top of page
Writer's pictureKenneth Weiss

Presidents' Day needs a jump-start

Perhaps it’s time to reboot the importance of Presidents’ Day in America. Now it’s barely recognized except for the plethora of retail sales and the absence of mail delivery.

 

There was a time when much of the country celebrated Abraham Lincoln’s birthday and George Washington’s birthday. Besides the joy students felt in having those days off from school, we often were reminded in class of the role that both presidents played in basically promoting and even saving the Union.

 


As the nation’s first president, Washington was reluctant to leave his beloved Mount Vernon for a job that he felt ill-equipped to handle. But for all his faults — remember, he was a slaveholder — Washington knew he was setting a precedent for future presidents with his inaugural address in 1789.

 

As author Ron Chernow put it in an article for Smithsonian magazine:

… Washington didn’t delve into policy matters, but trumpeted the big themes that would govern his administration, the foremost being the triumph of national unity over ‘local prejudices or attachments’ that might subvert the country or even tear it apart.

 

“National policy needed to be rooted in private morality, which relied on the ‘eternal rules of order and right’ ordained by heaven itself. On the other hand, Washington refrained from endorsing any particular form of religion. Knowing how much was riding on this attempt at republican government, he said that ‘the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government, are justly considered as deeply, perhaps as finally staked, on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.’“

 

As for Lincoln, he, of course, preserved the Union through its toughest challenge, the Civil War. His Emancipation Proclamation called for an end to slavery in the slaveholding states.

 



And, on the war-stained grounds of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, one of the key battles of the war, he gave his famous, 272-word Gettysburg Address, which ended with:

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

 

At a time when democracy seems on the line in America, we probably need to shore up the evidence of what got us here. That includes recognition of what the great presidents said and did. There’s been talk of renewing or strengthening civics education in the nation’s schools. That seems like a good starting point — and a way to acknowledge what many fought for over the years in the United States.

 

1 view0 comments

Comments


bottom of page