Obama-Memorial Day Across the USA with

Memorial Day, an American holiday observed on the last Monday of May, honors men and women who died while serving in the U.S. military. Originally known as Decoration Day, it originated in the years following the Civil War and became an official federal holiday in 1971. Many Americans observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries or memorials, holding family gatherings and participating in parades. Unofficially, at least, it marks the beginning of summer.

On May 5, 1862, General John A. Logan, leader of an organization for Northern Civil War veterans, called for a nationwide day of remembrance later that month. “The 30th of May, 1868, is 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 churchyard in the land,” he proclaimed. The date of Decoration Day, as he called it, was chosen because it wasn’t the anniversary of any particular battle.

On the first #Decoration Day, General James Garfield made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, and 5,000 participants decorated the graves of the 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried there. Many Northern states held similar commemorative events and reprised the tradition in subsequent years; by 1890 each one had made Decoration Day an official state holiday. Many Southern states, on the other hand, continued to honor their dead on separate days until after World War I.

President +Barack Obama laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Monday morning, beginning a somber Memorial Day observance at Arlington National Cemetery.

Obama, aided by a soldier in uniform, rested the large wreath on a stand a few minutes after 11 a.m. Monday. The president adjusted the wreath, stepped back and bowed his head in silence for a few moments. Afterward, an Army bugler played taps.

Later in the morning, @Obama spoke at a ceremony in the cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater. He said that, before the next Memorial Day, more than a decade of U.S. wars are supposed to end.

The Civil War claimed more lives than any conflict in U.S. history, requiring the establishment of the country’s first national cemeteries. By the late 1860s Americans in various towns and cities had begun holding springtime tributes to these countless fallen soldiers, decorating their graves with flowers and reciting prayers.

“We’re in a pivotal moment. Our troops are coming home. By the end of this year, our war in Afghanistan will finally come to an end,” Obama said to cheers from the crowd.

In his speech, Obama singled out relatives of those lost in war — from a woman who waited 63 years for her husband’s remains to be located in Korea to a group of young siblings sitting with first lady Michelle Obama.

“Your parents’ bravery lives on in you,” Obama said. “You will never walk alone. Your country will be here to help you grow up into the men and women your parents always knew you would be.”

Obama made only an oblique reference to the scandals at the Department of Veterans Affairs, and spoke in general about the country’s solemn obligations to veterans, as well as to families of the lost.

“These Americans have done their duty. They ask nothing more than that our country does ours, for now and the decades to come,” Obama said.
Before the ceremony, a large number of people were turned away from the cemetery’s entrances by security personnel who said that the event was at capacity. Jennifer Lynch, a spokeswoman for the cemetery, said afterward that the gates had been closed only briefly to secure the area for Obama’s arrival.
“They lock it down for security purposes,” Lynch said. She said the cemetery was reopened to visitors, and remains open.
read more  about the memorial day.

Memorial Day celebrations began to spring up on local levels just after the Civil War. But a Civil War hero from Illinois was the first to make it official.
Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, one of the great volunteer officers of the state, is credited as the first to declare Memorial Day an official holiday. Logan, a native of Murphysboro, declared an official holiday as commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the foremost Civil War veterans’ organization, in 1868.

Though Logan was the first to establish a national remembrance, there is considerable debate on the site of the actual first Memorial Day commemoration. “There’s a lot of controversy on that,” said Michael Jones, director of the Gen. John A. Logan Museum in Murphysboro. “There was a Memorial Day celebration in Woodlawn Cemetery in Carbondale in which Logan was the keynote speaker, and I believe that played a role.”
The Carbondale celebration, on April 29, 1866, is thought by many to be the the nation’s first community-wide observance. Some 212 area veterans participated in the event.

However, Jones notes a discrepancy on the inspiration for Logan’s action even within his own family. In her autobiography “Reminisces of a Soldier’s Wife,” Logan’s wife Mary cites her own experience at a cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1868.

“Mrs. Logan saw the withered flowers and flags that had been placed in honor of the Confederates buried there,” remarked Jones. “She described this to her husband and said he should do something similar, which she says was the basis for his national declaration. She never mentions the Carbondale event.”
Whatever the reason, Logan was moved to take Memorial Day a step further. On May 5, 1868, he issued General Order No. 11, designating May 30 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.”
Logan’s order stated that “no form or ceremony is prescribed,” but that individuals and communities were left to their own “fitting services and testimonials … cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead.”
In the first year of Logan’s declaration, an estimated 183 cemeteries hosted observances for Memorial Day, more commonly known as Decoration Day. A crowd of some 5,000, including keynote speaker and future President James A. Garfield, attended the first Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery that May 30. The following year, the remembrance was marked in over 336 communities in 31 states.

While the original order clearly applied to Northern soldiers, informal commemorations in the South became some of the earliest Memorial Day observances. Recent scholarly research also reveals a mass celebration, mostly of African-Americans, in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865.
There, a parade of some 10,000, including black Union infantry units, marched to a local horse track that had been converted to a prison for Union soldiers. Black workmen had re-buried at least 257 Union dead from a mass grave, inspiring the large gathering that included hymns, reading of scripture and placing of flowers.

In 1864, women in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, decorated the graves of their local dead soldiers, some whom had died at Gettysburg. On April 25, 1866, just days before the Carbondale celebration, a group of ladies in Columbus, Mississippi, placed flowers on the graves of Confederates who died at the battle of Shiloh. Noticing some nearby Union graves that had been neglected due to lingering animosities, they also laid some flowers to honor those soldiers.
On May 5, 1866, the town of Waterloo, New York, began an annual community event to commemorate war dead. A century later, President Lyndon Johnson and Congress declared Waterloo as the “birthplace” of Memorial Day.

In 1967, Congress officially named May 30 as Memorial Day, though many elderly Americans still refer to the holiday by its traditional name, Decoration Day. Four years later, the Uniform Monday Holiday Act switched the holiday to the final Monday in May. Though Memorial Day has become a three-day weekend and the kickoff to summer for many, thousands of communities from coast to coast still conduct ceremonies to honor their war dead.
In Logan’s hometown of Murphysboro, May 24-26 will mark the 100th anniversary of the community’s annual Logan Day celebration. This year’s event will feature appearances by some of Logan’s descendants, who will join in the symbolic placing of a wreath at the Logan statue in town. There will also be a ceremony at Woodlawn Cemetery in Carbondale, where Memorial Day observances have continued annually since the 1866 commemoration.
Jones sees parallels in today’s Memorial Day celebrations and the deeper meaning of Logan’s General Order No. 11. “I think Logan’s primary purpose was his fear, which is shared by many of us, that all of the veterans would be forgotten. He wanted to ensure that we will still honor the men who died to keep the republic.”