Remembering all the fallen on Memorial Day -- May 25, 2017 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For most of us, Memorial Day is the unofficial start of summer, a long weekend of cookouts, beach trips and sales. It didn’t start out this way.

On Decoration Day, as the holiday was first called, sorrow was still achingly fresh. We were a country of 31 million people in 1860 -- 22 million in the North and 9 million in the South, including 4 million slaves. Estimates of the lives lost in the Civil War range from 620,000 to 850,000.  

In the wake of the devastation, women in the South and in the North flocked to local cemeteries to decorate soldiers’ graves with spring flowers. Commerce ceased on Decoration Day as people took time to think and grieve. And yet the hard nub of bitterness persisted.

Arlington National Cemetery was founded in 1864 to bury Union dead on 200 acres at Robert E. Lee’s plantation on a hill overlooking Washington D.C. Although 

Confederate soldiers were also buried there, family members of the Confederates were not allowed to decorate their loved ones’ graves and sometimes even were denied entrance, according to the cemetery’s website.

Then, in 1901 in an attempt at reconciliation, hundreds more Confederate soldiers were reburied in a special section of the cemetery. Their headstones had an unusual pointed top to distinguish them from the rounded Union headstones. Southerners said the point would “keep Yankees from sitting on them.” 

A Confederate Monument was authorized, paid for by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and built by a prominent sculptor and Confederate veteran, Moses Ezekiel.

President Woodrow Wilson, first Southern president elected since the war, spoke at the dedication ceremony on June 4, 1914, a day after the 106^th anniversary of the birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy.

“My privilege is this, ladies and gentlemen: To declare this chapter in the history of the United States closed and ended, and I bid you turn with me with your faces to the future, quickened by the memories of the past, but with nothing to do with the contests of the past, knowing, as we have shed our blood upon opposite sides, we now face and admire one another,” Wilson said.

The Virginia-born president’s words were more an aspiration than an accurate account.

The ornate monument extols a romanticized version of the Old South with 32 life-size figures, urns, shields, Biblical symbols and a Latin inscription – “Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni.”

The phrase from the poet Lucan translates as “The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the losing side (or cause) pleases Cato,” roughly equating Lincoln with the tyrant Julius Caesar and the Confederacy with Cato who fought Caesar valiantly but lost.   

Americans are still struggling with how to remember the Civil War. New Orleans has taken the lead by removing four Confederate monuments. First to go was the most appalling – an obelisk to the Battle of Liberty Place, honoring a white supremacist group that killed members of the city’s integrated police force and state militia in 1874. 

Three other monuments -- honoring Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and Jefferson Davis – were also removed until suitable locations can be found.

“There is a difference between the remembrance of history and reverence of it,” New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said.

That distinction – that we can and should remember the past without idolizing it – is important as we try again as a country to move forward.  

One way may be to shift our focus from the famous figures on pedestals to the forgotten fallen, those whose names are inscribed on crumbling monuments on courthouse greens across the country.

On Memorial Day – a federal holiday since 1971 and the Vietnam War -- we honor all Americans who died in military service. Just as in the Vietnam era, during the Civil War a draft swept many into service. In the 1860s, those who could afford it could hire a substitute.   

This isn’t to say we overlook, or give a pass to, the Cult of the Lost Cause, the concerted attempt after the Civil War “to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity,” as Landrieu said. Not at all.

Communities need to decide which statues should be moved and where they should go. But cemeteries are a proper place for grandiose monuments to dead people and dead ideas. 

©2017 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Don't burn the flag or First Amendment -- Dec. 1, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

My guess is that few demonstrators who burned American flags to protest the election of Donald J. Trump have attended a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery.

Had they watched honor guards in white gloves neatly fold and present to the next of kin the flag that covered the coffin of a fallen service member, they would see the flag as personal.

A powerful and poignant symbol of sacrifice and honor, the American flag should never be torched to make a political point. The very idea is repugnant. 

This is not to say, though, that someone who burns the flag in protest should be jailed for a year or stripped of citizenship, as Trump suggested.

“Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail,” the president-elect tweeted at 6:55 on Tuesday morning.

The tweet seemed to come out of the blue, but Fox News reportedly had just aired a segment about a dispute at private Hampshire College in Massachusetts, where a flag was burned in an anti-Trump protest.

“Flag burning should be illegal – end of story,” Jason Miller, Trump transition spokesman, insisted later that day on CNN. “The president-elect is a very strong supporter of the First Amendment, but there’s a big difference between that and burning the American flag.”

No, actually, there’s not.

The Supreme Court ruled in Texas v. Johnson in 1989 that flag burning was “symbolic speech” protected by the First Amendment and invalidated laws against flag burning in 48 states. 

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable,” the court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision.

Among those in the majority was Justice Antonin Scalia.

“If I were king, I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag,” Scalia later told a TV interviewer. “However, we have a First Amendment, which says that in particular to speech . . . burning the flag is a form of expression.”

That likely would surprise Trump, who has joined the ranks of politicians who periodically fulminate against flag burning. By doing so, they draw attention to an exceedingly rare act that ought to be tolerated -- and ignored.

Perhaps no First Amendment issue is thornier. The American Legion applauded Trump’s tweet and urged Congress to prohibit flag desecration, something Congress has tried to do repeatedly over the years.

  

Everybody should take a deep breath and remember the wisdom of the late Sen. Daniel Inouye, Democrat of Hawaii, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in World War II, even as fellow Americans of Japanese descent were incarcerated in U.S. prison camps.

“This objectionable expression is obscene, it is painful, it is unpatriotic,” Inouye once said. “But I believe Americans gave their lives in many wars to make certain all Americans have a right to express themselves, even those who harbor hateful thoughts.”

Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York co-sponsored a bill in 2005 that would have punished flag burning by a fine up to $100,000 or a year in prison, or both. Her idea was to find common ground between veterans groups and free speech advocates.

“Senator Clinton, in Pander Mode,” The New York Times opined in an editorial 11 years ago this week, saying flag burnings had largely disappeared since the Vietnam War.

“Flag-burning hasn’t been in fashion since college students used slide rules in math class and went to pay phones at the student union to call their friends. Even then, it was a rarity that certainly never put the nation’s security in peril,” the editors trenchantly observed.

It’s still true that flag burning is rare and has never imperiled national security. Criminalizing flag burning might be politically popular, but the last thing we need is to make martyrs of publicity seekers with lighters who want their 15 minutes of fame.

Trump soon will fill the court vacancy caused by Scalia’s death. He has promised to name a justice who thinks like Scalia, and he should -- on flag burning and the First Amendment.

© 2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved. 30

Arlington Cemetery a living tribute -- June 16, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

When President John F. Kennedy visited Arlington House, the plantation home of Robert E. Lee surrounded by Arlington National Cemetery, in March 1963, he was so taken by the splendid views of Washington from the sloping hillside, a giant post oak in the foreground, that he mused he could stay there forever.

A few months later, JFK was laid to rest in the beautiful place. Landscape architect John Warnecke incorporated the Arlington Oak in his design for the gravesite, and special care was taken to protect the tree during construction.

Hurricane Irene in 2011 demolished the 220-year-old oak. The loss was devastating to tree and history lovers alike, but it wasn’t the end of the story.

Today, three post oaks grow in lush Kentucky bluegrass near the Kennedy gravesite. 

But they’re not just any trees, Stephen Van Hoven, chief of the horticulture division of the cemetery, said last week during a walking tour of trees.

They were propagated with acorns from the original Arlington Oak, a gift of American Forests, a conservation group.

While some areas, like the Kennedy gravesite, are formal in design and others more natural, the cemetery has visual and emotional impact by intention.   

“Nothing could be more impressive than rank after rank of white stones, inconspicuous in themselves, covering gentle, wooded slopes and producing the desired effect of a vast army in its last resting place,” said the 1901-1902 McMillan plan for the capital city. The nation’s first attempt at city planning, the plan was named for Sen. James McMillan of Michigan.

Almost nothing is left to chance. The cemetery’s contract for weekly grass cutting specifies that the grass may be no higher than 3 1/2 inches to 5 inches, Van Hoven said.

The cemetery has long invited visitors to imagine the stories the 400,000 people buried in the nation’s most hallowed ground could tell. Only recently, though, has it also encouraged visitors to look at the trees.

Last year, the Arlington National Cemetery, with more than 8,600 trees on 624 acres, became an accredited arboretum.

“The Arboretum serves as a living memorial to those who have served our nation and connects visitors to the rich tapestry of the cemetery’s living history and natural beauty,” the cemetery says.

Horticultural walking tours help educate visitors, as do about 300 aluminum labels installed on notable trees. Special screws were used to discourage theft.

One of the first stops on our tour was a Shumard oak and plaque to the 199^th Light Infantry Brigade, “In honor of the Redcatchers for their service and selfless dedication to duty in the Republic of Vietnam 1966-1970.” It’s one of 142 Memorial Trees in the cemetery, commemorating various groups.

The cemetery also has 36 trees honoring Medal of Honor recipients and three Virginia state champions and one co-champion trees. Champions are the largest of their species in the state.

Only three Memorial Trees have been added in the last 10 years, though, because planting a Memorial Tree now literally requires an act of Congress. The concern was that there would be too many. The cemetery also stopped accepting private donations of trees last year, Van Hoven said.

You can read more about the arboretum and see an inventory of trees in the Explore section of the cemetery’s website.

With Memorial Day behind us, Veterans Day may be the next time many Americans think of the cemetery, where national observances of the two holidays take place in the Memorial Amphitheater.

Another popular destination is Arlington House, the Custis-Lee Mansion that was the family home of Lee’s wife, Mary Custis Lee. The Union confiscated the property after Lee became the Confederate Army’s commanding general, and began burying war dead in the yard in 1864. It is a National Park Service site.

Behind the mansion is a stunning deodar cedar, planted in 1874 by David Henry Rhodes, landscape gardener of the cemetery for more than 50 years, Van Hoven said. Rhodes wrote about the cedar’s top being blown off in a hurricane in 1896, but the tree survives.

At Arlington National Cemetery, trees are a living tribute to veterans and all who are buried there.

©2016 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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