#184 Sidebar: “The Soldier’s Faith,” a Memorial Day Speech (Encore Presentation)
The History of the Americans
Jack Henneman
4.9 • 632 Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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
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)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the History of the Americans podcast, episode 184. |
| 0:10.6 | I'm your host, Jack Heneman, and we are recording this brief introduction on May 25, 2025 in New Orleans. |
| 0:20.6 | This episode's a sidebar, which is our term for an episode that is off the timeline of the history of the Americans. |
| 0:28.2 | Really, our way of signaling that the episode need not be listened to in sequence. |
| 0:32.8 | This is an encore presentation of the Soldier's Faith, a Memorial Day speech, which originally |
| 0:40.4 | dropped on May 25, 2023. It is almost the same as the original version, but I wanted it to |
| 0:49.2 | appear at the top of the podcast feed this Memorial Day, because the story it tells is actually more resonant than it was just two years ago, |
| 0:58.8 | consumed as we are now, about questions of war and peace |
| 1:03.5 | and the role of elite universities, such as Harvard, in our own national project. |
| 1:11.2 | With that in mind, here we go. |
| 1:14.9 | Okay, I normally don't give trigger warnings at the beginning of an episode, |
| 1:19.3 | but in this one, I'm going to say some nice things about Harvard. |
| 1:23.8 | I'll try not to overdo it, but forewarned is forearmed. |
| 1:29.0 | Memorial Day is, or at least used to be, an occasion for giving speeches. |
| 1:35.4 | Many of them have been very moving. |
| 1:37.4 | Some of them were moving when given, but ring out of time for those of us who read them in our own day. Some of them are interesting |
| 1:46.4 | because they offer us a glimpse of how an earlier generation confronted its own defining |
| 1:52.2 | challenge. A speech of this last sword is the subject of this episode. On May 30th Memorial |
| 2:00.7 | Day, 1895, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Harvard man and then a justice |
| 2:08.6 | on the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, delivered an address to the graduating class of 1895 in Cambridge. |
| 2:18.1 | The speech, known as the Soldier's Faith, |
| 2:21.8 | is in and of itself fascinating substantively |
... |
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