Page 18 - IAV Digital Magazine #564

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
How One President’s Day Became Presidents’ Day
George Washington was not a huge fan of celebrating his birthday.
A diary entry on his 28th birthday, Feb. 22, 1760, reveals a busy day installing a fence around the peach orchard at Mount Vernon, his home in Virginia.
As Alexis Coe, a presidential historian and Washington biographer, put it, “He would be more apt to chronicle the weather on his birthday than any present he received — unless it was a mule.”
And yet nearly 300 years after his birth, many Americans will have the third Monday in February off to honor the first president of the United States. (This year, that
falls on Feb. 20.)
Colloquially known as Presidents’ Day in a nod to the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and other past presidents, the federal holiday officially celebrates only Washington’s Birthday.
The story of how it became a three-day weekend is steeped
in differing calendars, inconsis- tent punctuation, labor issues and, of course, politics.
For the first 20 years of his life, Washington celebrated his birthday on Feb. 11, the day he was born in 1731, according to the then-used Julian calendar. But the date of Washington’s birthday moved in 1752, when the British Parliament adopted the newer Gregorian calendar to reflect a more accurate length of the solar year (it’s complicated). As a result, all earlier dates were shifted by one year and 11 days.
In all of her years of researching Washington, Ms. Coe, the author of “You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George of Washington,” said she had never come across any reference to “an obligatory or regular family birthday.”
But by 1778, as Washington was leading the Continental Army against the British, his vision for what a birthday celebration could mean for a new country began to change. When he and his men were stationed at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania, a group of drum-
mers and fifers celebrated his birthday with a performance in front of his quarters.
Jeffrey Engel, the executive director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, said Washington looked to his foes for inspiration. The birthday celebrations during the war, he said, “began as a snub to King George.”
After he became president, Washington continued to be the subject of regular birthday festivities, including balls and fireworks in his honor in New York and Philadelphia, the sites of the first presidential man- sions. Finding something to celebrate was key to Washington’s success, Ms. Coe said. As the new country was looking to establish a national identity, Washington was eager to fill that void.
“Washington did not love the limelight; he did not have patience for excessive praise or nostalgia, but he understood the importance of mythmak- ing,” Ms. Coe said. “He was well aware that he was a unifying figure.”
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