Article May 25, 1935 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Philip Schaff, J. A. V. Pieters, E. N. Porter Goff, Robert Cummins, John Simon, B. J. Stecker

[Editorial in the Boston Daily Globe, Massachusetts]

Memorial Day meets some necessity of American character that causes it to endure. It has long since ceased to be merely a day of remembrance for the fallen soldiers of the Civil War and has become securely rooted as a folk custom. Surely it is still a day of remembrance, but it is a day dedicated to all our past, to all those who helped to make America, not only to our own immediate forbears, but to all who have lived and died here and contributed, with their lives, to the scroll of American history as it has so far unrolled. ...

As we confront our future, we face again, as our forefathers faced after the Revolution, as our fathers and grandfathers faced after the Civil War, the challenge of uncertainty. When the Revolution was over our people set out on "new and untrod paths" leading into a hazardous future in the wilderness of North America. Most of the time since then our feet have been set upon new trails. Yet every major crisis that has arisen before our people has given impetus to our drive forward to new achievements. We have blundered sometimes, but we have always pulled ourselves together and gone on, with confidence and hope, toward making this the sort of country we most wish to live in. Generation after generation of our people have been brought up on the idea that nothing is impossible; that the question is never whether something can be done but how it can be done. ...

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