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It is time to wage the annual war for George Washington's Birthday and against Presidents Day, or Great Americans Day, or whatever other locution that the ignorant have contrived for the third Monday in February.
If it were up to me, there would be no Monday holidays, unless the holiday actually fell on a Monday. By making for extended weekends, Monday holidays actually detract from their goal of calling attention to their subject.
If you pause from routine in the middle of the week, you might think about why that happened -- i.e., we do a pretty good job of celebrating Independence Day, since we do so on July 4, rather than on the first Monday in July.
But if the holiday merely makes for a longer weekend, note that just a month ago, African-American leaders in Denver were talking about how disappointed they were that the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., got so little attention, even though Jan. 21 was an official federal and state holiday in his honor.
Another problem with the Monday holiday weekend is that it lowers productivity. If people indulge in customary American holiday activities during the three days, then they come to work tired, aching or hung-over on Tuesday, and they face the challenge of trying to do five days' work in four.
If we really must have three-day holidays, why not put them on Fridays? We could start the week strong and get five days' work done in four, eagerly anticipating the reward of a day off. American productivity wouldn't suffer, and our economy would improve.
So, let us add the Monday holiday to the long list of reasons to despise Richard M. Nixon, president from 1969 until he was forced to resign in disgrace in 1974.
It was Nixon who was in office when the Monday holiday law took effect in 1971. That affected only federal employees. States can have their own holidays when their offices are closed (we used to have Colorado Day on Aug. 1, the date Colorado formally entered the Union in 1876), but most states follow the federal government's example.
However, we cannot blame Nixon for declaring a Presidents' Day to replace Washington's birthday in February. It may be impossible to prove a negative -- in this case, that Nixon never issued a Presidents' Day proclamation -- but Jason Bezis has come as close as anyone ever will.
Bezis is a law student at the University of California in Berkeley, and like all sensible Americans, he prefers Washington's Birthday to Presidents' Day. Unlike most of us, though, he has done extensive research. Here's part of an email I received from him:
In January I visited the Nixon Presidential Materials
at the National Archives in College Park, Md., to put to
rest the contention that President Nixon issued a
'Presidents Day' press release or proclamation. No
'Presidents Day' proclamation exists from the Nixon
Administration in the Federal Register, the Weekly
Compilation of Presidential Documents, or the Public Papers
of the President. At the National Archives, I searched the
Nixon Administration's original 'subject file' on
'Holidays' and found no reference to 'Presidents Day.'
Despite the fact that USA Today, the Washington Post,
and many other publications, along with some public
officials, claim that President Nixon issued a 'Presidents
Day' proclamation or press release, I believe that it is
non-existent. In fact, according to my research, the first
and only president to issue a 'Presidents Day' statement
was President Bill Clinton -- six of them, in
1995-2000.
So, where did the Nixon tale come from? Bezis traces it
to a humor column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by
Michael Storey -- a satire that had Clinton borrowing from
a fabricated Nixon proclamation about how Pat and I plan
to celebrated at one of the many Presidents' Day sales,
purchasing for her a good Republican cloth coat.
Alas, it's hard to write satire that doesn't get taken
seriously by some dolt. I know, because I've tried, and
one result was a libel suit in 1980 from a county
commissioner here who insisted that people really believed
that he signed county documents as the Supreme
Commander.
Storey's humor is starting to resemble H.L. Mencken's celebrated Bathtub Hoax of the 1920s -- a piece with much obviously fabricated detail, just meant to entertain, that somehow ends up as gospel in reference works.
No matter what you've read or heard elsewhere, tomorrow is officially George Washington's Birthday, as far as federal law goes. In Colorado state offices, it is officially Washington-Lincoln Day. In Denver city offices, the legal holiday is Washington's Birthday.
It is not often that I find myself supporting U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, the Littleton Republican who represents our 6th Congressional District in Washing, but he's on the side of the angels on this one. He has introduced legislation to instruct federal agencies to call the holiday by its proper and legal name: George Washington's Birthday.
The sooner we get rid of Presidents' Day, the better we can remember George Washington, the only revolutionary commander known to history who voluntarily surrendered his power so that we might enjoy a constitutional republic.
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