I don’t know about Presidents’ Day. Sure, everyone loves a three-day weekend, but all presidents are not the same and some merit little in the way of celebration. If we are going to elevate any presidents, an idea that fits little with the anti-royalist sentiments of the Founders, we should be celebrating Washington and Lincoln.
Perhaps this is old-codger thinking. As with all schools at the time, Mrs. McDermott’s first-grade classroom at P.S. 71 in Queens displayed portraits of Washington and Lincoln on the wall. I long pondered their profiles but understood their significance as little as I did the empty inkwell bored into the top of my wooden desk. What purpose did they serve anymore?
The same can be said of the holiday. Britannica informs us that the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Bill moved Washington’s Birthday to Monday to give workers a long weekend. Theoretically, we are to celebrate either Washington and Lincoln or all presidents. Practically, “Presidents’ Day became the commonly accepted name, due in part to retailers’ use of that name to promote sales and the holiday’s proximity to Lincoln’s birthday.” That feels somewhat sacrilegious to me. Okay, a lot more than somewhat.
I could not understand the singular importance of Washington and Lincoln then, but I do now. Washington embodies the great and unfulfilled promise of the Declaration. We needed a great general to defeat a great power but a martyr to defeat the evil of slavery. This is what I would explain to my six-year-old self today if I could.
I can’t though, so I shall content myself with explaining it to my grandchildren. It is their heritage now, just as it is all of ours.
Happy Presidents’ Day