From Civil War to mattress sales, US Memorial Day vigour continues to ebb

Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning America's fallen service members, but it's come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on anything from mattresses to lawnmowers.

Auto club AAA said in a travel forecast that this holiday weekend could be "one for the record books, especially at airports," with more than 42 million Americans projected to travel 80 kilometres or more.

Federal officials said on Friday that air travellers had already hit a pandemic-era high.

It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the US military, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865.

For Manuel Castaneda Jr., 58, the day will be a quiet one in Durand, Illinois, outside Rockford. He lost his father, a US Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in California while training other Marines in 1966.

"Memorial Day is very personal," said Castaneda, who also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. "It isn't just the specials. It isn't just the barbecue."

But he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: "How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven't experienced anything like that?"

No longer 'sacred'

Someone has always lamented the holiday's drift from its original meaning.

As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become "sacrilegious" and no longer "sacred" if it focused more on pomp, dinners and oratory.

In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War's impetus — slavery — when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.

"We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation's destroyers," Douglass said then.

Meanwhile, how the day was spent — at least by the nation's elected officials — could draw scrutiny for years after the Civil War.

In the 1880s, then-president Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing — and "people were appalled," said Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon.

By 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its inaugural race on May 30, drawing 85,000 spectators.

Dennis said Memorial Day's potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I's end on November11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.

An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30th to the last Monday in May in 1971.

Dennis said the creation of the three-day weekend recognised that Memorial Day had long been transformed into a more generic remembrance of the dead, as well as a day of leisure.

In 1972, Time Magazine said the holiday had become "a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose."

Sales and travels

Even in the 19th century, grave ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnicking and foot races, Dennis said.

The holiday also evolved alongside baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week and summer vacation, according to the 2002 book, "A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness."

In the mid-20th century, a small number of businesses began to open defiantly on the holiday.

Once the holiday moved to Monday, "the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble," authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran wrote.

These days, Memorial Day sales and travelling are deeply woven into the nation's muscle memory.

This weekend, 2.7 million more people will travel for the unofficial start of summer compared to last year — despite inflation, according to AAA.

The Transportation Security Administration said it screened 2.66 million people at airport checkpoints on Thursday, about 2,500 more than last Friday, and the highest number since the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019.

The Federal Aviation Administration had predicted that Thursday would be the busiest travel day of the holiday period, with more than 51,000 airline flights.

Meanwhile, Jason Redman, 48, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he'll be thinking of friends he's lost. Thirty names are tattooed on his arm "for every guy that I personally knew that died."

He wants Americans to remember the fallen — but also to enjoy themselves, knowing lives were sacrificed to forge the holiday.