Holidays and History
WHO does not recall that burst of noble invective in which Gambetta, at the trial of Delescluze, arraigned Napoleon III and the Empire? “Here for seventeen years,”he said, “you have been absolute masters — ‘masters at discretion,’ it is your phrase — of France. Well, you have never dared to say, ‘We will celebrate — we will include among the solemn festivals of France — the Second of December as a national anniversary.’ And yet all the governments which have succeeded one another in the land have honored the day of their birth. There are but two anniversaries — the Eighteenth of Brumaire and the Second of December — which have never been put among the solemnities of origin; because you know that, if you dared to put these, the universal conscience would disavow them!” Gambetta’s taunt proved prophetic: within less than two years the Empire of Louis Napoleon, which dared not. celebrate its birthday, plunged headlong to destruction.
The conscience of France refused to join in jubilation over the Napoleonic coups d’état, — a healthy sign, which indicates that, although popular judgment cannot always be relied on to discern correctly the critical stages in a nation’s growth, it can still be trusted in the long run to repudiate the wicked and the unworthy. It can be trusted not to make a festival to commend deeds of which it is ashamed. So we Americans have never tried to whitewash the Mexican War. In most European countries, to be sure, national holidays have sprung up without much regard to historical significance. The birthday of the reigning sovereign, of course,is kept; but,as this varies with each new sovereign, no particular date comes to be fixed in the popular mind. The birthday of a dynasty, or of the existing form of government — except in cases like those which Gambetta assailed — naturally becomes the chief political event to be glorified year by year, — witness the Fourth of July in the United States, the Fourteenth of July in France, the Festival of the Statuto in Italy. Occasionally, through a lack of historical perspective, some occurrence of sensational emphasis at the moment, but without structural value, — the Gunpowder Plot in England, for instance, — appeals to the popular imagination, and is unduly perpetuated.
In general, the importance of holidays as a means of keeping fresh in the memory of a people the great stages of its Past, the vital principles which have brought it to the Present, the ideals to which it must be true if it would prosper in the Future, — this immense educative importance of holidays cannot be overestimated. And yet it has been too much neglected.
The deepening of the historic sense unquestionably marks, in nations as in men, the coming of maturity. For history embodies the collective experience of a nation, and it should serve, as memory serves each of us individually, to warn, or guide, or inspire. A people which has grown up cannot know too thoroughly the few transcendent or typical facts in the period of its childhood and adolescence. The outlines, at least, we expect every child to learn at school; and by statues and monuments we record great men and special occasions: but it is in our holidays that we can best set forth the few and simple, but indispensable, elements of our national being.
The calendar of every religion, with its fasts and festivals, proves the great value, as a stimulus to worship, of an ordered system of celebrations. Each significant event in the career of the founder of a religion has its special day; each saint, whose life exemplified some shining virtue, has his special remembrance; and these festivals, continually recurring, enable the members of that religion to keep always before them the concrete evidences of their faith. We cannot doubt that our national holidays might serve in similar fashion as a stimulus to enlightened patriotism.
The time has come, indeed, when the elements in our national growth stand out perfectly plain. What are they ? They are Liberty, Independence, Union. Our ancestors, who first protested against George III’s unjust taxation, and then resisted it, and finally, in 1775;, took up arms, had in view one great object, — Liberty. If that had been granted them, it is unlikely that they would have asked for more. But, after the struggle began, they realized that Liberty involved Independence, and so they pressed on and won both. The Revolutionary War left the Thirteen Colonies free and independent, but confronted by the problem of their future mutual relations. Should they form a federation, an alliance, a league, or should each try to go it alone ? After much discussion they agreed to be bound together in a union. But from the start, the nature of this compact was disputed: one party held that the Union was indissoluble, the other that its constituent members might secede at pleasure; and only after two generations of debate, and four years of civil war, were the partisans of secession defeated. Since 1865, Union has been recognized as the third vital element in the growth of the United States.
Liberty, Independence, Union, — we ought to honor these three cardinal principles by yearly commemoration. In fact, however, only Independence has its special festival, although Independence is intrinsically not more important than either of the others. But in some parts of the country, two days are already observed as holidays which might most appropriately and without any wrench be dedicated to Liberty and Union.
Massachusetts now celebrates the Nineteenth of April, the anniversary of the battle at Lexington and Concord, as Patriots’ Day. Up to a dozen years ago, the first Thursday in April had been set apart in that state as a day of fasting and prayer. But in the course of time its religious character faded out, and Past Day became a very secular feast, on which the first outdoor sports were played, and house-hunters scoured the suburbs for summer cottages. So the pretense of solemnity was abandoned, and the Nineteenth of April was pitched upon as the date of the regular spring holiday. Who dubbed it “Patriots’Day,” a title without historic patness, does not appear. Any date on which a battle was fought, Bennington, Lundy’s Lane, Antietam, Chickamauga, or a hundred others, might presumably, with equal reason, be called “Patriots’ Day.” In strict truth, the men who resisted the British troops at Concord and Lexington were not patriots, for they were fighting, not for their country, but for Liberty. Accordingly, the Nineteenth of April ought to be observed as Liberty Day; and since, as the sequel proved, the shot fired by the embattled farmers was heard round the world, and their resistance led to the Revolution, and this to the formation of the United States, Liberty Day ought to be a national festival.
To commemorate Union, we need only change the name and amplify the scope of Memorial or Decoration Day, which originated soon after the close of the Civil War in the beautiful custom of strewing with flowers the graves of the men, North and South, who had fallen in the conflict. Personal bereavement, poignant grief, inspired the earliest strewing of graves. It was a day of mourning, when mothers and wives and sweethearts and comrades paid visible tribute to their dear ones unreturning. But gradually the character of the occasion changed. The sense of loss, if not assuaged, was no longer an overmastering emotion. The very decoration of the graves became more formal and less personal, left in charge of veteran posts, instead of being the spontaneous offering of family and friends. A new generation grew up, to which the war was, happily, only an historic event, and now, more than forty years after its end, Memorial Day, notwithstanding the impressiveness of its ceremonies and the pathos of the dwindling ranks of survivors, is turning into a genuine holiday, on which nine tenths of our people, unmindful of the dead whom they never saw, seek the woods and fields and shore, in their magic May glory, and are glad to be alive. In another decade or two the survivors themselves will be too few and too feeble to observe the day; and then the graves will no more be strewn with flowers, and the original motive — the personal motive — will vanish.
But to stop at private bereavement over the loss of the dead soldier is to belittle him and us. He fell, but he fell in behalf of a great cause, and it is on that cause — on the purpose of his fighting and the issue of the war — that we should fix our attention. His deeds were public, of national import, however private the grief of his friends at his death. The outcome of the Civil War has been to establish Union as the vital principle which binds together all members of the American Republic. The men of the South fought valiantly for their contention that the bond was only partial, terminable at the pleasure of any constituent state; the men of the North maintained that the Union should be “one and inseparable,” “now and forever.” The party of the Union triumphed, and there is to-day no American, whether he dwell North or South, along the Atlantic coast or on the Pacific, who does not rejoice that the Civil War had this result. Therefore let us convert Memorial Day into Union Day, and in so doing simply recognize the change from private grief to public joy and thanksgiving, which Time has wrought in our view of the great conflict. Let us emphasize the immeasurable benefits achieved through the final acceptance of Union as an indestructible element of our national life, and thereby deepen our sense of fellowship and mutual responsibility. If we understood what Union means, we should see that one section cannot prosper at the expense of another, and we should not tolerate the greed of one state, nor the ascendency of special interests, in making our laws or in administering them.
Thus have Liberty, Independence, and Union emerged as the three historic elements in our national structure. But no country, least of all a republic, can endure unless it can rely upon the patriotism of its citizens. Patriotism is preeminently the civic virtue. It manifests itself in many ways, — on the battlefield in time of war; in the council, at the caucus, at the polls, in time of peace. It shrinks neither from unpopularity nor fatigues in exposing abuses and in resisting corruption. Personal ambition cannot seduce it; private gain cannot pollute. For the essence of Patriotism is unselfish devotion to the country’s welfare. The beauty of the service of this virtue, and the obligations we are all under to serve it loyally, cannot be too often impressed upon us. Happily, we Americans have in Washington the ideal patriot, and his birthday, which has been honored for generations, is properly our Feast of Patriotism. Virtue gains a hundredfold when it teaches by example. In Washington, Patriotism became incarnate; he illustrated by his conduct how it should inspire volunteer and Commander-in-chief, humblest voter and President. It is superfluous and unhistoric, if not impertinent, to go on assigning the Nineteenth of April to Patriots in general, when the Twenty-second of February is already consecrated to Washington, the world’s model of Patriotism.
Liberty, Independence, Union, Patriotism, — these ought to be blazoned in our national calendar. But there are two other facts, antedating our existence as a nation, which we must not ignore.
First, there is the Discovery of America. October Twelfth, the anniversary of that event, might well be made a festival, and called Columbus Day. Its celebration would serve to inform our latest generations not only about the actual exploit of the indomitable Genoese, but. about the European conditions out of which the New World was peopled, and the part which the New World has played in the evolution of mankind. Every American is an immigrant, either in his person or in his ancestors; and as our population has become polyglot, if not cosmopolitan, the proper observance of Columbus Day would help to teach the newcomers some of the principles of Americanism, and it would remind our scions of older stock that the American of to-day is no longer of British or even of Germanic derivation, and that the American of the future will be the product of the vast mingling, for which history shows no counterpart, of tribes and peoples and races, that is now going on.
Finally, there is Religious Toleration, the cornerstone of the American nation, without which our state-builders would have builded in vain. All our political and civic life, not less than our school and church and social life, presupposes this basis. Freedom to worship God according to each worshiper’s conscience is our inestimable bequest from the Puritans. They came to Plymouth and Boston, indeed, in order to be free to worship according to their conscience only; they set up a theocracy; they hoped to keep heretics out of their orthodox sheepfold. But inevitably the principle of religious freedom which they demanded for themselves permeated and transformed their commonwealth, and led to toleration, a blessing which we have so long enjoyed that we scarcely realize what it cost, or how essential it is to our national existence. We cannot guard it too jealously, nor give it too free a rein in guiding our private lives.
Thanksgiving Day, the most ancient of our holidays, with its Puritan associations, is the fittest day on which to celebrate Religious Toleration, which sprang from Puritanism, as a life-giving fruit tree springs from a stony seed. The earliest colonists gave thanks that their lives had been spared, or that a good crop put away the fear of famine; we should give thanks that we have inherited from them the priceless boon of Toleration.
Our historic holidays, therefore, named in their proper chronological sequence, should be Columbus Day, Thanksgiving (Toleration) Day, Liberty Day, Independence Day, Washington’s Birthday (Patriotism), and Union Day. If the time comes when the much-talked-of and much-desired friendship between Britain and the United States shall be celebrated in an annual festival, the Twelfth of February, the day on which in 1809 Darwin was born in England and Lincoln was born in America, might most fittingly be chosen; for Lincoln and Darwin were the highest representatives in the nineteenth century of the Anglo-Saxon race.
Meanwhile, let us Americans take care to keep constantly before us the vital principles on which our national life depends. Let us insist that at least once a year each of these principles shall be duly commemorated. Self-knowledge and experience are as indispensable to nations as to individuals. History teaches us both. When we have clearly fixed in our minds the very elements of the Republic’s existence, we shall have a criterion for judging every political act, and every proposed measure. We shall confront it with the ideal of Liberty, or of Union, or of Toleration, and approve or condemn it accordingly. A nation which understands itself pursues the line of its genius, with the added momentum of its past achievements. Only by returning frequently to the fountainhead of our ideals can we understand our national genius and keep our own action pure. Whoever has had a vision of these American ideals in their original beauty and power, him neither the whine of Anglomaniacs nor the croak of pessimists can disturb. But he knows that these ideals can be realized only through the unflagging devotion of intelligent Americans. Moreover, since we can rely little on tradition, because our population is being continually increased by foreigners utterly ignorant of American traditions, we must neglect no means to provide a substitute for it. The efficacy of holidays as such a means is clear.