Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Time to appreciate past U.S. presidents
Take a Presidents Day break from Trump mania, and honor the history of America’s previous presidents.
In the modern vernacular our current three-day holiday is called Presidents Day weekend.
Although that moniker is technically incorrect, the purveyors of mattresses, automobiles, furniture, hotel rooms and ski equipment who conduct “massive, monumental, revolutionary” sales using that name say otherwise.
Certainly, there has been a great deal of presidential news since the nation last celebrated one of these holidays.
Last year at this time we were in the throes of raucous presidential preference primaries in which it seemed that nearly every significant Republican on the planet was vying to be that party’s nominee.
Each took his or her turn at trying to knock off the novelty front-runner — Donald Trump.
The conventional political wisdom then was that Trump couldn’t possibly win, so it was a matter of which candidate would stop him.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were engaged in their own bit of drama.
Hillary Clinton, the presumed nominee, was engaged in a surprisingly difficult little tussle with Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Of course, she and Trump both prevailed and met each other in what turned out to be a particularly nasty and unconventional political battle.
While Clinton’s campaign watched the polls, Trump’s focused on Electoral College votes.
Much to the shock of many, he earned enough to pull off one of the biggest upsets in modern history.
It has been a whirlwind since. The attention on Trump is nearly nonstop. `
But today’s holiday is meant to honor presidential contributions that date back a little farther.
The holiday’s specific date has little significance as it falls on different dates each year because it is always on the third Monday in February, thus guaranteeing a three-day weekend.
In 1968, Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which officially took effect in 1971 following an executive order from President Richard Nixon.
The act shifted Washington’s Birthday holiday from Feb. 22 — Washington’s actual birthday — to the third Monday of February. The nation had unofficially observed Feb. 22 as a holiday from 1800 — the year after Washington’s death — until 1879, when President Rutherford B. Hayes signed a bill making it an official national holiday.
Sponsors of the 1968 bill wanted to call it Presidents Day because Abraham Lincoln’s Feb. 12 birthday was celebrated as a holiday in many states.
But Virginia senators — Washington’s home state — objected loudly. The holiday name technically has remained as Washington’s Birthday.
But over time many states began calling it Presidents Day.
And it is no longer about just one man, or, for that matter, even two.
So this Presidents Day weekend let’s take a short break from our Trump obsession and take the time to be grateful that we live in a country that has effectively transferred presidential power for more than two centuries.
That’s something worth celebrating.
Take a Presidents Day break today from Trump mania and honor the history of our nation’s leaders.