The Evening Star (May 26, 1946)
Memorial Day Message
By the Rev. Dr. Seth Brooks, minister of the Universalist National Memorial Church
As America faces another Memorial Day, many thoughtful persons must be wondering about the sincerity behind the observation of the day this year.
There is no question that many of us will remember our own dear departed, visit their graves and lay wreaths upon them. No sincerity will be lacking here!
Many of us old enough to remember World War I will think again of some lad we knew who died “over there.”
We can bring before our mind his youthful face. We have grown older, but he still is young and perhaps we say: “They shall not grow old, as we who are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning we shall remember them.” No sincerity will be lacking here!
And, as our elders did short months after Appomattox Courthouse, we this year may attempt to realize that some we knew will not be back, because so recently they left us we have not yet grasped that it was for eternity. No sincerity will be lacking here!
Beyond our individual feelings, however, there is the Memorial Day which we might think of as a national consciousness. We mean, of course, that one stipulated day when we as a people remember our nation’s dead and reconsecrate ourselves “to their unfinished task.” But what should the national mind remember? Bluntly put, it should recall that men died for this nation believing their sacrifice would be honored by those for whom they died. Moreover, that men believed that this nation was worth dying for and that other men would believe it was worth living unselfishly for.
Nor is that all! This day should remind us that no living American has done for America what one fallen American did for America. It is perhaps trite to say, but our country still is the most favored land on earth. We might put it: “We have been awfully lucky.” Let him who questions this behold the ruins of Europe and the Far East, the destitution and starvation that stalk the earth, and their offspring – chaos, loss of morale and lowered morality. No matter how unfortunate or abused many civilian Americans may think they are, they have not yet experienced conditions beyond these shores, nor have they made any contribution to their country which approximates that which was made by any man who gave his life that America might live. Yes, just existing in America is a blessed privilege which no other land we know of equally affords.
Memorial Day might end here with a tribute to our dead and a prayer of thanksgiving that we are living in America, but it doesn’t!
We would be fools or worse than fools if we did not see that every principle for which our dead gave their lives is threatened now. Nor is it as simple as calling the roll and saying: “Liberty, freedom, democracy and peace are endangered.” It goes far deeper. Things on the surface are threatened because something has affected the foundations. This country was established on the belief that there was a sacred covenant with God. The hint of it is found in Genesis: “That I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living thing.”
The American covenant stood on the belief that men here with God’s help could build an ideal land. But how many today ever think of building in America “a nation under God,” “a kingdom of righteousness,” “a new world”? We present-day Americans are acutely conscious of covenants, although we call them “contracts.” Much of our present-day quarreling and bickering is over what a contract includes or does not include. We need to put our minds on that everlasting contract between God and man. A nation is great when it perceives that men, through loyalty to their covenant with God, guarantee their loyalty in all lesser contracts.
Our national life today might be likened to an escalator which is off the roller. The steps, the handrails, the machinery and the principle of upward movement are there, but the ascending power has stopped. The quickest way for any nation to get off the rollers and stop its upward movement is for individuals to put selfish and group interests above the good and the welfare of all.
We Americans are not lacking in loyalty; the trouble is that our loyalty has become partial. We are loyal to our own group, class, union, business or party rather than to the good of the nation.
A 24-year-old Marine lieutenant, Ben Toland, who was killed on Iwo Jima, could speak for our thousands of dead this Memorial Day. Aboard a transport the night before he was killed he wrote a will. He had about $3,000, and all of it he left to philanthropic purposes. One bequest was to the Congress “for research in a far-sighted foreign policy and a better Government for all the people and not for just the organized pressure groups.” In an accompanying letter to his parents he wrote: “Take care of and nurture what we are fighting for.”
The supreme question on Memorial Day, 1946, is: “Are we taking care of and nurturing what American men fought for – and died for – that we might be given the opportunity to make real the American dream?”