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Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.
This Monday was Memorial Day. It commemorated all the Americans who died on behalf of the United States from its beginning to the present. It started out as Decoration Day. It was a phenomenon that grew out of the horrific Civil War in which 650,0000—700,000 Americans, North and South, died.
And people in that post-war era felt that their graves should be commemorated. And once people started to decorate the graves or put flowers on them or flags, that custom spread to the North, and each state then started to commemorate it. And it was finally federalized as an official holiday not until 1971.
I can remember when I was a senior in high school, it was announced that from now on, the last Monday coinciding with a three-day weekend would be commemorated as Memorial Day. I found a lot of students confuse it, or they do not even know what it is. They think that Veterans Day, which always falls on November 11, is the same.
No, it commemorates anybody, everybody who served in the armed forces, whether they were wounded, killed, or survived. And that is always on November 11 for a reason. It grew out of Armistice Day, and that was the ending of the First World War. It was decided to make it an iconic time or date, so it was the eleventh month, November, on the eleventh day, at the eleventh hour of the day when the fighting stopped.
And then to memorialize it further, that name morphed into Veterans Day to commemorate not just World War I’s ending, but all the people that served.
How many people have died fighting for America? About 1.2 million, and that includes 20,000 to 25,000 in the Revolutionary War if we count disease as well, maybe 20,000 in the War of 1812.
The Mexican War, 1848, there were probably 5,000. The big number, of course, was 650,000 to 700,000 in the Civil War since everybody on both sides who died was an American. And note the first great battle in April 1862, Shiloh, more people died in the initial big battle of the war at Shiloh than had perished in all the wars prior to Shiloh.
And then, of course, there was the Spanish-American War, World War I, where 117,000 died. My grandfather was farming. He was 26. He was minding his own business. He was drafted, and he went over to Belgium and France. The next thing he knew, he was at the Meuse-Argonne and was gassed and invalided out after two years and came back severely disabled.
And then, of course, World War II, where somewhere between 405,000 to 450,000 died, depending on how we count those who were sick, whether it was battle-related or whether they were in the United States or overseas.
I can remember, I am named after Victor Hanson, who was killed with the 6th Marine Division on May 19, 1945, in the last hour of fighting on Sugar Loaf Hill.
And then, of course, Korea with another 35,000, and then we had 58,000 in Vietnam and 7,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan and on, and on.
The singularity, though, we commemorate or are depressed by or awed by the numbers in two wars, the 430,000 that died in World War II and the 650,000 or 700,000—that is almost a million Americans who died—and I think people should recognize that.
We are now a country—we have never been on this frontier before in terms of percentages or the actual numbers of foreign-born. We have about 53 million Americans who were not born in the United States, and that is about 16.2% of the current population.
That is a huge number. And unfortunately, those large influxes occur at a time when we have lost confidence in the American system or experiment because we do not have civic education anymore. We do not have classes from K-12, much less in university, where people know about the iconic events, what the difference between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is, what caused the Civil War, what was Iwo Jima, what was Pearl Harbor.
Nobody seems to have any reference, any knowledge of that. And so what we need to do is to—one of the ways, the best way, I think, to assimilate legal immigrants is to remind them that they wanted to come to this country. We did not force them to come. In most cases, we did not invite them to come.
They chose to come here because they felt, in terms of security, personal freedom, and economic viability, they would be better off than they were in their home countries.
So when they arrived in this fully developed 250th year of America this year, they should ask themselves, and we should help them understand why this was such a prosperous, great nation, why it is the oldest constitutional republic in the world today, and why it has been so successful.
And the answer is that from time to time in its 250-year history, it has called on young people 18, 19, 20 [years old] to go far overseas in almost every case except the Civil War, the Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, and fight enemies, whether they were German militarists or Austro-Hungarian militarists or Nazism in Germany or fascism in Italy or Japanese militarism or during the Cold War in Korea to stop communist aggression in Vietnam, same thing.
But they were uprooted from a very comfortable existence, and they gave their lives so that the United States today would be what it is. And if we do not tell people that, there is no appreciation that they came late to a country in which 1.2 million people had died to make it the attractive nation that enticed them to come in the first place.
And it is not just legal immigrants that need to relearn the lesson of American sacrifice, it is our own youth. They grow up with iPhones, they grow up with sophisticated automobiles, they grow up as beneficiaries of 21st-century medicine. All of that is a result, a dividend, of the sacrifice of people that we do not even know anymore.
And sometimes we do not even know the places or the circumstances in which they gave their fullest and their last sacrifice. And they were all young, and they never had a chance as the rest of us did to mature. So on Memorial Day, think of the dead and what they did for us and try to commemorate it.
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