Opinion: Is it Washington's holiday or do we celebrate all 45 presidents?

A painting of a man in a Revolutionary War dress uniform on a white horse, with others in the background

By Virginia Heffernan

Feb. 19, 2024 3 AM PT

On calendars, it’s Presidents’ Day, or no apostrophe: Presidents Day. To the federal government, it’s Washington’s Birthday. But California really gets festive. California lists the holiday as “The third Monday in February.”

Banks, schools and nonessential government offices are closed. Most of us get the day off. But does anyone really celebrate this occasion that goes by more than a dozen different names, depending on what state you’re in?

Primerrily, an anti-woke resource site for patriotic families, encourages kids to use their Monday off to bake presidential treats, like Zachary Taylor’s beignets and Grover Cleveland’s Snickerdoodles. The site also proposes kids sing the presidential anthem.

Hail to the Chief, as we pledge cooperation / In proud fulfillment of a great, noble call!

That’s a lyric few can pull off. In an era when many of us pledge not to collaborate with the president but to thwart him at every turn, “Hail to the Chief” no longer slaps. Or even seems to belong on the playlist at all.

Celebrating all the presidents in a daylong gulp is impractical, no matter your politics. In fact, the transformation of Washington’s Birthday to Presidents Day seems to have hollowed out the holiday’s meaning altogether, making it synonymous more with mattress sales than with the 45 men who happened to have served, well or poorly, as the nation’s chief executive over the last 235 years.

The reason for the holiday’s date is that George Washington was born on Feb. 22, 1732, close to 300 years ago. Washington, of course, is the father of our country, a patriarch squared. Also, of course, an enslaver and usurper of Native lands. He personally held 123 humans in bondage at the time of his death.

He was a general and statesman. After leading the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War, Washington oversaw the drafting of the Constitution, established the federal government and served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797.

He’s a fellow worth contemplating. He carried out the commitments of the Declaration of Independence, which rejected monarchy and held that all men are created equal. Then the Constitution, which he signed, dropped the equality bit and ennobled property rights, counting some humans as chattel.

One way to spend the holiday might be to discuss Washington’s bifurcated legacy. Or maybe just text someone about it? And by all means, beignets.

As with Shakespeare, who wasn’t revered as the English GOAT until some 150 years after his death, Washington wasn’t figured the full American GOAT right away. In 1869, his face was engraved on the dollar bill. In 1879, his birthday became a national holiday. In 1884, the Washington Monument was completed.

All of that followed the Civil War. In celebrating Washington, therefore, we’re recalling not just the founding of the nation, but the refounding. We’re revisiting the national myth-making that was meant to tie the Union back together after it was torn apart.

Washington was Southern, after all, a son of Virginia, where the Confederacy was headquartered. Canonizing him right after the Civil War, with a monument designed by Robert Mills of South Carolina, can be seen as an effort to assure the broken nation that the United States didn’t just belong to abolitionists and industrialists, who’d so recently been victorious at war. Southern farmers made the nation too.

But in the 1870s another dead folk hero — very different and much more controversial — rose up the pop charts just as Washington was getting his dollars.

In 1873 or 1874, Julius Francis, a druggist in Buffalo, N.Y., started celebrating Abraham Lincoln’s Feb. 12 birthday. He petitioned Congress to make it a federal holiday — but today only California, Connecticut, Illinois, Missouri and New York observe it officially as a standalone holiday. (In California, it mostly amounts to closed courtrooms.) Four other states fold Lincoln in with Washington in a third-Monday-in-February event, calling the occasion Washington–Lincoln Day (Colorado, Ohio), Washington’s and Lincoln’s Birthday (Minnesota), and Washington and Lincoln’s Day (Utah).

Black History Month, celebrated in February, also has its origins in 19th century celebrations of Lincoln’s birthday on the 12th, and the abolitionist Frederick Douglass’ birthday on the 14th.

In one year, 1939, Washington’s Birthday was claimed by American Nazis, who held a “true Americanism” event in New York City on Feb. 20 featuring an image of the first president flanked by swastikas and the Stars and Stripes.

Various headstrong states go their own way in February. Alabama leaves out Lincoln and gives the third Monday to Washington and fellow Southerner Thomas Jefferson, though Jefferson was born in April. Nine states don’t have it on their official calendars at all, including Florida, North Carolina and Kentucky (where Lincoln was born).

Most people, however, know the day as Presidents Day, with or without the apostrophe, which seems to wander aimlessly. One way or the other, you can huzzah for Washington and/or Lincoln, or for every president on the place mat.

But even allowing for Apostrophe Confusion Syndrome — which dogs many holidays — we’re really mostly talking about the big guy.

And it’s not Millard Filmore, Franklin Pierce or John Tyler. It’s not whoever you’re voting for in November.

It’s Washington.

Still, the man himself enjoined Americans “to guard against the impostures of pretended patriotism,” so go easy on the powdered wigs.

And then there’s Washington’s memorable description of a bad bed: “a Little Straw—Matted together [and] one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight in Vermin such as Lice and Fleas etc.”

A new mattress might be the best way to celebrate after all.

Virginia Heffernan is a regular contributor to Wired and writes a newsletter, Magic and Loss, at virginiaheffernan.substack.com.