The Uncanny Artifice of George Washington

I received a number of fascinating responses to yesterday’s post about the federal calendar and presidential holidays, including whether we should abandon Columbus Day in favor of a national holiday celebrating Abraham Lincoln. I also learned a little more about how Lincoln never had a national holiday in the first place because the states of the old Confederacy, whose representatives and senators had inordinate seniority throughout the 20th century, just didn’t want to hear about it. Indeed, the 1968 federal law which grouped federal holidays into long weekends and which, in fact, even if it did not formally consolidate Washington’s birthday as “President’s Day”, was always in the shadow of Southern resistance to any commemoration of Abraham Lincoln.