Joanne Freeman:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Joanne Freeman.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

Today, we’re going to do something that might seem obvious, but I think is going to be a much more interesting and telling story than you might assume. Obviously, we were just coming out of celebrating July 4th, and we just saw the creation of a new holiday Juneteenth. So for both of those reasons, we thought that this episode would be a good time to explore holidays and actually national holidays in particular. To look at some of the ways in which holidays came about, to look at how federal holidays come to be, and to look at what they mean to American citizens and to how we think about the nation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the fun part about this when we first decided to do this episode was realizing how little we actually knew about the creation of federal holidays and why they were important.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true. We kept saying, “Hey, wait a minute. Do you know this?” No.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. Like why are they all on Mondays?

Joanne Freeman:

Right.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which we’re going to tell you.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Logical questions, but we had to find them out too.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So let’s start by pointing out that the new holiday that we just got, which has signed into legislation on June 17th, Juneteenth is our first national holiday since we got the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday in 1983.

Joanne Freeman:

And thus my thought at the beginning here is that people aren’t actually aware of the fact that you can create holidays, although that’s been controversial over time. So let’s start out by talking about that basic fact. What is a federal holiday? What is the history behind the process that led up to Juneteenth? Juneteenth being really a day to commemorate and I suppose celebrate the ending of slavery, emancipation. Something that people have been trying for a time to get passed as a holiday. A woman named Opal Lee had been trying for a very long time, an activist to get this passed. So there are some wonderful photographs of her floating around online enjoying the happening the creation of the day that she worked so hard to get

Heather Cox Richardson:

Didn’t she walk from Texas to Washington D.C.?

Joanne Freeman:

She did. She did.

Heather Cox Richardson:

When she was in her eighties?

Joanne Freeman:

She was quite old when she did it. She walked to make a point.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But one of the things I think that’s interesting I think about looking at Juneteenth in this moment in the way that we’re hoping to look at it today is the degree to which it brings to the fore a number of themes about federal holidays that really seem to run through all of them.

So it’s this idea that we are changing the way we think about our past. And we are celebrating in American history not simply at the founding for example, as we’ll talk about of the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, but rather the idea of human freedom, which I just love. But one of the other themes about Juneteenth that I really like is the fact that one of the opponents of establishing a holiday, Ron Johnson, a Republican of Wisconsin objected to making it a holiday initially, because he said it was a waste of taxpayer money. And the theme of taxpayer money as a way to stop changes in our celebrations because they change the meaning of what America is supposed to be is one that I really didn’t see coming. And I’m fascinated by the idea that rather than standing up and saying, “Hey, I don’t want to celebrate this.” They say, “No, this will be a waste of taxpayer money because we will be paying federal workers without them showing up to work.”

Joanne Freeman:

But that’s such a, what’s the word I’m looking for?

Heather Cox Richardson:

I think we all know the word you’re looking for.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s true. It is that. It is such an easy way and seemingly politically correct way to protest against something that you don’t want to happen is to claim that it’s going to be economically too costly, because we’ll be paying federal employees. Now of course, the pushback on that could be if you have a holiday, then tourism probably goes up, travel goes up. So there are other ways in which money is flowing with these holidays. So it’s kind of a non-starter. Although as you just suggested Heather, it’s a non-starter that keeps starting several times when holidays are proposed.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And Johnson ended up removing that objection, although there were other objections of course to Juneteenth. But the focus on money is a really interesting one as we push forward, because it is surprising how many ways the question of money comes into the celebration of our country.

In fact, we get federal holidays in 1870, actually for a financial reason. Which makes complete sense once you know the story, and that’s that many states were already celebrating or taking the day off on Christmas Day, December 25th, New Year’s Day, January 1st, which used to be a huge holiday, especially in cities. There’s a great course to be taught someday on celebrations of New Year’s Day in New York City and Boston. And then the 4th of July. And that was a huge problem for bankers in Washington, D.C., because they didn’t have the day off while banks were closed elsewhere. And this caused a problem for their financial records. So for example if you had a contract that was due to end on one of those days, you didn’t have somebody on the other side who could go ahead and do the other half of it.

So what you get in June of 1870 is Congress going ahead and saying, “Hey, let’s make Washington D.C. honor this state practice already so that our bankers aren’t caught in this weird snarl.” So the contracts actually ended the day before those holidays legally so that the bankers in Washington, D.C., weren’t at a disadvantage compared to the bankers in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s fascinating is that in the actual resolution that is brought up, that this is very much about bills of, and bank checks, and promissory notes. That that very much is at the center of the creation of these holidays. Which again, it’s one thing to say it. It’s another thing to include it in the actual legislation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it’s actually perfect in terms of thinking about what a federal holiday is. Because think about how this reflects the moment. You’ve got the rise of national banking after the Civil War, you’ve got Grant, who’s the president in 1870 being intimately connected to the banking industry, especially in New York City. Of course, he’s the one who’s going to step up and say, “Yeah, let’s fix this for the bankers because we really need to.” So the origin of our federal holidays actually comes from two things that are going to be themes throughout the idea of celebrating federal holidays. One is honoring something the states already do in a sort of pell-mell fashion. And two, there’s a financial component to a lot of these. And I don’t mean necessarily profits, although we’re going to get to that. But also the idea of somehow making sure that how we celebrate our nation intersects with our financial structures.

Joanne Freeman:

The other thing that’s interesting about that pattern is the way that federal holidays are created really highlight pretty much the internal structure of our government, right? And number one, it shows that Congress really is a reactive institution often. That it in this case is reacting to things that are already going on in the states. And along the same lines, it’s really a great demonstration of federalism, small F federalism in action, right? There are some things happening on a state level, and some things happening on a national level. And in one way or another, that often hopefully usually sorts itself out.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the other thing comes up here is why Mondays?

Joanne Freeman:

And there is an explanation for that. And it has the very conveniently titled name. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which was passed in June of 1968. And what’s interesting about it is it’s partly a response to lobbying groups, and in particular one that was titled NATO, which is not the NATO that you think, but actually the National Association of Travel Organizations. And they were urging for Monday holidays for along the lines of what we’ve already mentioned once, which is travel, tourism, the spending of money for the kinds of things that a travel organization would like would go up if a Monday holiday tacked onto a weekend was the norm.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the fun thing about this creation of this new idea of holidays on Mondays that I particularly liked was first of all, the argument that it would slow down traffic fatalities as people no longer had to rush to and from the beach or grandmother’s house in a single day, as one person said. They argued that it would actually help business and help workers by not throwing holidays randomly in the middle of weeks.

But my favorite justification for the argument that we should have our holidays on Monday was that we were living in such a traumatic time in 1968, that we needed all the help we could get. So actually, the president of the National Association of Travel Organizations, a man named Clarence Arata actually said, “We are living in a time when shocks and pressures threaten to blow every safety valve that nature built into our systems. Besides being a boon to the travel business,” which of course is what he cares about, “These five Monday holidays will be a better tranquilizer than any doctor’s prescription.” And you know what? He kind of had a point. I love our Monday holidays.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of the congressmen who supported the idea of moving Washington’s birthday, and Memorial Day, and Veteran’s Day all to Mondays was a Democrat from New York, a guy named Samuel Stratton who said, “By passing this legislation, we will become the working girl’s friend for life.”

Joanne Freeman:

Now I have to say Heather that when I first saw that quote, I actually was so irritated by it, that I had decided I was not going to read it. So I’m very glad you did. It sort of for some reason, got me to fist waving irritation. But yes, it does indeed very much show the spirit of that particular moment in time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All right. So at this time we got holidays. We have first of all, the idea that we have to make sure that banks all over the country operate on the same schedule, and we have to try and make sure people have a safety valve and make sure that they bring in a lot of money tourism. Let’s take a number of holidays here and talk about how they’ve changed the way we think about America. So let’s start with the fourth, since we just celebrated it. Nothing important happened on the fourth of course. So maybe we should just skip that and go right to the late 19th century.

Joanne Freeman:

Very funny. You reconstruction historian you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I just can’t resist.

Joanne Freeman:

I know you can’t resist. I was just waiting to see what form it would take.

Heather Cox Richardson:

All right, but let’s be fair. How often do I get to tease anybody about history?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, early American history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s a little specialized.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, it is. It is. I will play that role. So indeed. July 4th, we did just celebrate it. And it is without question, a big holiday. So let’s start out by talking about that one a little. And one of the main things to talk about would be why do we celebrate July 4th when the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 2nd? Which is indeed the fact. July 2nd, 1776 in the Second Continental Congress.

The reason has to do with when the declaration was printed up and distributed. On the document itself when that happened two days later, it’s dated July 4th. So the reason why we celebrate the holiday on July 4th is because it’s in writing, which I kind of love. There’s a long-standing American tradition of constitutions and rights in writing. They want to see them on paper. So it makes perfect sense that we take in a sense, what many consider to be the national birthday from the document itself rather than from the day when independence was officially declared.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So I always look at that and think pictures or it didn’t happen. Because I totally agree with you, but it’s sort of a 1776 version of, “Yeah right. Pictures or it didn’t happen.”

You know me. I’m all about how do things actually happen. I once asked Pauline Maier, who’s a leading historian of the American revolution, how did people actually hear about the declaration? And she said, “Well, they made copies of it. They made the first official copies. And then there were knockoff copies from that. And people would take them and put them in their saddlebags or on their ships and take them to harbors, and to ride them out from the harbors. And then they would go to central places and read them.” So where people talk about they read the Declaration of Independence here. When I was a little kid, I really thought they were taking the Declaration of Independence all around the country. And they would read there and people would gather. And it was sort of this national moment where people were all reading the same document. And of course up here on the coast of Maine, we have a place where a declaration was read.

And that idea that they were all participating in one thing and that they were going to continue to celebrate that, I actually find that profoundly moving. And I love the idea of these documents going person by person from a dock, to a ship, to a boat, to another dock, to somebody on a horse, to running up the steps saying, “I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” And everybody crowding in to hear it. I guess maybe it’s a wonder that that kind of celebration is held all these years. But it’s kind of what we still do on the 4th of July when we can and there’s not a pandemic is gather. And actually in my family, we still read the declaration.

Joanne Freeman:

Do you really? Is that something you’ve always done?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, we do. Well not always, not when the kids were little. But yes. And they used to think it was complete torture. But it wasn’t just us. A lot of people would come to the house and we would read it. And yes, it’s quite long for little kids. And I kind of thought okay, I’m a mother who’s really gone over the edge here. And the year I tried not to do it, they were like, “Well, why don’t we read the declaration?” I’m like, “In a half an hour, as soon as I find it.”

Joanne Freeman:

That is good historian parenting right there.

Heather Cox Richardson:

They all became scientists.

Joanne Freeman:

Well still. They’ve got the important training at their, at their core. But what I also appreciate about that same idea, that same moment is that the Declaration of Independence wasn’t just a piece of paper. It was an act. It commemorated an act and it became an act. When you gathered around and you listened to it being read, you heard the fact of independence. That became a moment that people were engaged in. So it’s easy to dismiss documents and particularly all capital letters, founding documents as just documents. But in this particular case, perhaps more than many, it wasn’t just a piece of paper. It represented an act. And when you took part in the reading, you were taking part in an act as well.

And the interesting thing is too that the declaration was signed on the second, but it’s July 4th that we celebrate is that by the time of their deaths, many of the founders themselves were really focused on the fourth as the important date. And as a matter of fact, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4th, 1826, the 50th anniversary obviously to the day of the document coming out. But they at that point, Adams and Jefferson were celebrating the fourth as the important day to the point that Jefferson was I gathered drifting in and out of consciousness of his last few days. And whenever he regained consciousness on his death bed, he would say, “Is it the fourth yet?” So he literally was staging his death so that he could die on the fourth. So by the end of their lives, really it’s obviously July 4th is the day.

But originally on July 2nd, I have to read this wonderful quote from John Adams. It’s a famous quote, but it really sort of captures the spirit of July 4th in a lot of ways that would end up being true. So Adams says, “The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other,” which is interesting. “From this time forward, forevermore. You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not. I am well aware of the toll, and blood, and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend these states. Yet through all the gloom, I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory.” And I have to pause there because I know there are people out there who like me, know every word of the play/movie 1776, and they will recognize those lines. “I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory,” from the soundtrack/musical.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I’m sorry. I’m laughing at you here, all three of you who know the words to that.

Joanne Freeman:

You held up three fingers I know. I say what I often say, which is…do you know that when I said once in my American revolution course, which is a big lecture course-

Heather Cox Richardson:

I love winding you up.

Joanne Freeman:

You do, and it’s easy. I’m like the auto-emoter on this. I’ll just emote on command. I have a big American revolution lecture course, like 100 students. And when I said once 1776 is a good bad movie, the students got very upset. It was a good movie. So there are young people today who still share enthusiasm. So it’s got to be at least 100, if not three. No really, it actually still has some popularity. But yes, I will acknowledge it’s a niche group of people.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So one of our more famous celebrations of the 4th of July is in 1852 when Frederick Douglas, a formerly enslaved person gives a phenomenal speech on the day after the fourth, on the 5th of July, 1852, in which the speech is titled What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? And of course, he’s a brilliant writer. And he goes, and he gives us great [inaudible 00:18:50] to how wonderful the framers were. He talks repeatedly about, “Your fathers.” And it’s interesting the way he does it because he really keeps hitting the words your fathers. And the first half of that speech is about how your fathers went ahead and they recognized an unjust situation.

He has this great line where he says, “Oppression makes a wise man mad.” And he goes ahead and gives this long talk about how great the framers were. And he says, “Finally, fellow citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this Republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men. They were great men too, great enough to give fame to a great age. It does not often happen to a nation to raise at one time such a number of truly great men. The point from which I am compelled to view them is not certainly the most favorable. And yet, I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration. They were statesmen, Patriots and heroes. And for the good they did and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”

And then he goes on to say, “What am I doing here then? I’m a formerly enslaved person, and I don’t have any rights in this country, which still practices human enslavement.” He says, “My business if I have any here today is with the present.” And then he goes on and says, “Fellow citizens, pardon me. Allow me to ask why I am called upon to speak here today. What have I or those I represent to do with your national independence?” And then he goes on to talk about how African Americans are not included in the Declaration of Independence. And he says, “Above your national tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains heavy and grievous yesterday are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”

The use of that moment to say, “Yeah, those are great principles. And the framers who came up with those principles are fabulous. But what about Black Americans?” Is again, a touchstone moment in our country. This very famous speech in which I suspect you didn’t realize it would still be one of the top speeches from our July 4th celebrations, but one that really hits to the heart of what is going on with that celebration.

Joanne Freeman:

Now what’s fascinating is that that tradition that Frederick Douglas in a sense initiated of using July 4th as a day to on the one hand commemorate and celebrate some of what did happen, but really powerfully mark what hasn’t happened yet or who isn’t really included in that celebration. That’s a tradition that begins and continues. And another striking example of it is in the 1876 Centennial celebration of the United States. And there was a huge exposition in Philadelphia with pavilions and all kinds of examples of mechanics and other ways in which the United States was booming ahead, and full of prosperity, and a leading nation.

On July 4th, 1876, they of course had a celebration there, and a ceremony. Susan B. Anthony wanted to be part of that and was basically denied an opportunity to speak. At her insistence, she was given at least a place to sit on the platform. But when the moment was right in the ceremony, she actually pushed her way to the front of the platform and began reading a portion of her Declaration of the Rights of Women. “While the nation is buoyant with patriotism and all hearts are attuned to praise, it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note on this 100th anniversary of our country’s birth. When subjects of kings, emperors, and czars from the old world join in our national Jubilee, shall the women of the republic refuse to lay their hands with benedictions on the nation’s head. Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776. Not only as abstract truths, but as the cornerstones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget even in this glad hour that while all men of every race, and climb, and condition have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement.”

So again, really powerful statement that she pushes her way into being able to give, showing the power of the holiday by showing the power of standing up and saying, “People aren’t included in this, and it matters.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then we can jump forward 100 years to the bicentennial, the 1976 bicentennial. Which at first President Lyndon Johnson in 1966 said, “Hey, we’re going to have to do something to celebrate this.” And he set up the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. All good. All systems go, right? And the Nixon is elected in 1968, 2 years later. And he changes the meaning of the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission from looking at the era the way it had been set up, and decides that basically he’s going to make it just his term at office.

Joanne Freeman:

Wait a minute. I have to pause do actually laugh at that without more words. Because just, I don’t know what the chutzpah, the hubris. “We’re going to use it to celebrate me,” in essence.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and that’s exactly what happened. He put in charge of it at an executive, a guy named Jack Levant, who actually went ahead and made it very clear that he wanted to use the bicentennial to celebrate Nixon. He says that he wanted to have control over the way that the holiday was being celebrated, and he calls it, “The greatest opportunity Nixon, the party, and the government has as a beacon of light for reunification within the nation and the world.” And of course this creates all kinds of firestorm, and the House Judiciary Committee starts to hold hearings on how it’s being politicized. The committee gets disbanded and it gets replaced by a different committee called the American Revolution Bicentennial Association. And in the process of trying to celebrate 1776, what the American Revolution Bicentennial Association does is rather than trying to centralize the celebration after what had happened to Nixon, they go ahead and decentralize it. So they allow private businesses to take over a lot of the planning and they try and decentralize the whole thing.

And what quickly happens of course is a number of places celebrate the bicentennial in ways that are important, that actually includes a lot of voices in the bicentennial that might not otherwise have been included. And perhaps, we’ll talk more about for example, the reenactors. So there’s a lot happening at the local level. It also gets commercialized very quickly. So you may remember all the Coke cans for example, and things that were actually bicentennial items. And interestingly enough, I remember the bicentennial. And I remember all those advertising gimmicks. And as a kid, I didn’t recognize that that was unusual. I thought this was like, “This is great. All these companies really care about this.” And you’ll be proud to know that when I moved out of my mother’s house many, many years ago, I still had a Pepsi can. That was decorated for the bicentennial.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh Heather. I can’t even tell you what’s in my closet. But I knew that what was going on was special. And I needed to save every weird little thing that I could find. So all of those things that were crass commercialism, they were, “Look, history is everywhere,” to me. So indeed.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, there was a lot of that history is everything. Yes. And Ford used that, President Gerald Ford who took office after Nixon resigns in August of 1974, gave remarks on the bicentennial that recognized that it was a hard moment for Americans, and that the work, as Adams said all those years ago was going to be ongoing. He said …

President Gerald Ford (archival):

Liberty is a living flame to be fed, not dead ashes to be revered. Are the foundations laid in 1776 and 1789 still strong enough and sound enough to resist the tremors of our times? Are our God-given rights secure, our hard worn liberties protected?

Heather Cox Richardson:

So the next holiday that we wanted to take a look at was Columbus Day, because that is a holiday whose meaning has changed quite dramatically over time. So if you have the 4th of July meaning different things to different people, Columbus Day has changed dramatically, what it was intended to do and what it is now become.

So Columbus Day is one that fascinates me because the history of Columbus, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It’s one of the few dates in history I can remember solely because of that.

Of course, the arrival of Columbus and his sailors on the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria in The Bahamas is going to change world history. Although Columbus never actually set foot in North America, European settlers and Euro Americans went on in our history to celebrate the idea that he opened the way into these parts of the world.

Joanne Freeman:

The initial reason why Americans sort of pointed at him was they were constantly worried about how the new world seemed or could stand up in the face of the glories of the old world. And this was one way to claim that the new world had a history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But that’s actually not where we get a national celebration of Columbus Day, which is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which is one of the reasons that I’m always fascinated by this history.

In fact, in the late 19th century during reconstruction or during what many scholars still consider reconstruction, the influx of Italian immigrants to America most of whom were Catholic means that Italian immigrants are portrayed negatively in American history in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of stereotypes about them. And they get lynched. In 1891, a mob of about 20,000 New Orleans residents lynch 11 Italian Americans who have been incarcerated in a new Orleans jail. And when that happens, there’s actually an outcry from the Italian ambassador to America and from the Italian government. And in office at the time is Benjamin Harrison.

There’s a flurry of information between the Secretary of State and the president about what America should do about the fact that these Italians have been lynched. And one of the things that they do is they offer an indemnity to each of the victim’s families. Harrison called for a proclamation celebrating Columbus’ landing to be celebrated on October 21st. He intended for it to be a one-off deal, but it takes off in the Northern cities primarily. It takes off in cities where there is a large population of Italian immigrants and also Catholic immigrants. So Harrison says, “Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and enlightenment. The system of universal education is in our age the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of enlightenment. And it is particularly appropriate that the schools be made by the people in the center of the day’s demonstration.”

Well, what’s going to happen after this in the 1890s, and the sort of continuing recurrence of local celebrations of Columbus is in the early 20th century, the rise of the KU Klux Klan, especially in the North really hits Catholic communities very hard, Catholic and immigrant communities. Because the KKK in the 1920s focuses on immigrants as well as on Black Americans and on bootleggers, by the way as well.

So the immigrant communities begin to try and emphasize the degree to which they have built America. One of the fraternal organizations at the time the Knights of Columbus decides that they’re going to try and affect the way people think about American history, especially since they are increasingly under attack by members of the KKK. Who for example, begin to argue that in order to become a Knight of Columbus, you have to take an oath in which you promise that you’re going to make relentless war against all Protestants.

So they’re trying to say, “No of course that’s ridiculous. We’re not going to do this.” And they go ahead and they contract for a number of books in what was going to be called the Knights of Columbus Racial Contributions Series. And they’re emphasizing the role of immigrant Americans in our society and also Black Americans. And the reason I point that out is because there were only a few of these books ever published. But the one about Black Americans and the role that they have played in America was actually written by W. E. B. Du Bois. That’s The Gift of Black Folk if you know that book that was published by the Knights of Columbus in this racial contribution series that they did.

So in the process of trying to emphasize the role of non-white Americans in American history, they begin to celebrate Columbus. And they begin to have local celebrations primarily in New York City of Columbus, and of the idea that all people are welcome in America. It’s a deliberate attempt to push back against the KU Klux Klan. They increasingly begin to pressure the federal government to go ahead and recognize the importance of Italian Americans and Catholic Americans in society. And in 1934, FDR, who is desperate to try and solidify this new democratic coalition that he is building based on the idea of these New York City coalitions, he comes from New York. He goes ahead and he proclaims October 12th, Columbus Day, a national holiday. Now it’s different than an official federal holiday. Doesn’t give federal employees a day off for example. But it’s a step in that direction.

So that’s what the Columbus Day holiday was initially supposed to be. It was supposed to be an inclusive holiday that welcomed immigrants and welcomed all religions to America, but that’s going to change. And it’s going to change along with American history.

The dates are actually really interesting here because Lyndon Baines Johnson, LBJ goes ahead and establishes Columbus Day as part of the bill that gives us all those Monday holidays. He makes Columbus Day a federal holiday to fall on a Monday in 1968. And now think about what’s happening in 1968. The social justice movements of 1968.

Joanne Freeman:

We need that tranquilizer.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, that’s right. You know that’s exactly right. So Johnson actually when he establishes Columbus Day says, “This new holiday will henceforth honor one of our finest and most cherished national characteristics. Our ability to live and work together, men and women of all national origins as one United and progressive nation.”

Now less than 10 years later in 1977, the International NGO Conference on Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations in the Americas was held in Geneva, Switzerland. And one of the things that it did, of course it’s sponsored by the UN. And one of the things that it does is it gives out a declaration of the discrimination faced by indigenous peoples including about 100 Native American delegates who attend the conference. And at the end of the conference, they issue a series of recommendations. And one of the things that they say is that Americans should observe October 12th, which they identify as the day of the so-called discovery of America, as an international day of solidarity with the indigenous peoples of the Americas.

So all of a sudden, the holiday goes from being about inclusion, to being about focused on the intuition of Euro Americans into North America and the subsequent devastation of the indigenous population. So you’ve got a very quick switch there between ’68 and ’77. And of course since then, the meaning of Columbus Day has increasingly focused on the idea that it is an attack on indigenous people. And many states are refusing to celebrate Columbus Day, and instead celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day on that day.

In 1989, South Dakota starts to shift. South Dakota which of course has a very large population of Lakotas, switches the meaning of that holiday. And increasingly, there is going to be an attempt to change the meaning of Columbus Day and turning it into Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Again, a moment where you can take a look at what history means and what people think events mean and what commemoration means through these federal holidays.

Joanne Freeman:

Indeed. And to sort of add a little coda there that since 2014, there are actually 13 states now that have joined South Dakota in observing Indigenous Peoples’ Day. So we started out by talking about how Congress can be reactive in the sense, and how things start on a state level and then sometimes move to a national level when it comes to holidays. So it’ll be interesting to see how this continues to develop, because I think many people assume now that what exists now has always existed. And that’s not the case. Holidays have always been in flux. And Columbus Day is a particularly dramatic example of that.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I actually really love that. I love that our national holidays change. I mean, that’s the idea that you can learn and grow. And it’s reflected in the holidays that we as a nation celebrate. I think it’s totally cool.

Joanne Freeman:

I totally agree. And it shows thinking, and rethinking, and reprocessing. And even if we don’t always agree with where the thinking and reprocessing is going, I think it’s wonderful to see that kind of change.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that brings us to election day, which is a holiday that is currently on the table for celebration, and one that has really long roots in America. The idea of celebrating election day actually is a big deal in colonial New England with the celebration of election day with sermons. So many of the themes that we think of as American themes actually start long before there was an America, when there were simply British colonies on the East Coast.

Joanne Freeman:

What’s interesting about some of those election day sermons is that many of them were preaching the idea that you should vote and put people in office, and then step back, and get out of the way, and allow your betters, who you’ve given power to, to rule. So on the one hand, the idea of election, the process of election is seen as being supremely important. But it’s a very particular kind of election that’s being enacted and commemorated.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Getting tap to do the election sermon was a really big deal in colonial New England. And Boston was famous for its election day sermons. Other towns actually had them as well too. But people would come in to hear this very famous sermon of the year. And then the business of the colony would be covered, and people would vote on the direction of the colony going forward or the people who would take the colony in the direction going forward.

And then later on, it was kind of a gathering place. People would have a special election day cake that they made of yeast, and raisins, and sweet spices. And they would have the celebration. Well, one of the things that I love about the election day sermons is that again, they lay down so many of the themes that have come up in America again and again. And one of the ones that I actually teach, because I don’t think you can really do American history without it is the election sermon of 1670 from Samuel Danforth called the Errand into the Wilderness. It’s New England’s Errand into the Wilderness.

So the Puritans, he’s a Puritan. The Puritans begin to arrive in 1620. There’s going to be a huge migration between 1620 and 1630. By 1670 in the Errand into the Wilderness, Danforth’s theme is, “Oh boy. We screwed everything up. We used to be great, but now look what we’ve done. We’ve fallen away from where we were supposed to be. We’re not doing what we promised God we were going to do. And crucially, if we don’t get back to the way things used to be when things were really good, God is going to abandon us. And we’re no longer going to be different than anybody else.”

And I just love that because that is known as an American jeremiad. That first famous American jeremiad saying everything used to be better in the past is in 1670. That theme that these election day sermons saying that America is, of course it’s not America then. That this new experiment on this continent is great and that God is behind is going to be a theme of election day sermons going forward. But again, the idea that by 1670, they’re already saying, “Crap, it’s all downhill from there,” strikes me as being really important. Because America’s always got that, “Gee, things used to be better.” We need to work harder now to make sure things can be better in the future, because we’ve really fallen away from how we were in some unspecified past.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, what’s interesting is early on, election day was a really big deal. Even we’re talking in the United States, the end of the 18th century. It was a really big deal because it was hard to get to polling places. It’s not as though they were on every corner or even necessarily in every town. So sometimes, you had to travel a good ways to get to a polling place to be able to vote. So typically, the period around election time became something of a kind of celebration day when people would see people they hadn’t seen for a long time. And the people running for office would be I don’t want to say bribing, but offering a lot of alcohol and a variety of other kinds of foods to people in the hope that they would vote for them. It was kind of a mass celebration of sorts that the election brought about. But for that reason, in addition to the actual purpose of the election, they were a noteworthy event. It was a time that you looked forward to and that you ended up being in a mass crowd in a way that you typically weren’t.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The other thing that’s cool about Election Day and the idea of the Election Day, and one of the things that always jumps out at me is when you’re writing, when you’re copy editing, the word election day, the words election day are capitalized. It’s actually capitalized in the way we write those words, which suggests it’s something very special and a certain day. And the idea of getting a certain day that’s an election day is itself an interesting story because we get that in 1845. Which strikes me as being enormously early in a time as Joanne says, where everybody’s got to walk to the polling place or make an effort to get there. And people have different schedules. And we don’t really have really yet, we’re starting to get by 1845, but the idea of regimented clocks. I mean, that’s going to be a factor in American history in that moment where we start to do things by time, rather than by where the sun is.

But the idea that we get a day in 1845 that is known as election day is a reflection of concerns about cheating. They’re worried that because different places have votes on different times, that people can go from one state to another or from one town to another, and just continue to vote because they don’t really have good voting roles at the time. There isn’t yet a nationalized system of voting or even state systems in many places of counting. So the idea is that if everybody does it at the same time, you’re going to be able to make sure that somebody doesn’t hop from Maine to New Hampshire for example, and vote twice.

Joanne Freeman:

To me, one of the significant things about election day is obvious but worth stating. Is that in asking or thinking that it ought to be a holiday, it’s a holiday with a very concrete purpose, right? There are many foreign countries that already have that day off to enable people to vote as a civic duty. So on the one hand, you can talk about what some of the holidays we’ve been discussing today commemorate, or memorialize or rethink, rethink again.

The question about election day as a holiday is also bound up with voting and voting as a fundamental right. And so nowadays, when it’s once again come into conversation, should we have election day off or not? Should it be a holiday or not? It’s very much bound up in the discussion that we have now in a variety of different ways about voting rights. About allowing and broadening, as opposed to restricting voting rights. It ends up being part of that same conversation.

Now today, there are actually 11 states that offer holidays for election day. Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia. So 11 states are allowing for people to take time off work to go and vote. But you can see how kind of along the lines of what we just said about Columbus Day, touching on issues that have very much a lot to do with American identity, this too is connected to a hot button issue right now which is the fundamental issue of American politics, which is the right to vote. So it’ll be very interesting to see what happens with this as time goes on in the near future, and who has the power to determine what might happen with election day.

Heather Cox Richardson:

One of the things that I like about the debate over election day now is that it does pull up that idea that you stop federal holidays by complaining that they’re going to cost money. So in fact, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell took a stand against the idea of having election day, be a federal holiday when he said …

Mitch McConnell (archival):

“That’s what America needs, another paid holiday and a bunch of government workers being paid to go out and work.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that has led people to suggest instead of creating a new federal holiday for election day, rather simply to turn Veteran’s Day into election day. And I mean, it’s interesting to think about how we even ended up with a Tuesday in November as our current election day. And that’s of course because they didn’t want to do Sundays, which was the day of rest theoretically, where you could have put it because people were in church on that day. And because it takes a long time for people actually get to their county seats to vote, you had to give them enough time during the weekday to go ahead and get to the county seat to be able to vote. And in order to do that, you wanted to pick a time when there wasn’t going to be a lot of work to do around the farm.

So in the fall, after the harvest is in there’s a moment in early November when the roads are still passable, but people aren’t going to be stuck home on the farm harvesting. So we got this Tuesday in November. But there’s no reason in the modern day world with the public transportation, and the Interstate Highway Act, and the fact that most Americans no longer live on the farm to mean that it has to be on that certain Tuesday in November, even though it has sat there since 1845. We could in fact move it to something like Veteran’s Day.

Joanne Freeman:

Now at this point, I think looking back at what we’ve been talking about in this episode, I think some of the takeaways and some of them very directly get us right back to Juneteenth. Some of the takeaways in what we’ve been talking about is number one, it’s very clear to see that holidays, at least many of them in many ways are often bound up with questions about national identity. What people think America is, what people want America to be, what people are willing to say to fight for it to be what they want it to be. That American identity and celebrating holidays are very much part of the same whole.

Also, it’s interesting to note how often conflict of some kind or another is bound up either in the creation of the holidays, or in the celebration of the holidays. That even once a holiday is declared, or even if it’s not declared official, the celebration of it, bringing people together at a moment that is commemorating or declaring things that have to do with identity. By definition almost, that’s going to be a moment bound up in conflict.

So both of those things certainly can apply to the Juneteenth decision that just happened very recently as a matter of fact. That very obviously, it has a lot to do with national identity at this moment with questions of race. And there is a conflict bound up with although in this case less conflict than there could have been, which is nice, bound up with the creation of the holiday.

The other thing worth noting I think that we’ve been discussing today is just the degree to which holidays individually and as a whole shapeshift over time. That in the same way that they represent American identity and that they reflect what people think of America or want America to be, in a very logical way, that changes over time. And you can see that as a historian, speaking as a historian, if you look at the creation and celebration of holidays, you can see in concrete form this often kind of ethereal idea about what Americans think about America.

So it’s kind of nice after the creation of Juneteenth just after celebrating July 4th that we take this moment to step back and really think about the significance of these holidays, in addition to the fact that they often give us a day off and at least according to the preferences of some, get us to spend money.