The History of Presidents’ Day

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Here in the United States, yesterday was Presidents’ Day. We honor a few American presidents because their birthdays were in February. Over time, it has expanded to a day off for certain groups of people and big sales from stores. I want to give a history of the holiday, and why we celebrate a day in February.

To give you the history of this holiday, I need to start with George Washington. George Washington was born in February in the 1730s. It gets a little more complicated because of the different calendars in use at the time (The Gregorian and the Julian). But regardless of the day, his birthday still falls in February. Americans have venerated George Washington as long as this country has existed. So it really should be no surprise that people wanted to create a holiday to celebrate him.

Washington’s birthday was first set as a remembrance the year after he died (technically a couple of months because he died in December 1799). There was a celebration on the centennial anniversary of Washington’s birthday in 1832 and when the Washington Monument began construction in 1848.

As you can see, people have been celebrating Washington’s birthday for a long time before any official holiday was created. The US Senate decided it was finally time to officially recognize Washington’s birthday as a federal holiday. Senator Stephen Wallace Dorsey of Arkansas was the first one to propose a bill for it, and President Rutherford B. Hayes signed it in 1879. Originally, the holiday was only for Washington, D.C., but it was expanded to the rest of the country in 1885. Washington’s Birthday was the first American holiday to honor a single person.

Washington’s birthday was celebrated relatively unchanged until 1970. In 1968, a law was passed called the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. This act moved both Washington’s Birthday and Memorial Day to a Monday to give federal employees three-day weekends. It also moved Columbus Day to a Monday (now called Indigenous People’s Day). Veteran’s Day was initially moved as well to a Monday, but that got returned to November 11 in 1978 to celebrate Armistice Day of World War I.

Many states also recognized Abraham Lincoln’s birthday as a holiday, which was on February 12. With the passing of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, many states combined both Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays into one holiday because the holiday falls between the two dates but never on either one. They called it Presidents Day. Some states put an apostrophe after the ‘t’ in Presidents, some put it after the ‘s’, and others don’t use an apostrophe at all.

States can determine who they celebrate on this holiday. Many states celebrate Washington and Lincoln. Others use Washington and Jefferson. Since the 1970s, the holiday has evolved into recognizing every person who has held the office of President. People and states can also be selective of who they choose if they don’t want to recognize every single President (because there are some that haven’t been great depending on who you ask). On official calendars, however, the day is still recognized as Washington’s Birthday. The Presidents Day name that we now recognize has never been officially agreed by lawmakers.

Schools, banks, the New York Stock Exchange, post offices, and non-essential government employees have the day off. For everyone else, it’s a regular Monday. It’s nice for me as a teacher because it does give me a longer weekend. But overall, the history and celebrations of Presidents’ Day is relatively uncomplicated compared to other holidays and history lessons I have written about. I hope you learned something (I certainly did), and if you celebrated, I hope you had a happy Presidents’ Day!

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