Memorial Day Origins and How Federal Holidays Get Created

It's Monday, May twenty fifth, and if you have Memorial Day off today, we hope you're enjoying it. A lot of people confuse Veterans Day, Memorial Day, and Labor Day. A good way to remember: Memorial Day is in May, and it honors the dead, American military personnel who didn't come home. Veterans Day is in November, and it honors the living. Labor Day is in September, and it has nothing to do with the military, it's about workers. The distinction matters, and the fact that most Americans mix them up tells you something about how these holidays' meanings have drifted over time. We're covering this today because Memorial Day has one of the most remarkable and least known origin stories of any American holiday, and the broader question of how a day becomes a federal holiday turns out to be its own fascinating system. There are only twelve federal holidays in the United States. The most recent was added in 2021. The path to getting on that list involves Congress, cultural momentum, and in at least one case, a Stevie Wonder song. More than two dozen American cities claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day. Congress has officially recognized Waterloo, New York, as the birthplace. But the earliest large-scale documented observance happened in Charleston, South Carolina, and it was organized by people who had been enslaved. In the final year of the Civil War, the Confederate army converted the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club in Charleston, a former plantation that had become an elite horse track, into an open-air prison for captured Union soldiers. The conditions were terrible. Over 257 prisoners died from disease and exposure. Their bodies were dumped in a mass grave behind the grandstand. When Charleston fell in February 1865 and Confederate troops evacuated, the formerly enslaved Black residents of the city remained. One of the first things they did was tend to the dead. Twenty eight Black workmen spent two weeks exhuming the Union soldiers from the mass grave and reburying each one in an individual grave. They built a tall fence around the new cemetery, whitewashed it, and inscribed an archway over the entrance: "Martyrs of the Race Course." On May 1, 1865, roughly ten thousand people, most of them formerly enslaved, gathered at the site. Three thousand Black schoolchildren marched and sang "John Brown's Body" while carrying armfuls of flowers. Members of the 54th Massachusetts and other Black Union regiments performed military drills. Speeches were made. Picnics were held. It was, by any standard, the first large-scale Memorial Day observance in American history. Yale historian David Blight discovered records of the event in a dusty Harvard archive in the late 1990s. He wrote about it in his 2001 book "Race and Reunion." Blight called it "the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution." Formerly enslaved people, honoring the soldiers who had died for their freedom, on the grounds of a former plantation turned prison. The symbolism was total. The story was suppressed. After white Democrats regained political control of South Carolina in 1876, the Black community's version of Memorial Day was deliberately erased and replaced with Confederate memorial traditions. The site of the original ceremony is now Hampton Park, a public park in Charleston. There is no major monument to the 1865 event. Most Americans have never heard of it. The version that became official came three years later. On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans' organization, issued General Order No. 11, designating May 30 as "Decoration Day" for decorating the graves of fallen Union soldiers. The first national observance was held at Arlington National Cemetery. Blight has said he has no evidence that the Charleston event directly inspired Logan's order. But the freed people of Charleston were first. There are twelve federal holidays in the United States. That's it. Every other day off you get, President's Day sales, Black Friday, Election Day, is either a state-level decision or a private employer's choice. Federal holidays apply only to federal employees and the District of Columbia. Private companies aren't legally required to observe any of them. The first four were created together in 1870: New Year's Day, Independence Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. Washington's Birthday was added in 1880. Memorial Day, originally Decoration Day, became a federal holiday in 1888. Labor Day followed in 1894, after violent strikes and labor unrest made it politically useful for the government to show support for workers. Veterans Day (originally Armistice Day) was added in 1938. Columbus Day came in 1968. Then nothing happened for fifteen years. Martin Luther King Jr. Day was first proposed four days after King's assassination in April 1968. A bill was introduced in Congress that same week. It went nowhere. For the next fifteen years, the bill was reintroduced, debated, and stalled repeatedly. The campaign included a petition with six million signatures and a lobbying effort that crossed political lines. Stevie Wonder wrote "Happy Birthday" in 1981 specifically to build public support for the holiday. The song reached number one on the R&B charts and became the anthem of the movement. In 1983, Congress finally passed the bill and President Reagan signed it. The first MLK Day was observed in 1986. New Hampshire was the last state to name the holiday after King, in 1999, over thirty years after his death. Then nothing happened for thirty eight years. Juneteenth was proposed as a federal holiday as far back as 2005. It was signed into law in June 2021, moving from Senate passage to presidential signature in three days. It was the fastest creation of a federal holiday in modern history, propelled by the racial reckoning following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The rarity of federal holidays is a feature, not a bug. Each one costs the government money: federal employees get a paid day off, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates each holiday costs roughly sixty five million dollars in premium pay alone. Proposals for new federal holidays are introduced regularly, including Election Day, Indigenous People's Day, and Cesar Chavez Day. None have advanced. The bar is extraordinarily high, and the political will to clear it appears roughly once per generation. Memorial Day's evolution from its origins to today tracks a pattern that applies to almost every holiday we've covered on this show. The original meaning was specific, political, and rooted in a particular community's experience. Over time, it became general, commercial, and detached from its origins. The freed people of Charleston in 1865 knew exactly what they were doing and why. They were honoring the soldiers who died for their liberation, on the grounds of a plantation turned prison. By 1971, when Congress moved Memorial Day to the last Monday in May to create a three-day weekend, the holiday had become primarily a marker of the start of summer. Mattress sales. Barbecues. Travel weekends. A 2018 survey found that fewer than half of Americans could correctly state the purpose of Memorial Day. The Cinco de Mayo episode we did earlier this month followed the same arc: a military victory in 1862, adopted as a symbol of resistance by Chicano activists in the 1960s, commercialized by beer companies in the 1980s, and now celebrated by millions of Americans who don't know what it commemorates. The pattern is consistent: the ritual survives, the reason doesn't. Whether that matters is a personal question. Some people will hear the Charleston story today and think about it differently when they see flags at half-staff. Others will fire up the grill and enjoy the day off, and that's fine too. The holiday exists for both of those people. What HigherIQ can do is make sure you know the full story before you decide what it means to you. Ten thousand formerly enslaved people, three thousand children carrying flowers, singing on the grounds of a prison where soldiers died for their freedom. That happened. It was the first Memorial Day. And for over a century, almost nobody knew. So if this comes up in conversation, here's how to think about it. Memorial Day honors the military dead, not living veterans. The earliest large-scale observance was organized by formerly enslaved people in Charleston, South Carolina, on May 1, 1865. They exhumed 257 Union soldiers from a mass grave at a former plantation turned prison, gave them proper burials, and held a parade of ten thousand people. The story was suppressed for over a century until a Yale historian found records of it in a Harvard archive. There are only twelve federal holidays in the United States. The most recent, Juneteenth, was added in 2021. The one before that, MLK Day, took fifteen years of lobbying, six million petition signatures, and a Stevie Wonder song to get passed. Getting a day on the list is one of the hardest things to do in American politics. Keeping its meaning alive after it gets there might be even harder. Stay informed, stay curious, and we'll see you tomorrow.