94-5: "The fervor with which Americans practiced the rituals of Memorial Day began to fade in the late 1870s and early 1880s. Graceful popular ceremonies," declared The New York Tribune in May 1878, no longer fit in a society characterized by "the pioneers of the prairie and the speculators in railway stock." Bitterness had waned, and as "individual sorrow for the fallen fades away," said the Tribune, Decoration Day "gradually loses its best significance." By 1880, the same paper editorialized on how Decoration Day had "become coarser and more blurred" in its meaning, and how it had fallen into the "slough of politics." In the Gilded Age, the Tribune claimed that the truly "loyal" would continue to honor the Civil War dead, but also make every "effort to put out of sight the causes of the war, the hate and bitterness which we thought immortal." At stake now was the next generation and the social and moral order. Civil War memorialization should not be used for political purposes among the children born since the war, claimed the Tribune, but the sacrifice of soldiers should very much be used as lessons in morality and patriotism. "The days they [postwar children) have been born in are not heroic," declared the Tribune, "they are full of fraud, corruption, bargain, and sale. Men are not pushing to the battlefield to die for an idea; they are pushing into place." As an antidote to America's "sordid expertness in money-getting," the editors spoke for a large cross-section of the culture that now looked to the Civil War dead, as well as to living veterans, as the alternative to their unheroic age, as sources of honest passion, higher morality, something "noble and true ... kept for our children."
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com