What Does Memorial Day Mean for America Today?

When I was growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin in the 1970s, Memorial Day was a welcome day off from school. A harbinger to the warm summer days that lay ahead. But in one part of town, the holiday began with a more solemn event. Under the tall, leafy oaks at the town’s large cemetery overlooking the Fox River, residents gathered to mark the reason we celebrated the day in the first place – to honor the American men and women who died while in the armed services.

During my senior year of high school, I was asked to speak at the annual gathering. Local leaders had the good sense not to let me use my own words. Instead, they maintained an annual tradition and asked me to recite Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

It was a fitting speech in part because Memorial Day – initially called Decoration Day – was first established as a holiday just three years after the Civil War ended. But its import goes beyond this.

Lincoln’s two-minute address was one of the shortest and yet most important speeches in American history. Just four months before Lincoln spoke, almost 8,000 Union and Confederate soldiers had died in the three-day battle of Gettysburg – approximately the same number of Americans who would later perish at Pearl Harbor, D-Day, and 9/11 combined. 

In November 1863, Lincoln spoke to the 15,000 people who gathered in Gettysburg to dedicate the new military cemetery there. He honored the Union soldiers whose lives had met a sudden end, and the moment was heavy. So many had lost sons and brothers who would never become parents, never reach old age, never achieve another great success or even relish the small joy of watching another sunset.

Lincoln asked the living to find devotion from the sacrifice of the dead. To resolve that they had not died in vain. To bring to the nation, as he put it, “a new birth of freedom.” And in the immortal words of his conclusion, to ensure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

On this Memorial Day, it’s worth pausing to ask what we should make of these words for our own day.

We live in a different era when a divided public is debating not just what we want from the future but how to think about the past. I hear this firsthand from a new generation of employees I have the privilege of working with every day. They bring into the workplace critical questions that sometimes harken to the heart of our national identity. How do we reconcile the past of a country that was born to advance freedom and equality yet held people in slavery justified by prejudice?

It can seem a Gordian knot. Yet one part of the answer can be found in Lincoln’s words.

Abraham Lincoln didn’t ask people to embrace the version of America the nation had founded. To the contrary, he called for “a new birth of freedom.” At its core, the Gettysburg Address suggested that thousands had sacrificed their lives so America could change.

Lincoln himself embodied this change. In 1858 he had said in a debate that white and Black Americans were too different to live together “on terms of social and political equality.” In 1861 he was prepared to defend the union but not abolish slavery. But by the war’s end, he waged a political battle as well as a military war not just to end slavery, but to pave the way for the equal protection of Black Americans under the constitution.

Lincoln’s life, like America’s journey, is a story of learning, growth, and change.

Today a new American generation is making its own indispensable contribution to the country’s need for change. Memorial Day should help us honor the persistence and courage that change requires.

The events of the past year remind us that the prejudices that led to the battle at Gettysburg are still not behind us. The murder of George Floyd rightly has reignited impatience about the enormous gap between the end of slavery and a future free from the impact of racism on our Black citizens.

The news of recent months woefully demonstrates the continued power and broader reach of human prejudice. Asian-Americans whose grandparents were interned during World War II confront the risk of violence while walking to a grocery store or pursuing an honest day’s work. Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors face renewed incidents of Anti-Semitism and threats of assault. And this follows attacks in recent years on Mosques and Muslims in America.

Sadly, the events can seem constant while the identities of the victims continue to change. People of color, women, members of the LBTQI+ community, and native Americans all clearly deserve the equal protection and respect that harken back to the nation’s most lofty ideals. But on too many days it feels like these ideals remain as distant as the horizon. Not surprisingly, we hear from so many that they feel they’re engaged in an exhausting struggle simply to run in place.

People are not wrong to worry. But there is cause for hope.

Lincoln demonstrated in just two minutes of oratory the positive difference the right words can make. One can never speak out too early or too often against human prejudice. With words large and small, we each have our own opportunity to lend our voices to this cause.

Lincoln’s words also illustrate the power of principle. By calling for “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” he provided a beacon that is as important today as the morning he spoke. The best changes often serve timeless values.

Even more important, the extraordinary sacrifices Lincoln honored show that ultimately, deeds matter more than words. Lincoln spoke to an audience that was already fatigued from more than two years of war. Yet the conflict had almost two more years to run, requiring more energy, strength, and sacrifice than many thought the public could sustain.

Fortunately, the challenges of our day involve not civil war, but the peaceful and determined persistence of volunteers, non-profits, companies, and leaders in government. We can each make our own unique contribution to the changes we want to see. And by working together, we can encourage in each other the resilience needed to advance along the path of progress.

As I learned the day when I was asked to recite the Gettysburg Address, Memorial Day is more than a day off from school or work. And the history that led to this holiday is not just some abstract event painted on a distant canvas.

This Memorial Day we should remember that people sacrificed their lives so we would have the freedom to change. It’s a sacrifice we should honor, and it’s a freedom we should cherish.