Politics & Power Quote by John Linder

Memorial Day’s origin story, in this telling, isn’t really about grief; it’s about who gets to narrate grief. By conceding that “tributes…had been held in a number of towns,” the line briefly gestures toward a grassroots, scattered America mourning on its own terms. Then it pivots: “one of the more well-known stories” becomes “the story about General John Logan.” The move is subtle but decisive, shrinking a messy national chorus into a single, name-brand protagonist.

That’s the intent and the politics at once. Linder, as a politician, leans into the kind of history that travels well: a clean founding tale anchored by an authoritative figure. Logan, a Civil War general and later a key advocate of a formal day of remembrance, offers a convenient hinge between local ritual and federal recognition. Institutional memory prefers hinges. They’re easy to teach, easy to commemorate, easy to put on a plaque.

The subtext is that public memory doesn’t just happen; it’s curated. “More well-known” is doing quiet rhetorical work, treating popularity as legitimacy, as if the most repeated version is the most truthful or most deserving. It also sidesteps the contest embedded in Memorial Day’s beginnings: multiple communities, multiple claims, and competing regional narratives about who started what, and why.

In that sense, the sentence is less a neutral historical preface than a map of how civic holidays get built: from dispersed acts of mourning into a single story with a single sponsor. That consolidation is exactly how a nation turns loss into ritual - and ritual into identity.