The Poppy, the Wreath, the Empty Chair: Memorial Day’s Lasting Symbols

The most enduring Memorial Day symbol is also the smallest. A red paper poppy, no larger than a quarter, pinned to a lapel. Most Americans who have seen one know it is connected to fallen servicemembers without necessarily knowing why. The story runs through a single poem, written in a Belgian dressing station in 1915 by a Canadian military doctor who was burying his friends.

“In Flanders Fields”

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was a physician in the Canadian Expeditionary Force at the Second Battle of Ypres in April and May 1915. The battle introduced the German army’s first large-scale use of chlorine gas. McCrae spent seventeen days treating casualties at a forward dressing station. On May 2, 1915, his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by an artillery shell. McCrae conducted the burial himself, as no chaplain was available. The next day, looking out at the makeshift graves marked with rough wooden crosses — and at the red poppies growing among them in the disturbed soil — he wrote the poem that would carry the symbol across the next century.

The poem was published anonymously in Punch magazine in December 1915. It is now in the public domain.

The corn poppy — Papaver rhoeas — grew abundantly in the churned soil of the Western Front battlefields. Its seeds can lie dormant for decades and germinate when the ground is disturbed. The connection to soldiers’ graves was botanical before it was symbolic.

Moina Michael and the Poppy Program

In November 1918, days before the Armistice, an American academic named Moina Michael read McCrae’s poem in Ladies’ Home Journal. She was working at the YMCA Overseas War Secretaries’ headquarters in New York at the time. She bought twenty-five silk poppies from a department store, wore one herself, and distributed the others to delegates attending a conference she was supporting. She would spend the rest of her life — until her death in 1944 — championing the red poppy as the official memorial flower of the United States.

The American Legion adopted the poppy as its memorial symbol in 1920. The American Legion Auxiliary, founded the same year, formalized the Poppy Program in 1921. The program had a specific architecture: disabled veterans manufactured the paper poppies, the Auxiliary distributed them, and the public donated to wear them. The proceeds funded veteran welfare and the rehabilitation of disabled veterans. The Veterans of Foreign Wars maintains its own Buddy Poppy program on the same model.

A century later, the program still operates. Veterans in VA hospitals and assembly programs still make the poppies. The Auxiliary still distributes them in the days before Memorial Day. The donations still go to veteran welfare. The flower on a lapel in late May is not decorative. It is a working part of a fundraising and remembrance machine built to support the disabled veterans who manufacture it.

The wreath at the Tomb

If the poppy is the smallest Memorial Day symbol, the wreath is the largest. Every year on Memorial Day morning, the President of the United States — or, when the President is unavailable, the Vice President or another senior official — lays a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. The wreath is a circular arrangement of greenery and flowers, large enough that it is carried on a frame. The ceremony is broadcast nationally.

The wreath has a specific design tradition. It is composed of evergreens — typically white pine, cedar, or fir — symbolizing eternity. The flowers are red, white, and blue. Four sentinels of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment — the Old Guard — escort the wreath into position. The official places it. A bugler sounds Taps. The ceremony ends. The wreath stays at the Tomb for the day.

The ceremony’s continuity is striking. It has been performed in some form every Memorial Day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier since the first burial there in November 1921 — through the Great Depression, through the Second World War, through the Korean and Vietnam wars, through every administration since Warren Harding. The form of the ceremony has barely changed. The continuity is part of the message.

The missing-man table

Walk into a U.S. military dining facility on any base in the world, and somewhere in the dining room there will be a small table set for one. It is set carefully. It is set with intent. It is called the Missing-Man Table, or the POW/MIA Table, or the Fallen Comrade Table, depending on the unit and the tradition. The table is empty. That is the point.

Every element on the table is symbolic, and the tradition has been codified across the U.S. armed services. The table is small — set for one person who is not there. The tablecloth is white, for the purity of the missing’s intent. A single rose sits in a vase for the families left behind. A red ribbon is tied to the vase. A slice of lemon on the bread plate is for the bitter fate of the missing. Salt sprinkled on the plate is for the tears of the families. An inverted glass indicates the missing cannot share the meal. A candle, in some versions, represents the light of hope. The chair is tilted against the table, indicating that the seat will not be filled.

The Missing-Man Table tradition emerged in the Vietnam War era, organized initially by POW/MIA families’ advocacy groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was formalized by U.S. Armed Forces branches and adopted by veterans’ organizations, the American Legion, and the VFW. It is now standard in U.S. military dining facilities, at countless veterans’ organization meetings, and at private veteran family gatherings around the country.

The table is a different kind of symbol than the poppy or the wreath. The poppy is for everyone. The wreath is for the Unknown — for one dead servicemember representing all dead servicemembers. The Missing-Man Table is for the specific person at this specific table. The chair would be filled if the person were here. The chair is empty. The country has chosen to acknowledge that, with the same care, every meal, in perpetuity.

What the symbols share

Three symbols, three different scales, three different origins. The poppy emerges from a poem in a Belgian dressing station in 1915. The wreath is laid annually at a tomb that did not exist before 1921. The empty chair was set first by the family members of soldiers who had not come home from Vietnam.

What the three symbols share is a single function: making absence visible. The dead cannot be present at the ceremony. The missing cannot be present at the meal. The Unknown cannot be named. The symbols are the country’s chosen way of holding the place open — small enough to wear on a lapel, large enough to lay at a tomb, specific enough to set in front of an empty chair.

A symbol works when it points at something that is still there but has stopped being seen. These three still work because the country has kept maintaining them — the Auxiliary still distributes the poppies, the Old Guard still escorts the wreath, the dining halls still set the table. The work of remembrance is constant. The symbols are how the work shows up where the public can see it.

Sources

• John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields,” Punch magazine, December 8, 1915 — public domain. Full poem reproduced above.
• Moina Michael, The Miracle Flower: The Story of the Flanders Fields Memorial Poppy (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., 1941).
• American Legion Auxiliary, Poppy Program — public program documentation.
• Veterans of Foreign Wars, Buddy Poppy program — public program documentation.
• Arlington National Cemetery, Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony — U.S. Army and Arlington National Cemetery public records.
• The Missing-Man Table protocol — U.S. armed services ceremonial standards; POW/MIA family advocacy historical documentation.
• 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard) — public U.S. Army information on Tomb ceremonial duties.