Category: History Date: 1939-05-30
Memorial Day 1939
On the 30th of May, known as Memorial Day, America, pays tribute to her soldier dead. It was a beautiful thought, first suggested by a Southern woman, that the graves of the soldiers who gave their lives in the Civil War be fittingly decorated with flowers. The day has now found a permanent place in the calendar of American holidays, and well so; for any nation that is unmindful of its heroic past, will be only too heedless of its possible future. Today we pay tribute to all of our soldier dead who laid down their lives on every field of battle, beginning with the Revolutionary and ending with the World War.
Memorial Day is then freighted with sacred thoughts and memories more so than any other national holiday. On this day there is brought home to every thinking American the price that was paid to bring forth, as Lincoln so nobly worded it, "a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal" we realize today the tremendous sacrifices that were made during the past 163 years of our national existence in order to preserve intact the priceless boon of religious liberty, political freedom, and the right to pursue a legitimate calling or profession unmolested. Certainly there are diverse and conflicting movements on foot, subversive and anti-American to the core, seeking to deprive us of our national heritage and blessings. May we, free citizens of the greatest republic on earth be found as loyal to flag and country today as were those who in times past made the supreme sacrifice on the field of battle. The torch of liberty and freedom has been handed down to us so let us not fail our fallen heroes. We can promote and tolerate but one "ism", and that is Americanism. And in the words of the late President Theodore Roosevelt. "We have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is loyalty to the American people." If we thus place America first, then our soldier dead will not have died in vain; then will the stars and stripes continue to wave untarnished and unblemished "O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!"
Chaplain H. W. Reinke
The torch of liberty and freedom has been handed down to us so let us not fail our fallen heroes.
