Whom will we Honor on Memorial Day?

Whom will we Honor on Memorial Day?

"Whom Will We Honor on Memorial Day?" is a short polemical essay by Howard Zinn, first published as an op-ed in the Boston Globe on June 2, 1976, and later collected in Howard Zinn on War (Seven Stories Press), which carries an introduction by historian Marilyn B. Young. The piece opens by describing how the holiday is conventionally observed — highway carnage from holiday traffic, flag displays, bugles, parades, and "unthinking applause" — before pivoting to Zinn's central charge: that Memorial Day has been hijacked by "the usual betrayal of the dead," the hypocritical patriotism of politicians and military contractors angling for the roughly $100 billion in defense contracts then pending before Congress. Zinn reframes the question of the title literally: whom should genuine remembrance honor? He rejects the standard honorees — the politicians who vote funds for war, the contractors who profit from it, the generals who order men into battle, and the FBI agents who spied on antiwar activists — arguing none belong at public ceremonies on what he calls a "sacred day." In their place, he proposes a counter-canon of resisters and dissenters. He cites a New Hampshire widow who refused a military burial for her husband, killed in Vietnam, rejecting the "hollow ceremony" of those who sent 50,000 Americans to their deaths. He praises the B-52 pilots who refused to fly Nixon and Kissinger's final, "vicious" bombing raids, pointedly asking why universities eager to hand out honorary degrees never honor such men. He closes his list of exemplars with historical figures of principled antiwar dissent: Henry David Thoreau, jailed for protesting the Mexican War; Mark Twain, who denounced American war against the Filipinos; I. F. Stone, nearly alone among editors in exposing the brutality of the Korean War; and Martin Luther King Jr., who defied the White House's blandishments and his own advisers' caution to condemn the Vietnam War. He quotes the closing lines of John Dos Passos's 1919 ("The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…") as an epitaph for the war dead conventional ceremonies fail to truly reckon with. The essay's second half turns from eulogy to indictment of militarized budget priorities. Zinn proposes that Memorial Day should mean not just flowers and trees planted on graves but the destruction of weapons that "endanger us more than they protect us." He details government waste as evidence of this misplaced defense logic: a quarter-billion-dollar helicopter assault ship dubbed "the biggest floating lemon," accepted by the Navy despite more than 2,000 major defects at its trial cruise, and a proposed $90 billion for the B-1 bomber — sums contrasted against a national shortage of affordable housing, families crushed by high rents and mortgage rates, and people unable to pay hospital bills. Zinn anticipates and rebuts the standard rejoinder — that "we must be practical" and cannot "deplete our defenses" — by inverting it: those who invoke practicality have actually depleted the nation's youth and resources through a war in every generation. He asserts that true security lies not in armaments but in "living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage," framing government military spending as a threat comparable to foreign adversaries — "our own" government "also trying to kill us." The essay ends with a direct appeal: "Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death." Structurally the piece functions as a compact antiwar manifesto disguised as a holiday reflection, using the occasion of Memorial Day to stage a broader argument Zinn made throughout his career: that official commemoration of war dead typically serves to launder and perpetuate the militarism that killed them, and that authentic memory requires honoring dissenters and redirecting resources from weapons to human welfare. Marilyn B. Young's framing introduction to the volume situates this essay within Zinn's decades-long body of antiwar writing — spanning from the early 1960s through the mid-2000s — connecting his critique of the Vietnam-era military budget to her own scholarly focus on U.S. wars in Asia and the recurring machinery of wartime propaganda and sacrifice.

By Howard Zinn · First published 1976 · Genre: Political Essay, Opinion Journalism, Anti-war Literature · 864 words

First lines

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top-secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year's Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was cancelled.

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

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memorial day · war commemoration · critical history · american history · military sacrifice · social justice · alternative narratives · working class struggle · victims of war · indigenous peoples · antiwar perspective · historiography

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