We once celebrated the individual greatness of George Washington on his birthday, February 22. Historian James Thomas Flexner called George Washington the indispensable man, because he was the one individual most responsible for successfully launching the American experimenta new form of government, a democratic republic in which the people are sovereign, but their power is limited by a written constitution.
Nevertheless, this year (as every year, for the past half-century) on the third Monday of February, a travesty of a holiday called Presidents Day, has unofficially replaced the honoring of George Washington. It is unofficialbecause the February holiday is still legally Washingtons birthday, although even memoranda in U.S. government agencies refer to Presidents Day. In substituting an unofficial Presidents Day for the official Washingtons Birthday, the administrative state and its ideological echo chamber in the cultural leviathan are telling us that the lives of Chester A. Arthur and Franklin Pierce are of equal significance with that George Washington.
They are also telling us that individual lives dont matter, that what matters is a persons race, ethnicity, and gender. As a curator of the Smithsonian Institution told the Washington Post two decades ago, We are not a great men/great women placewhat matters most is the groups that one is born into.
The replacement of Washingtons Birthday with Presidents Day began in 1968 with the passage of the Monday holiday law. At the time, we were assured by the bills sponsors that its passage would not diminish Washingtons memory in any way. After all, the February holiday was still called Washingtons Birthday and Americans would have, in the words of sponsor Rep. Robert McClory (R-Ill.), an extra weekend to visit Mt. Vernon.
Several far-seeing congressmen who opposed McClorys bill predicted the negative consequences with prescient clarity.
Rep. Joe Waggonner (D-La.) told the bills sponsors: You have further commercialized and made further meaningless something that has the respect of the people of this country.
Rep. Dan Kuykendall (R-Tenn.) saw clearly and sadly into the future. If we do this, he warned, 10 years from now [that would have been 1978] our school children will not know what February 22 means. They will not know or care when George Washington was born. They will know that in the middle of February they will have a three-day weekend for some reason. This will come.
Interestingly, efforts to make the change from Washingtons Birthday to Presidents Day official have always been defeated. For example, one such bill was introduced in 1998 by Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) The failed Durbin bill would have re-designated the legal public holiday of Washingtons Birthday as Presidents Day to recognize the contributions that Presidents have made to the development of our Nation, besides specially noting Franklin D. Roosevelt along with Washington and Lincoln.
Pro-Presidents Day advocates sometimes claim they want to honor Lincoln. But this is a red herring because Presidents Day, this year or any year has never been called Washington-Lincoln Day. It is called Presidents Day and it implies that Millard Fillmore is as significant a chief executive as Washington or Lincoln, for that matter. Lincoln himself was one of Washingtons greatest admirers. He wrote in 1842 that Washingtons name was, the mightiest name on earth?long since mightiest in the cause of civil liberty; still mightiest in moral reformation . . . In solemn awe pronounce the name?and in its naked, deathless splendor leave it shining on.
For years now, retired Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) has carried on a campaign to restore the celebration of Washingtons Birthday. He proposed to start by making sure that federal agencies got the name of the February holiday right and stop calling it Presidents Day. Those of us who want, in Lincolns words, to preserve the mystic chords of memory that bind our nation together must hope some member of Congress picks up the banner that Bartlett once waved.
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