Lincoln Memorial Dedicated In DC; Woodrow Wilson Praises Union Soldiers On Memorial Day: Today In History

May 30, 2017, is the 150th day of the year, with 215 days remaining. The moon is in a waxing crescent phase, with illumination at 29 percent.

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Moral Courage vs. Physical Courage: Woodrow's Memorial Day Address

In 1919 at the Suresnes cemetery near Paris, France, President Woodrow Wilson delivered a Memorial Day message to the American people.

"They do not need our praise," Wilson said of the "men who perished for the sake of the Union."

"They do not need that our admiration should sustain them. There is no immortality that is safer than theirs," the president continued. "We come not for their sakes but for our own, in order that we may drink at the same springs of inspiration from which they themselves drank."

Wilson remarked on the men who fought for the Union that the citizens of the United States owed these soldiers "something more than a legal establishment" of the Union; Americans owed them the spiritual reestablishment of the Union as well.

"We admire physical courage," said the president," but we admire, above all things else, moral courage."

Former President Taft dedicates Lincoln Memorial

Former President William Howard Taft, at the time serving as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and president of the Lincoln Memorial commission, dedicated the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1922. Constructing the monument was underway in 1914 after Congress approved a $300,000 appropriation, a present-day equivalent worth of $14.5 million. The neoclassical structure took eight years to complete, designed by New York architect Henry Bacon and Massachusetts sculptor Daniel Chester French.

Taft presented the monument to President Warren Harding, who accepted it on behalf of the American people. The dedication ceremony was attended by none other than President Lincoln's only surviving son — 78-year-old Robert Todd Lincoln.

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