Honoring those who gave all for our country

If you have not taken time yet, please spend part of your Memorial Day weekend honoring or thanking a veteran.

Memorial Day originated as a movement to decorate the graves of Civil War soldiers. Newspapers helped lead the charge following World War I to make it an official holiday honoring all of our fallen heroes, according to the Library of Congress.

Those details are captured in newsprint and preserved as part of our nation’s permanent record.

The National Republican, a newspaper in Washington D.C., covered the early efforts June 1, 1868, describing how flowers were collected everywhere, from the President’s conservatory to private gardens. Volunteers then arranged them into wreaths, crosses, bouquets and other displays before they were taken by ambulances to the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery.

People came May 30, 1868, at first as a trickle on foot, then in groups of vehicles, and by 1 p.m. “they were appearing on the grounds in almost a solid column. A great many who resided in the country came also, and assisted in swelling the mass, until there were present some four or five thousand ladies and gentleman.”

Speakers announced at the opening of ceremonies that the day, May 30, had been designated for the purpose of “strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating, the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet church-yard in the land.”

“We have come to weep with those who have survived, to weep over the fallen brave,” a speaker said in offering the prayer. “Well do we know that these flowers will perish where they fall; yet we pray, O Lord, that year by year, they may be strewn afresh by others who may come after us.”

Other speakers said they struggled to utter words on the occasion.

“If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the graves of 15,000 men whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem with music of which can never be sung,” the Honorable James A. Garfield of Ohio said. “With words, we make promises, plight faith and praise virtue.

“Promises may not be kept, plighted faith may be broken, and vaunted virtue only the cunning mask a vice.

“We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summoned up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens.

“For love of country, they accepted death. That act resolved all doubts and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.”

Three decades later, the San Francisco Call reported May 28, 1899, on “The New Memorial Day.”

Gen. Marcus P. Miller, who commanded troops during the Spanish-American War, wrote the day would mean much more to Americans of the future than in the past. Its significance would be deeper, broader and more truly national.

“It will mean not only the commemoration of those heroes who fell fighting for the preservation of the Union, but for the first time since its institution, it will be an anniversary of a common sorrow, the surest and most effectual peacemaker either in family or nation,” Miller prophesied. “The descendants of the heroes of both North and South, fighting, suffering, dying together in foreign lands, in defense of their country’s flag, must serve to make Memorial day what it should be, a day set apart to do honor to our heroic dead.”

War correspondent Edward Marshall, in the same issue, also wrote of the reality at Arlington — row upon row of newly turned graves for soldiers just returned home from war. They were soldiers he knew, after spending the year prior traveling from camp to camp, getting to know the soldiers who would fight in the upcoming war, then traveling with them to foreign lands and going into battle, fighting and bleeding beside them.

“Where lay the dead heroes of our Civil War was solemnity, but no sadness. The scars of that great conflict had been obliterated by time,” Marshall wrote. “But where the new graves are in this great red blot (of newly turned clay) — a tremendous wound in the (short grass) to tell a story, awesome and as full of heartache as it is of glory.”

While Miller and Marshall couldn’t have imagined, and perhaps would not have wanted to imagine, the wars to come, it is a knowledge we as a community have a responsibility to remember and pay tribute to.

In today’s edition, you will find a list of 200 Butler County citizens who died in service of our country. The list is compiled by the Butler County History Museum, which also has a display recognizing these men and women. While they have a special display for Memorial Day, the museum also has a veterans’ room, dedicated to remembering our military men and women year-round.

This is not the first time these names have appeared in the pages of the Daily American Republic. The generations of reporters and newspaper people who came before us, like Marshall, shared the stories not just of soldiers lost in combat, but of friends and neighbors whose lives were given in defense of country.

Today, we help honor not just our community’s veterans, but also our mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors who have answered the call.