Crossing the Maginot Line
Memorial Day was born from the ashes of the Civil War — a conflict in which Americans, for the first and only time on such a scale, took up arms against one another. Before it became a federal holiday, it was known as “Decoration Day,” shaped by countless acts of remembrance: grieving families placing flowers on graves, communities gathering in solemn tribute, newly freed African Americans in Charleston honoring Union dead with dignity and gratitude. In 1868, General John A. Logan gave the observance national form, designating May 30 as a day to honor the fallen — deliberately choosing a date tied not to victory or defeat, but to memory itself.
There is a deeper irony, and perhaps a deeper wisdom, in the origins of the day. Logan’s wife, Mary, had witnessed Southern women decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers and urged that the custom be extended to Union dead as well. From the wreckage of division came a gesture of shared humanity. The flowers placed upon graves crossed battle lines long before politics did.
Each Memorial Day, I think of the Civil War not only because it gave rise to this national observance, but because it remains the starkest warning in our history of what happens when citizens cease to see one another as fellow citizens. More than 10,000 battles and skirmishes were fought across the nation. Americans killed Americans. Every other war in our history united the country against an external enemy — a king, an empire, a dictatorship, an aggressor abroad. The Civil War alone turned inward.
My own connection to that history is personal. My great-great-grandfather, Levi Evarts of Bellville, Ohio, enlisted at 18 and served four years in the Union Army. He defended supply lines along the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad, fought along the Tennessee River, endured defeat in Athens, Alabama, and advanced the siege of Decatur against General John Bell Hood’s forces. Long after the war, I discovered from National Archives records that he had once been stationed at Camp Denison, in the very village where I grew up.
His life afterward was neither triumphant nor tragic, but unmistakably American. He became a schoolteacher. In old age, he lived at the Ohio Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Home in Sandusky, where his flowing white beard made him a beloved Santa Claus for generations of local children. The war marked him, but it did not wholly define him. Few lives are so simple. In 1993, I discovered he died poor and did not have a gravestone in the place he was buried at the Belleville, Ohio Cemetery. On Memorial Day 1993, my father and I “decorated” his grave with a headstone and flag from the Veterans Affairs Department honoring his Civil War service.
As I look at our country today, I cannot help but think again of that earlier era of fracture. Increasingly, Americans regard political opponents not merely as people with different convictions, but as threats to the nation itself. Scholars call it “affective polarization.” Most Americans simply experience it as exhaustion, anger, and distrust. It is amplified nightly through partisan media ecosystems that present not merely different opinions, but different realities. Social media deepens the divide, rewarding outrage and feeding grievance with algorithmic precision.
There was division in earlier generations too. But there was also a stronger sense that we belonged to one another before we belonged to a party. Americans argued fiercely, then saluted the same flag, trusted the same institutions, and inhabited enough common ground to preserve a common story.
Encouragingly, that story is not lost. In research conducted through our More Perfect alliance, Americans ranked political identity last among the ways they define themselves. Family came first. Being American followed closely behind. Faith, community, race, ethnicity, and vocation all ranked ahead of politics. The loudest voices in our public life may suggest otherwise, but most Americans still understand, instinctively, that citizenship is larger than ideology.
Traveling across the country, I see this truth repeatedly. I meet Americans preoccupied not with ideological warfare, but with the enduring concerns of ordinary life: paying bills, raising children, finding safe neighborhoods, securing decent schools, caring for aging parents, building purposeful lives. Beneath these concerns lies another longing — for community, for belonging, for institutions and relationships that draw people together rather than drive them apart. Churches, civic groups, book clubs, volunteer organizations, garden clubs, and neighborhood associations still form the quiet architecture of American democracy. They remind us that a republic survives not through outrage, but through association.
What repels many Americans today is not disagreement itself, but the culture of contempt surrounding it. Narcissism at the national level — the endless performance of self, grievance, accusation, and retribution — leaves people hungry for something sturdier and more generous.
This Memorial Day, perhaps we might remember the more than 41 million Americans who have served in our armed forces and the more than 1.3 million who gave their lives in war. They came from different regions, races, faiths, and political beliefs. They crossed every conceivable divide in service to a common cause larger than themselves. Their sacrifice asks something of us still.
Two passages often return to my mind. In A Separate Peace, John Knowles writes of the tragic human tendency to invent enemies where none truly exist:
“Only Phineas never was afraid, only Phineas never hated anyone. Other people experienced this fearful shock somewhere, this sighting of the enemy...All of them, all except Phineas, constructed at infinite cost to themselves these Maginot Lines against this enemy they thought they saw across the frontier, this enemy who never attacked that way—if he ever attacked at all; if he was indeed the enemy.”
The metaphor is devastating. The Maginot Line was built to defend against an attack that never came in the way imagined. So, too, we often construct elaborate defenses against caricatures of one another — fearful, suspicious, and convinced of mortal threat — while the real dangers to the republic advance elsewhere: cynicism, isolation, irresponsibility, and the slow erosion of civic trust.
Historian Edward Gibbon offered a warning equally relevant to our own age from an age long ago:
“In the end, more than freedom, they [the ancient Athenians] wanted security. They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all – security, comfort, and freedom. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.”
Freedom requires more than rights; it requires duties. A republic cannot survive if citizens demand everything of society while giving little to one another. Democracy depends not only upon institutions, but upon habits of character: restraint, sacrifice, truthfulness, courage, and mutual regard.
Memorial Day calls us not merely to remembrance, but to reflection. Who are we? What binds us together? What obligations do we owe one another as citizens of a free people?
The fallen we honor this week cannot answer those questions for us. But perhaps, by remembering their example, we can answer them better for ourselves and for our country.
Great piece. One of the reasons I've always been excited about things like national service — as you and I have discussed extensively — is precisely because it achieves the kind of binding, and instills the habits of character, you talk about here. The only thing that can counteract the deleterious forces of digital division is something that gets Americans together side-by-side working in common purpose.
Thanks, John. We have a Civil War connection in our family, too. We visited the grave of
Clinton Gardner, a sailor on a Union gunboat on the Mississippi river, in Liberty, Indiana. Your piece also reminded me of one of the many great quotes of Lincoln. In one of his first recorded speeches, to the "Young Men's Lyceum", a debating society (the 1830s equivalent of the Joe Rogan experience, you might call it), he noted the breakdown in the rule of law as typified by mob attacks on free blacks and abolitionists. As is often true with Lincoln, his words are so relevant to today. He noted that our country would likely never be conquered by foreign invaders, and that the greatest fear was self-destruction. As a nation of free people, he wrote: "we must live through all time, or die by suicide".