Too Many Chiefs
by Hendrik Hertzberg
According to some of the calendars and appointment books floating around this office, Monday, February 19th, is Presidents’ Day. Others say it’s President’s Day. Still others opt for Presidents Day. Which is it? The bouncing apostrophe bespeaks a certain uncertainty. President’s Day suggests that only one holder of the nation’s supreme magistracy is being commemorated—presumably the first. Presidents’ Day hints at more than one, most likely the Sage of Mount Vernon plus Abraham Lincoln, generally agreed to be the greatest of them all. And Presidents Day, apostropheless, implies a promiscuous celebration of all forty-two—Jefferson but also Pierce, F.D.R. but also Buchanan, Truman but also Harding. To say nothing of the incumbent, of whom, perhaps, the less said the better.
So which is it? Trick question. The answer, strictly speaking, is none of the above. Ever since 1968, when, in one of the last gasps of Great Society reformism, holidays were rejiggered to create more three-day weekends, federal law has decreed the third Monday in February to be Washington’s Birthday. And Presidents’/’s/s Day? According to Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, it was a local department-store promotion that went national when retailers discovered that, mysteriously, generic Presidents clear more inventory than particular ones, even the Father of His Country. Now everybody thinks it’s official, but it’s not. (Note to Fox News: could be a War on Washington’s Birthday angle here, similar to the War on Christmas. Over to you, Bill.)
Just to add to the Presidential confusion, Washington’s Birthday is not Washington’s birthday. George Washington was born either on February 11, 1731 (according to the old-style Julian calendar, still in use at the time), or on February 22, 1732 (according to the Gregorian calendar, adopted in 1752 throughout the British Empire). Under no circumstances, therefore, can Washington’s birthday fall on Washington’s Birthday, a.k.a. Presidents Day, which, being the third Monday of the month, can occur only between the 15th and the 21st. Lincoln’s birthday, February 12th, doesn’t make it through the Presidents Day window, either. Nor do the natal days of our other two February Presidents, William Henry Harrison (born on the 6th) and Ronald Reagan (the 9th). A fine mess!
Here is the question thus raised: at this chastening juncture in our republic’s history, wouldn’t everyone welcome a moratorium on Presidential glorifi-cation? Isn’t the United States a little too President-ridden, much as post-medieval Spain was a little too priest-ridden? Our capital city groans under the weight of obelisks, equestrian statues, and grandiose temples fit for the gods but devoted to the winners of Presidential elections. “Presidential historians” populate the greenrooms of our cable-news networks. Presidential suites sit atop Vegas hotels. Presidential libraries gobble up ever-growing swathes of urban and, as the unhappy faculty of Southern Methodist University recently learned, campus real estate. Time to throttle down.
from the issuecartoon banke-mail thisA good place to start, after securing the retailers’ and calendar-makers’ agreement to call Washington’s Birthday by its true name (if not its true date), would be with the most sacred object our society mass-produces: money. At the moment, of the seven denominations of banknotes in general circulation, no fewer than five have Presidents on them, ranging chronologically from Washington (who would have frowned on the honor, as smacking of monarchy) to Grant (who would have appreciated the irony, given that he was habitually broke and presided over an Administration rife with finan-cial scandals). The two others are the ten-spot (Alexander Hamilton, who might have been President if he hadn’t been a duellist) and the hundred (Benjamin Franklin). On the coins, it’s pretty much Presidents all the way, except for Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea, who are on dollar coins that barely circulate and are obvious affirmative-action benchwarmers, destined for the hook once a female President or two comes along, or even sooner. Beginning this year, the Mint plans to roll out new circulating dollar coins, four different ones a year, for as many years as it takes. Who will be on them? Why, Presidents, of course—all of them, in the order they served, scoundrels and heroes alike. Someday, like a bad penny, a George W. Bush dollar will turn up. Heads you lose.
As it happens, a federal district court has ordered the Treasury to redesign our paper money to make it friendlier to blind people. Why not take the opportunity to go further than changing sizes or adding texture? Franklin shows the way. Yes, he was a politician, but he was equally or more famous as a scientist, a diplomat, a newspaperman, an aphorist, a satirist, and a boulevardier. Let’s keep Washington on the single, and then let’s start printing bills with pictures of the other sorts of people that make us proud to be Americans. With rotating portraits, we can have a musicians’ fin (Foster, Gershwin, Ellington), a scribblers’ sawbuck (Twain, Melville, Dickinson), a performing-arts twenty (Caruso, Keaton, Balanchine), a secular saints’ fifty (Douglass, Jane Addams, King), and a scientists’ C-note (Franklin, Edison, Einstein). As a three-fer (President, saint, writer), Lincoln could have the two-dollar note all to himself. A three-spot could be introduced, with Whitman (“What you give me I cheerfully accept,/A little sustenance, a hut and garden, a little money, as I rendezvous with my poems”). As with Presidents, a decent interval would be required. The Dylan fiver will have to be deferred until another decade of the sixties rolls around.
One can dream. Meanwhile, if you think you’re sick of Presidents, wait till you see the parade of Presidents-in-waiting. Wait? You don’t have to wait. Decision 2008 is already upon us, full-bore. A generation or two ago, political scientists used to complain that American campaigns dragged on for eight or nine months, in contrast to the three to six weeks that is normal elsewhere. Those were the days. As of last week, ten Republicans and nine Democrats, all of them plausible enough to claim a place in televised debates, have either filed formal exploratory committees or declared their candidacies outright, and another half-dozen or so are on the verge. The first such debate is ten weeks from now—even though the first primary is nearly a year away, the conventions don’t convene for a year and a half, and the election itself is twenty-one long months down the road. Unsurprisingly, as the Washington Post reported last week, 2008 is fated to be “the nation’s first billion-dollar presidential campaign.” No doubt “the issues” will get a full airing, but, more than ever, it’s going to be all about the Benjamins, and not just who gets his picture on them.
― Jeb, Tuesday, 25 September 2007 21:47 (eighteen years ago)