition of 30 May 1875, as it merely stated, “yesterday was Decoration Day. The flags in the city were at half mast. We heard of no further observances of the occasion.” Whether this was a continuing reflection on the prominence and influence of southern Democrats in the city and region is an interesting question, because the 1874 commentary certainly indicated a change in general thinking about sectional differences with the commemoration of the day.
It was not, however, until 1879 that a Decoration Day event was held in Los Angeles and we will be sure to take this up in a post for next year’s Memorial Day.