Memorial Day, the last Monday in May, was created after the Civil War to honor more than 600,000 Americans who died in uniform. But decades of commercialization and a 1971 federal law that made it a three-day weekend have transformed the holiday into what many now treat as the unofficial start of summer — a time for mattress sales, beach traffic, and backyard barbecues.
Edmundo Eugenio Martinez Jr., an Army veteran who served in Iraq and lives in Katy, Texas, said the day has lost so much meaning that “people conflate and mix up Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Armed Forces Day, July Fourth.” For Martinez, the day is about honoring 17 U.S. service members he knew who lost their lives. “I was either there when they died or they were soldiers of mine, buddies of mine,” he said. “Some of them lost the battle after the war.”
Memorial Day was originally called Decoration Day, because families and communities decorated the graves of the fallen with flowers and flags. The first national observance was held at Arlington National Cemetery on May 30, 1868, when about 5,000 people placed flowers on the graves of 20,000 Civil War soldiers, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
But in 1996, Yale University historian David Blight uncovered evidence of what likely was the earliest commemoration of the war dead. In 1865, less than a month after the Confederate surrender, more than 1,000 newly emancipated African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, exhumed the remains of Union prisoners from a mass grave, gave them proper burial, and organized a ceremony attended by about 10,000 people, mostly freedmen, Blight detailed in his 2001 book “Race and Reunion.”
“Out of the memory of slavery and the war, Americans begin to create a new national set of memorial practices,” said Ben Railton, a history professor at Fitchburg State University. Railton acknowledged that several other places — including Waterloo, N.Y., Boalsburg, Pa., and Columbus, Miss. — also have strong claims to the holiday’s origins, but the Charleston event is the likely earliest documented earlier commemoration.
After World War I, the holiday was expanded to honor all Americans who died in military service. For decades, it remained on May 30. But in 1971 Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, shifting Memorial Day to the last Monday in May to create a three-day weekend. Some veterans’ groups and historians say the change contributed to the erosion of the holiday’s solemn character, turning it into a gateway to summer activities. In recent decades, legislation has been introduced every few years to restore the holiday to its original date, though none has passed.
In 2000, Congress established a National Moment of Remembrance, asking Americans to pause at 3 p.m. local time each Memorial Day. The law urged citizens to “voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a Moment of remembrance and respect.”
The tension between commemoration and commerce has also played out at the local level. Some American Legion posts have withdrawn from Memorial Day parades in recent years because crowds were too thin, and several cities have canceled long-running parades. Meanwhile, a handful of former Confederate states continue to observe a separate Confederate Memorial Day on different dates.
For Martinez, the day remains personal. He said he spends it thinking about the 17 people he served with who did not come home — and about their families. “It’s not about discounts,” he said.