Martyrs of the Race Course

Memorial Day means different things to different people, but it is odd that the official U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs website makes no mention of the first Decoration Day held in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865. Instead, the VA lists the typical story of Waterloo, New York, which was officially commemorated by President Andrew Johnson in 1866.

David Blight offers an excellent chapter in Race and Reunion on the first Decoration Day, describing how the 21st US Colored Infantry marched into Charleston in late spring of 1865, accepted the formal surrender of the city and gave the Union dead found in a mass grave of a makeshift prison camp a proper burial. They also cleaned up the former horse racetrack, designating it as a cemetery for the "Martyrs of the Race Course."

This event was celebrated by some 10,000 people, including white Charlestonians, with a parade, military drills, a children's choir singing "We'll Rally Around the Flag," and a huge picnic afterward. Fortunately, a correspondent's record survived in the archives of the New York Tribune.

In the chapter, Blight went onto note how the memorial became co-opted by other towns and cities around the country and eventually came to be a national holiday, but it seems these black infantry soldiers never got their due. Not surprising since it wasn't until 1948 that Harry Truman desegregated the Armed Forces with Executive Order 9981. It didn't matter that blacks had fought along side whites in the Civil War and in two world wars, they were still considered separate and not quite equal. What should have been a reconciliation back in 1865 was deferred 73 years, much like the Civil Rights movement itself.

Meanwhile in the South, Memorial Day ceremonies revolved around the fallen Confederacy, marked on days that honored the final surrender of General Joseph Johnston and the birthdays of Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis, ranging from April 26 to June 3. Charleston kept its initial celebration quietly under the rug.

Memorial Day has grown to commemorate all American war dead and was officially designated a national holiday in 1971. The military aspect of it has receded a bit. There are not the big parades like there used to be, but still many people go to cemeteries to honor fallen soldiers. A somber ceremony is carried out each year at Arlington National Cemetery as the dead has grown considerably since 1865.

But, it seems to me that not only are events like that in Charleston in 1865 lost to the collective imagination, but the brutality of war itself, as we seem to keep getting ourselves mired in wars that serve little purpose and leave deaths and casualties far beyond the official tally of fallen American soldiers. Moments like these should give us pause, like it did those soldiers of the 21st US Colored Infantry.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Searchers

You are invited to join us in a discussion of The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl. The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics' Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts. The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories. The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...

Dispatches from Vilnius

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