When I was a little boy in the Southern California school system in the 70s and 80s there were separate holidays for Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays. Or at least this was my recollection. Both were celebrated. Then Martin Luther King Day became a federal holiday in 1986. I thought at time and for many years after that President’s Day was created out of a consolidation of Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthday in order to make room for Martin Luther King Day, on the reasoning that there’s a limit on the number of federal holidays. A number of years ago I looked into this and it turned out that this wasn’t true. I can’t remember the exact details. Lincoln’s Birthday was never a federal holiday but it was celebrated in California. There was also a shift beginning around the same time to rebrand Washington’s birthday as President’s Day. (Officially, it’s still Washington’s Birthday.)
In any case, my interest in this is that Abraham Lincoln should really have a national holiday. Some of this is a matter of him just really being a great president quite apart from the revolution brought about by the Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments. Sometimes great iconic figures aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. But the twin presidencies of Washington and Lincoln are if anything more powerful and important on close examination than they seem, though Washington’s role isn’t limited to his presidency. You have to see it in the context of his military and de facto political leadership during the Revolutionary War and his role in the period between the Revolution and his presidency, including his role at the constitutional convention. In any case, point being Washington and Lincoln are both critical figures in our national history. The holiday problem is that we have a logjam of birthdays, with King’s in January and both Washington’s and Lincoln’s falling in February. I guess there’s some reason why we can’t have that many national holidays right after each other. Fine. I don’t make the rules.
But, remember, every problem is an opportunity. Everyone has their more or less favored holidays. But regardless of your preference there’s one genuinely stupid national holiday: Columbus Day. Our current conversations about this day are focused on changing perceptions of Columbus and his role in ushering in the calamitous human consequences of the Columbian Exchange, the collapse of native populations, de facto enslavements of native populations and the formal enslavement of Africans kidnapped from Africa and made into a permanent, inter-generational enslaved population in the Americas. But it’s stupid in another way. Columbus was a little known figure through most of American history. The creation of the Columbus holiday was mostly a matter of giving the rising Italian-American population of late 19th century America a symbol of inclusion in the unfolding national story and combat rising anti-Italian and anti-Catholic at the end of the 19th century. Like Jews and Poles and other groups pouring into the US in the late 19th century, Italians were looking for ways to read themselves into the national story. Columbus was a Genoese sailing on behalf of the Crown’s of Castile and Aragon. But close enough. Here was Italian right at the very beginning of the national story.
If we were to abolish Columbus Day I recognize this would be some slight to Italian-Americans and perhaps native populations who are invested in the rebranded ‘Indigenous People’s Day’. I say this simply to note that I’m neither indifferent to this or unaware of it. But we can accomplish two things by abolishing Columbus Day and replacing it with some version of Lincoln’s Birthday. (Also, forget ‘President’s Day’. Let’s go back to celebrating it as Washington’s Birthday, which officially it still is.) The truth is that a lot of presidents were just okay and a lot of them kinda sucked. We shouldn’t class them all together genuinely great leaders like Washington and Lincoln. We can deal with moving the celebration of Lincoln until later in the year because there are various dates tied to the Emancipation Proclamation which come later in the year. These dates get moved around pretty casually and tying Lincoln’s celebration to the Emancipation Proclamation has the added benefit of tying his celebration to the constitutional revolution that Lincoln made possible and began but did not live to see.
This last part is more than a minor one. We’ve discussed over the years the various ways in which the Reconstruction Amendments are still treated as not quite up to par with the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Indeed, there’s a rising call on the right to actually claim they don’t exist, that they weren’t properly enacted, thus doing officially what the right has unofficially been doing for a long time, trying to read the Reconstruction Amendments out of the Constitution.
As Justice Thurgood Marshall argued in a speech during the centennial celebrations of the constitution in 1987 the Reconstruction Amendments created a fundamentally new constitutional order. These weren’t technical revisions like many subsequent amendments, changing the precise age of voting eligibility or term limits for presidents. To him, the pre-Reconstruction constitution was fundamentally “defective”, indeed “defective from the start” and had or has no claim on our allegiance. That latter point is a more complicated on to me. But he was certainly right that the post-Civil War constitution is different in kind. In many ways we’ve been trying to wrestle back the implications of these amendments from the start. Indeed, the upcoming birthright citizenship case is one of the most brazen and shocking attempts to do so yet. These are genuinely liberationist amendments which set the whole constitutional order in a radically new direction.
In any case, those are my thoughts on this Washington’s Birthday. Martin Luther King Day in January; Washington’s Birthday in February; Lincoln/Freedom Day some time in the summer or the fall and then simply get rid of Columbus Day which was never actually about Columbus in the first place.