This is an encore presentation of a Sidebar episode we originally posted on Memorial Day 2023. It seems even more relevant today, strange as that may seem, consumed as we are now about questions of war and peace, and the role of elite universities, such as Harvard, in our own national project.

On May 30 – Memorial Day — 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge.  The speech, known as “The Soldier’s Faith,” is in and of itself fascinating substantively and also for its indirect effects. Regarding those, Theodore Roosevelt, another Harvard man, read the speech some seven years later and determined to appoint Holmes to the Supreme Court on account of it. 

Beyond that, the speech is incredibly prescient, in certain respects, and eloquent, even poetic, on the question of personal courage and purpose to a degree that will seem alien to most Americans today, perhaps especially those of us who have never served.

In this special episode for Memorial Day, we read (almost all of) “The Soldier’s Faith” with annotations and digressions, which we hope you find worthy to reflect upon.

We conclude with a look at the historical context, the United States on the brink of its own imperial moment, and the national imperative to unite North and South at the dawn of a new century.

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Selected references for this episode

Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

“The Soldier’s Faith”

John Pettegrew, “‘The Soldier’s Faith’: Turn-of-the-Century Memory of the Civil War and the Emergence of Modern American Nationalism,” Journal of Contemporary History, January 1996.

George Root, “Just Before the Battle Mother” (YouTube)