How Presidents Day evolved...

good point (0.00 / 0)

Thank you for bringing this up. I was also thinking this morning of what it was like a few decades back when there was a separate Holiday for both Lincoln and Washington. It really loses the impact when it moves to a generic Monday in Feb.

Now it's President's Day as in the dead president's on your bills... another Holiday for commerce.

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by: Clem Guttata @ Mon Feb 15, 2010 at 15:26:54 PM UTC

Down with commercialization (0.00 / 0)

but this version of what happened with Washington and Lincoln's birthday's is not quite true - see the Wikipedia arcticle, which links to a couple of articles and the law itself.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U...

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by: JAWVMM @ Tue Feb 16, 2010 at 00:25:33 AM UTC

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your mileage may vary... (4.00 / 1)

I'm not sure what detail I got wrong... admittedly, there may be some confusion here because there's a lot of variation in state holidays versus federal holidays.

As long as we're referring to Wikipedia, here's an excerpt from the Presidents Day article (emphasis mine):

The first attempt to create a Presidents Day occurred in 1951 when the "President's Day National Committee" was formed by Harold Stonebridge Fischer of Compton, California, who became its National Executive Director for the next two decades. The purpose was not to honor any particular President, but to honor the office of the Presidency. It was first thought that March 4, the original inauguration day, should be deemed Presidents Day. However, the bill recognizing the March 4th date was stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee (which had authority over national holidays). That committee felt that, because of its proximity to Lincoln's and Washington Birthdays, three holidays so close together would be unduly burdensome. During this time, however, the Governors of a majority of the individual states issued proclamations declaring March 4 to be Presidents Day in their respective jurisdictions.

An early draft of the Uniform Holidays Bill of 1968 would have renamed the holiday to Presidents' Day to honor the birthdays of both Washington and Lincoln, but this proposal failed in committee and the bill as voted on and signed into law on 28 June 1968, kept the name Washington's Birthday.

By the mid-1980s, with a push from advertisers, the term "Presidents Day" began its public appearance. Although Lincoln's birthday, February 12, was never a federal holiday, approximately a dozen state governments have officially renamed their Washington's Birthday observances as "Presidents Day", "Washington and Lincoln Day", or other such designations. However, "Presidents Day" is not always an all-inclusive term.

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by: Clem Guttata @ Tue Feb 16, 2010 at 09:44:01 AM UTC

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