“Dane, tomorrow is Memorial Day, and it is Bittersweet,” Sizer wrote. “Bittersweet in that we miss you and love you … but so proud that you died in an honorable manner. It is my mission to ensure that you and others like you are never forgotten. Your legacy will live on forever; I promise … they won’t forget.”

Her sentiment was posted on Legacy.com, the largest of a growing number of Web sites that commemorate the men and women who give their lives in defense of the country. The Legacy.com page in Dane’s honor includes several obituaries, more than 200 photos, and a guest book with around 1,500 messages from relatives, friends, neighbors, and even strangers paying tribute to his service and sacrifice.

Like gravestones and monuments, virtual memorials are accessible year-round, but are positively thronged over the Memorial Day weekend—indicating just how important the day still is to Americans, notes John Metzler, superintendent of Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C. “Memorial services and cemeteries won’t disappear, but how we remember someone, how we tell the story of a life—that’s changing fast, and is no longer limited to what can be carved on a gravestone or inked on newsprint,” he says.

Civil War veteran John Logan led the charge to establish Memorial Day.

It began with decorations

Memorial Day, our official holiday for the remembrance of those who die in military service, has been celebrated for nearly 150 years. But each new generation observes the day a little differently—based on the character of the era. Today the holiday has expanded beyond its official origins: Americans often use the day to remember not just servicemen and women, but all friends and family who have passed away. Watching parades and air shows, attending memorial ceremonies, placing flowers on graves, and even the basic practice of sharing memories with others are all 
part of this celebratory yet solemn day.

Originally known as Decoration Day, the official holiday was proclaimed by General John Logan, national commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, 
on May 5, 1868, in response to national grief over the tremendous loss of life in the American Civil War. It was first observed on May 30 of that year with the decoration of grave sites at Arlington National Cemetery.

By 1890, all of the Northern states observed Decoration Day. However, due to lingering Civil War hostility, the South refused to take part until after World War I, when the holiday’s meaning was changed from honoring the Civil War dead, to honoring all Americans who had died in military service. Still, despite the change, several southern states, including Texas, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Tennessee, continue to observe a separate day of mourning known as Confederate Memorial Day or Confederate Heroes Day.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson officially changed the name of Decoration Day to Memorial Day and declared the city of Waterloo, New York, to be the original birthplace of the idea, but it is more likely that the practice evolved broadly. Today more than two dozen cities claim to be the real place of origin, but the genuine roots of the holiday may in fact remain in a page of history that up until recently had been forgotten. (See box for the full story.)

At Arlington National Cemetery, the graves are decorated with new flags every Memorial Day.

Continuing to remember

Today there are some who believe that the actual meaning of Memorial Day has been lost and that the holiday has become little more than a day for picnics, barbecues, and trips to the beach. “Of course I am aware of the true meaning of Memorial Day,” says Florida resident Juan Gomez, “but we usually use the long weekend to visit with friends and family. Our activities rarely involve any formal remembrance of the soldiers who have died in battle.”

Senator Daniel Inouye (Hawaii) worries that too many Americans have lost sight of Memorial Day’s significance. He blames the holiday’s subdued celebration on the fact that its observance was moved from May 30 to the last Monday in May in 1971, in compliance with the National Holiday Act requiring all Federal holidays to provide three-day weekends. “Instead of recognizing Memorial Day as a time to honor and reflect on the sacrifices made by Americans in combat, many celebrate the day as the beginning of summer,” explains Sen. Inouye. “We must look on the day as one of remembrance as well as education. The youth of our nation have much to learn from our great patriots. Lessons about duty, honor, and sacrifice will guide them as they become our nation’s future leaders.” In an effort to redirect attention to the holiday’s original meaning, Sen. Inouye has introduced bills—in 
every session of Congress since 1989­—that would restore observance of Memorial Day to May 30.

However, some assert other reasons that Memorial Day celebrations are not as robust as they once were. Says Terrell Upson, who served as a lieutenant in the Navy during the Bay of Pigs conflict: “World War II was a great triumph for the Allied Forces. As Americans, we entered the conflict united, and we all made sacrifices for the good of the cause. When the war finally ended with the total and unconditional surrender of the enemy, we believed that we had achieved something that made the world a better place. But the conflicts that we have been engaged in since have not been as clear cut to most Americans in terms of right and wrong, and have not been as universally supported politically. Although the efforts of our armed forces have been no less valiant, admirable, or appreciated, I believe that national expression of our gratitude has been blunted in some cases by our conflicting points of view.”

The National Memorial Day Parade returned to Washington, D.C., in 2005, and draws some 300,000 Americans.© Jonathan Ernst/Corbis

Honoring heroes past and present

Whatever the reason, few places celebrate Memorial Day with the vigor that we once expected, but there is reason to believe that enthusiasm for the holiday is again on the rise. The National Memorial Day Parade returned to Washington, D.C., in 2005, after a hiatus more than 60 years. Organized by the American Veteran’s Center, thousands of spectators lined the streets of the nation’s capital for the first national Memorial Day parade since the outbreak of World War II. The parade has been held every year since, and enthusiasm continues to grow—drawing nearly 300,000 spectators since 2007.

“It’s important for all of us to remember that our soldiers are fighting for us right now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Some of them have done as many as five and even six nine-month tours of duty in war zones. During World War II, the average tour was only 45 days,” says Laura Ymker, director of the National Memorial Day Parade for the American Veteran’s Center. According to Ymker, the Washington parade pays tribute to veterans of all American wars. “All branches of the military are represented,” she says, adding that the parade includes costumed re-enactments of Revolutionary and Civil War battles. “All of our soldiers helped to make America what it is today. We honor them all.”

There are other national observances as well. All U.S. flags are still flown at half-staff from dawn until noon on the holiday. Since the late 1950s, the soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment have placed American flags at each of the 260,000 gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery on the Thursday before Memorial Day, and kept vigil throughout the weekend to ensure that they remain standing. In 2000, a National Moment of Remembrance via silent contemplation, or by listening to taps, was decreed to be observed on Memorial Day at 3 p.m. local time.

Though simple, these observances mean a great deal to America’s servicemen and women stationed overseas. “It’s important for soldiers to know that the people back at home remember them. It reminds them that what they are doing is appreciated,” says Doug Ross-Walsh, a second-year student at West Point Military Academy, who has seen many of his older classmates shipped out over the last two years.

“For those of us old enough to remember, Memorial Day is a national nostalgia for moral commitment,” says Michael Vaccariello of Duluth, Georgia, who served as an Army Corporal during America’s conflict in Korea. Viewed that way, it is likely that enthusiasm for the holiday will never go out of style.

A sign of the times: Today even memorial tributes are high-tech. Some people utilize Web sites like Legacy.com to share stories and photos about their loved ones with family and friends across the world.

Honoring Our Heroes The Saturday Evening Post

Now, more than 30 years after his death, Rockwell is still acknowledged for deftly chronicling the best of 20th century American life with vignettes of simple emotions evoked by everyday people. This phenomenon is a resounding testament to Rockwell’s prowess as a storyteller and is the subject of another kind of one-man show: the upcoming exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., titled Telling Stories: Norman Rockwell from the Collections of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. The exhibit, assembled from the private collections of these two popular film directors, will feature rarely viewed pieces of Rockwell’s work, including George Lucas’ favorite, Lands of Enchantment, which shows a youngster imagining himself as an armor-clad knight riding away with a beautiful girl. The point is not the boy reading, but how the book inspires the boy’s imagination, taking him, in idealized form, to another time and place.

“It’s a painting celebrating literature, the magic that happens when you read a story and the story comes alive for you,” notes Lucas.

Lands of Enchantment
by Norman Rockwell
November 10, 1923
© SEPS.

And that’s just one of the 50-plus images from the highly anticipated exhibit, which runs from July 2, 2010 through January 2, 2011. The exhibit will also explore the artist’s elaborate creative process while spotlighting Rockwell’s ability to capture the range of human expression and distill whole episodes of American life into single and broadly accessible moments by drawing upon a full arsenal of skills that would have served him well as a filmmaker.

According to Virginia Mecklenburg, the museum’s senior curator, both Lucas and Spielberg were inspired by Rockwell’s creativity and tender subject matter, as well as his warm depictions of America without cynicism.

“Both filmmakers grew up in the 1950s, enjoying Rockwell’s illustrations on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post,” says Mecklenburg. “They share the artist’s sensibilities in many ways, and have sought to express similar values, such as loyalty, courage, and friendship, in their own work.”

When working on Star Wars, Lucas said that he realized there needed to be a kind of film that expresses those values, as well as the mythological realities of life—the deeper psychological movements of the way we conduct our lives—that are evident in fairy tales. “Once I got into Star Wars, it struck me that we had lost all that—a whole generation was growing up without fairy tales. You just don’t get them anymore, and that’s the best stuff in the world,” Lucas explains.

Like Lucas, Rockwell was an original. He grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, living in a rough-and-tumble New York boarding house. He quit high school to attend classes at the Art Students League in New York, and was already a working, if occasionally struggling, artist in his teens. But in 1916, when he sold his first cover to the Post, he began to carve what would become a unique niche in the American psyche. Throughout the course of 323 Post covers over the next 50 years, he would stoke and affirm our pride in who and what we are at our very best moments, even if most of us rarely experienced the fresh-faced version of the world.

“Storytelling was very important to Norman Rockwell,” says Lucas. “Every image has either the middle or the end of a story, and you can already see the beginning even though it’s not there. You can see all the missing parts of the story because he took that one frame that sort of tells you everything you need to know.

Knuckles Down
by Norman Rockwell
September 2, 1939
© 1939 SEPS.

“And, of course, in filmmaking we strive for that. We strive to get images that convey, visually, a lot of information without having to spend a lot of time at it. Norman Rockwell was a master at that—he was a master at telling a story in one frame,” explains Lucas.

That concentration of information as well as emotion is something inherent in Rockwell’s art. Emotion certainly spoke to Steven Spielberg when he first saw one of his favorite Rockwell paintings, High Dive, the August 16, 1947 Post cover that depicts a boy at the top of what must be (or 
so we imagine from the boy’s expression) a towering diving board. He crouches high above a swimming pool, too afraid to either jump or climb back down. The painting hangs in Spielberg’s office at Amblin Entertainment because it holds 
a great deal of meaning for the filmmaker.

“That painting spoke to me the second I saw it … and 
when I was able to buy it, I said, ‘Not only is that going in 
my collection, but it’s going in my office so I can look at it every day of my life.’ We are all on diving boards hundreds of times during our lives. Taking the plunge or pulling back from the abyss … it is something that we must face. For me, that painting represents every motion picture, just before I commit to directing it—that one moment before I say, ‘Yes, I am going to direct that movie,’ ” says Spielberg.

In the case of his Oscar-winning film Schindler’s List, Spielberg remarked, “I lived on that diving board for 11 years before I eventually took the plunge.”

Even in the creation of their work, Spielberg and Rockwell were more similar than is immediately evident. To create his meticulously detailed recollections of everyday American life, Rockwell worked much like a film director, not just acting out the scenes in his imagination, but scouting locations, casting everyday people from his town for particular parts, choosing costumes and props, and directing his performers to make them instantly familiar to the public. Little wonder then, that filmmakers like Spielberg and Lucas, as well as others, should be so inspired by his work.

In directing his own scenes, Rockwell had a specific focus, just not one based on the stark realism in which he grew up. Instead, Rockwell aimed to depict life in a kind of realistic fantasy. He later remarked in his autobiography, My Adventures as an Illustrator, “I paint the world not as it is, but as I would like it to be.”

Rockwell's youngest son Peter (sitting by the marine) and oldest son Jarvis (the blond boy in the sweater) posed for this wonderfully narrative work, set in Benedict's Garage, a local hangout in Rockwell's home of Arlington, Vermont.
© SEPS

This desire to “make” the real world a better place, at least in his images, was a sentiment that Rockwell would voice throughout his life. Eventually, he sought something of the idealized world he imagined, when he moved out of the city, first to New Rochelle, New York, then later settling in Vermont with his family. Rockwell found new models in the form of neighbors, as well as his children.

“All of us, my brothers, my mother, and myself, as well as our friends, served as characters in my father’s illustrations at one time or another,” says his son Tom, himself a writer, perhaps best known for his popular children’s book, How to Eat Fried Worms.

A study of Rockwell’s creative process reveals that composing each of his simple-to-understand works wasn’t simply a matter of grabbing whoever was handy and drawing them into a picture. In fact, each image was a highly involved endeavor requiring masterful ability as an illustrator and painter, as well as his unique skill to create “scenes” that would be instantly understood by the viewer.

“Everything I have ever seen or done has gone into my pictures in one way or another. The story of my life is really the story of my pictures and how I made them,” Rockwell said. “I store up things in my mind, and when I need something 
for a picture—a feeling, a character, a wry smile—there it is. And I draw it out and paint it.”

In the act of describing his work, Rockwell, the artist, embodied his characters, just as his work now embodies aspects of the American character that still strikes a chord, inspiring both other artists and Americans from all walks of life today.

The fact that Rockwell’s canvases are populated with 
such real-looking people is likely what gives them such resonance, making them believable. Still, there is something in the facial expressions that Rockwell not only captures, 
but exaggerates—youthful enthusiasm, boyish eagerness, pride, yearning, determination, and more—that transcends location, time period, and situation and makes the works both easy to connect with and ripe for repeated rediscovery, generation after generation.

In this context, Rockwell becomes as significant as any American artist has ever been, and can arguably be credited not only with recounting the American experience but to a large extent, with constructing the collective “memory” of the good old days that we still yearn for, whether we ever personally experienced them or not.

"Everything I have ever seen or done has gone into my pictures in one way or another," Rockwell once said.
© SEPS.

Rockwell’s opinion of his work during his life was decidedly more humble, however. Certainly he was conscious of his role in the art world. He was an illustrator, not a modern artist or fine arts painter, and he had to satisfy not only himself, but his clients and audience alike. He needed 
to create scenes that people would get in a matter of seconds. He had to meet deadlines and stick to magazine proportions. And within those strict parameters, he wanted to convey this sense of idealized life. “I guess I had a bad case of the American nostalgia for the clean, simple country life, as opposed to the complicated world of a city,” he explained.

Rockwell’s insight and anything-but-easy process is itself the subject of a new, in-depth book, Norman Rockwell: Behind the Camera, by author and historian, Ron Schick.

“In order to ensure that every detail was perfect, Rockwell first used models and drew from life. Eventually, though, he switched to photographing his subjects in a variety of poses and with varying props, locations, and models. Every minute detail was deliberate, a means of convincing the viewer that they were eavesdropping,” says Schick, who describes Rockwell as a narrative artist with a Jeffersonian sense of America and its modest, everyday heroes.

“The world needed comfort, something 
to believe in, and Rockwell gave it to them 
in a way that people from all walks could understand,” Schick says. Understand, yes, but also be emboldened. The moments of inspiration that the artist captured, the tacit encouragement to move forward and celebrate life with all its challenges, setbacks, and triumphs—these ultimately may be Rockwell’s best legacy.

In a nation with cultures as disparate as ours, that Rockwell consistently managed to find patches of common ground for us to build on is a testament to his enduring work, not only for the generations of Americans who grew up seeing his art when it was new, but for future generations who are seeing Norman Rockwell’s America for the first time.

For more information, check out our Post retrospective Norman Rockwell and American Idealist Art or browse our Norman Rockwell art section.

America’s Artist The Saturday Evening Post