As America marks Memorial Day, we honor all the lives lost when the nation draws its sword. A look back at the holiday in 1916, as the nation stood on the cusp of World War I, helps put that cost in perspective and illuminate paths to minimizing it going forward.

This Memorial Day, as in 1916, Americans salute the sacrifices of our military. Today knowledge that they died to win a just peace is unknown except to those few who remain of the Greatest Generation. Since the World Wars, America has struggled to achieve the kinds of victories that were taken for granted in 1916. 

In part, this results from presidents failing to seek the consent of the governed in the form of declarations of war from Congress, the last having been passed in 1942. Although the Civil War had, by definition, divided the nation, by 1916 it was remembered as a triumph on the road to creating a more perfect union.

America’s then most recent conflict, against Spain in 1898, had been a resounding success, too, one that helped bind up the nation’s wounds. In 1916, the scars of the Civil War endured in commemorations of the fallen.

Ten states marked Memorial Day on June 3, the birthday of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate rebellion. Others marked it in late April and some on May 10, when Union soldiers captured Davis. The date was set nationwide as the last Monday of May in 1971.

New York City held its Memorial Day parade in 1916 on Tuesday, May 30. Hundreds of veterans, active-duty troops, and Boy Scouts marched along Riverside Drive past Grant’s Tomb. Final resting place of the Union’s commanding general, President Grant, the tomb bears the stone inscription, “Let Us Have Peace.”

The oldest veteran in the parade, Captain Charles J. Murphy, 93, appeared in arms against Mexico in the mid-1840s. That conflict resulted — after America cut Mexico a check for today’s equivalent of about $204 million  — in the realization of Manifest Destiny by adding the Southwest and California to the union.

Just as “rain threatened” to ruin the parade in 1916, war clouds loomed over America that Tuesday morning as European armies clashed. A New Jersey Republican, Senator Joseph Frelinghuysen,  captured the mood in remarks the Sun published on its front page.

“We are now passing through trials and difficulties as a nation,” Frelinghuysen said. “Give us wisdom and strength to bear these trials and do the right.” He hoped that America might “stand as the great signpost of the world, pointing the way to … the establishment of universal peace.”

President Wilson, running for reelection, also had peace in mind, campaigning on a slogan with which he was never comfortable: “He Kept Us Out of War.” After winning a second term, he imposed a draft to fight the Central Powers. While unpopular, his action was again backed by the people’s representatives in Congress.

Doughboys started heading “over there” not long after the parade on Riverside disbanded; 116,516 never came home. Those who did found a nation transformed into “the world’s policeman.” A generation after the guns of the Western Front fell silent, America was back fighting despots overseas.

The cost this time was 416,800 dead, but again, America was victorious. Again, it emerged stronger. In his speech to the Third Army in 1944, General George S. Patton said, “Americans have never lost, and will never lose, a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to America.”

Patton’s bravado was familiar to the thousands who stood hatless on Riverside Drive in 1916 with, the Sun reported, “mingled feelings of pathos and confidence.” They’d never known a conflict like Vietnam or Afghanistan where political squabbling left the nation’s heart troubled and undermined the military’s mission.

Returning to declarations of war that unite the nation is one step to recapturing the confidence of 1916, and returning to an America that marks Memorial Day confident that the fallen give their lives today, so the nation is stronger when it has to defend the peace tomorrow.