We Americans are a resilient people, but like resilient people everywhere, we need the occasional interlude of rest and relaxation. Which is why after two weeks of something like a national nervous breakdown over equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee, we welcomed the approach of Labor Day, the traditional end-of-summer federal holiday that offered a three-day respite from drama.
Of course, the historic origins of Labor Day are lost in the mists of time, journeys home from the beach, and Toyotathons. Originally observed as a local tribute to the burgeoning labor union movement, Labor Day became a federal holiday during the administration of President Grover Cleveland (1894). The fact that less than 7 percent of workers in the private sector now belong to a labor union has not gone unnoticed—in the past few decades, union growth has been almost exclusively among government employees—but the persistence of Labor Day as a federal holiday represents the great American habits of adaptation and historical amnesia. Labor Day is now largely a three-day ritual interlude, signifying the unofficial commencement of another school year.
Yet there is trouble on the horizon. With Labor Day safely behind us, Americans are confronted with the uncomfortable fact that the next federal holiday on the swift-moving calendar (October 9) is Columbus Day, another late-19th-century inspiration now sunk deep in political controversy. Christopher Columbus used to be celebrated as the 15th-century Genoese adventurer-explorer who, seeking a seafaring trade route to China under the patronage of the Spanish throne, stumbled onto the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas. To be sure, he was not the first European to set foot on the American continent (hello, Leif Erikson!) but the Columbian expeditions were the first to take root in the New World.
Up until fairly recently, the European discovery of the Americas was regarded as a milestone in Western civilization, and Columbus was embraced by Italian-Americans as a national hero. But the latest interpretation of these events—that Columbus was an imperialist/genocidal buccaneer who brought disease, Christianity, and capitalism to America’s aboriginal inhabitants—will be familiar to anyone with some knowledge of current scholarly dogma. Accordingly, beginning with Berkeley in 1992, forward-looking cities and states across the country have moved to supplant Columbus Day with an Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Even the Italian-American mayor of New York seems prepared to discard the statue of Christopher Columbus and his eponymous circle, in Manhattan, focus of the annual Columbus Day parade in honor of his fellow Italian-Americans.
Indeed, a hurried glance at the federal calendar suggests that the discord will only intensify as the weather grows colder. Hard on the heels of Indigenous Peoples’ Day comes Thanksgiving, another sentimental observance of the English “encounter” with native tribes in Virginia and Massachusetts—which, of course, led to European expansion throughout the continent, internal conflict, the founding of the American republic, Manifest Destiny, and all that bad stuff. And Thanksgiving is followed by Christmas, a winter holiday in the Christian calendar marking the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, a religious milestone that is also a federal holiday in our increasingly secular state.
Observers may detect a pattern here: Objections to popular federal holidays tend to emanate from the political left; and as such cultural things go, the left often gets its way in due course. But there are other complications. The birthday of George Washington, for example, used to be a federal holiday that enjoyed widespread sanction in the land where he was traditionally regarded (in the words of Robert E. Lee’s father) as “first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.” But not necessarily: Washington’s status as a Southern slaveholder and promoter of westward expansion has called his various monuments and memorials into question. And in any case, passage of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act (1968)—which was intended to grant workers a reliable series of three-day weekends—effectively transmuted Washington’s Birthday into Presidents’ Day, on which Americans honor every commander in chief, from Washington and Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Pierce and Jimmy Carter. Indeed, the only individual in American history whose date of birth is now a federal holiday is neither Lincoln nor Washington, nor Susan B. Anthony nor Walt Whitman, but the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It would be tempting, at this juncture, to suggest that the only federal holidays devoid of impassioned dissent are the Fourth of July (on which the national consensus holds for the moment) and, perhaps, Veterans Day and Memorial Day. But of course, Memorial Day was originally intended to commemorate the Civil War dead—which, presumably, includes soldiers of the Confederacy—and Veterans Day grew from an observance of the World War I armistice into an all-purpose tribute to American armed forces. If the Pilgrim Fathers and Jamestown settlers now find themselves on the wrong side of history, how long will veterans be exempt from revision?
Philip Terzian is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
