MEMORIAL DAY in America (this Monday, May 27) dates back to the Civil War aftermath when the country had suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths. Those ceremonies were not always peaceful. North and South each considered those of the opposing party who had perished on the battlefields essentially criminals, traitors. Therefore Memorial Day effectively became a real national event not until after America had entered the First World War in 1917.
A country that had less than a hundred thousand soldiers under arms at the outbreak of that war, built an army and navy of five million within a few years. Two million of them were sent to the European theater. Nothing like this had happened in America before. Every time a new load of young men got on the train somewhere to be shipped out, it was marked by a grand farewell ceremony. And soon those boys were given a name.
Laddie Boy.
“GOODBYE and luck be with you, Laddie Boy, Laddie Boy. Whatever your name may be, there’s a look in your eye, as you go marching by, that you will dare and do and die.” What Vera Lynn a generation later would become to the soldiers in WWII, and Bette Midler to Air Force pilots during Desert Storm, that was singer Nora Bayes during the eighteen months that American men from seventeen to well over forty were sent to the trenches in France.
One hundred and fifty thousand of them lost their lives, twice as many came back wounded or permanently disabled. All of a sudden, Memorial Day became a truly national observance all over the US. When President Warren Harding stood in attendance in Hoboken as a ship with 5,000 coffins containing dead soldiers arrived in May 1921, he promptly broke down in tears. Audio recordings were made, and the 78 rpm record became a hit nationwide. Next thing he knew, the president was given a young dog in the White House. Harding named him Laddie Boy.
WARREN Harding was of Dutch origin through his mother. He was honorary president of the annual Van Kirk family reunions, membered by more than two thousand families at the time, all descendants from immigrants Jan and Geertje Verkerk from Beusichem in Gelderland. He had a keen sense of what was going on on Main Street USA, because not only had the war left major scars, but so had the Spanish Flu that had started in Kansas and killed 700,000 Americans. Moreover, the US unemployment rate was fast approaching 15 percent.
Harding’s real profession was, and had been for more than thirty years, that of editor of a local Ohio newspaper – that was all he ever managed until he was elected president in 1920. He knew how important dogs were to families everywhere. And so he pulled out all the stops to make his Airedale terrier the snuggle buddy of the nation. “While no one remembers him today, Laddie Boy’s contemporary fame puts Roosevelt’s Fala, LBJ’s beagles and Barney Bush in the shade,” says Tom Crouch, a Smithsonian Institution historian. “That dog got a huge amount of attention in the press. There have been famous dogs since, but never anything like this.”
The National Museum of American History in Washington exhibits a bronze sculpture of Laddie Boy with a newspaper in its mouth. Made from pennies that twenty thousand newspaper delivery boys cobbled together. Every day, Laddie Boy went to pick up the newspaper from the White House lawn and took it to the president, that’s why. He was America’s one and only Memorial Day dog.
* The most popular song in America in 1918 was Laddie Boy, gezongen door Nora Bayes.
