Tag Archives: Armistice Day

Forgotten (or Repurposed) Holidays

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A week or so back I had to call a town office in my home state of Rhode Island, but wound up leaving a recorded message, because I’d forgotten it was V-J Day.

That may perplex some people, and stir vague memories for others. It’s the anniversary of Victory over Japan, and Rhode Island is now the only state where it’s still an official observance (second Monday in August, rather than the historical August 14). It’s a curious little holiday, late in a seaside summer. It used to be widely celebrated, but faded with memory of the war, pushed along no doubt by proximity to Labor Day.

Another holiday from my youth is Lincoln’s Birthday (February 12), which itself was overshadowed by Washington’s Birthday, ten days later. This meant two days off school in two weeks, possibly plus snow days as a bonus. George has long had an official national holiday but Abe hasn’t, and some places cram them together as “Presidents’ Day,” but eight states still celebrate Lincoln. This incudes New York, which I have somehow managed to miss in 25 years of living here. I speculate that it’s limited to closing government offices.

Thanksgiving goes back to a proclamation by Lincoln more clearly than it goes back to the Pilgrims, but Franklin D. Roosevelt shaped our modern celebration. It was traditionally the last Thursday in November, and also traditionally kicked off the Christmas shopping season. Some years November has five Thursdays, and the last one comes pretty late, so during the Depression FDR proclaimed it the FOURTH Thursday, to stimulate an extra week of retail business.

New Englanders and Republicans furiously celebrated on the fifth Thursday, and a mini-cartoon in the Bing Crosby movie “Holiday Inn” showed a confused turkey running back and forth between the two dates on a calendar. We’re all used to it now.

November has a second holiday, formerly called Armistice Day, celebrating the 11th day of the 11th month, when World War I ended. As memory faded, and as 17 million Americans went into uniform for the SECOND World War, this became Veterans’ Day, to honor all those who served.

Much to the exasperation of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (combat veteran and P.O.W.), who said “Armistice Day was a hallowed anniversary because it was supposed to protect future life from future wars. Veterans Day, instead, celebrates ‘heroes’ and encourages others to dream of playing the hero themselves, covering themselves in valor.”

Memorial Day started out as Decoration Day, to place flowers on the graves of the Union dead from the Civil War. (Waterloo claims the honor of initiating the holiday.) Former Confederate states fiercely ignored it, but… once again… as memory faded, and as two world wars brought hundreds of thousands of deaths, the day became Memorial Day for ALL the dead, and moved to the last Monday in May.

Believe it or not, the “Pennsylvania Dutch” used to be the about only Americans who paid any particular attention to Christmas, and even into the 20th century it was a normal work day for many people. Even as a gift-giving holiday, it had to compete with New Year’s.

Columbus Day has rightly come into scorn for celebrating a guy who, whatever his virtues, initiated an age of horror, with bigotry, imperialism, mass murder, and enslavement, all on scales such as the world had never seen. But holidays and statues, however much they purport to be about the past, are mostly about the times in which they are created. Columbus Day proclaimed the acceptance (at last!) of Italian-Americans (and by extension, other “new immigrant” groups) as full-fledged members of the American community. Maybe we should change it to Marconi Day.

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Back in 2008, I was at Dick Kurzenberger’s 90th birthday party in the National Soaring Museum. “Dick,” I asked, “were you actually born ON Armistice Day?”

With his usual big smile, he assured me that he was, and I had visions of Dick being born as bells rang and flags waved and everybody burst out singing. But his obituary a few years later told me that Dick had been born November 11, 1918 IN GERMANY. Now my vision was completely different – a baby boy coming into a world of fear, despair, and defeat.

World War I ended at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The effect had been spoiled a bit by the “false armistice” a few days earlier, when a newspaper reporter’s draft article was mistakenly sent out to the world. But it was for real this time. Businesses closed. Bath, Penn Yan, and Hammondsport had impromptu parades and motorcades. Steuben County’s monthly draft contingent was held at Addison, then told to change trains and go back home. People lined up to pay a quarter (benefit of Red Cross) and ring the Bath fire bell. “Mark this date down in your calendar,” the Hammondsport Herald wrote while monarchies crashed, “as the last day of the Middle Ages.”

Over in England the bells rang and townsfolk shouted in celebration as Wilfred Owen’s parents were handed a telegram. Their son had been killed in action, exactly seven days before. “What passing-bells for those who die as cattle?,” he had written a year earlier. “What candles may be held to speed them all?”

There were downsides to the peace. Within a few weeks the Curtiss Hammondsport plant closed for good, throwing 600 people or so out of work. As agricultural prices collapsed, many farmers staggered under time payments for equipment they had bought while the hands were off in uniform. On top of that, the Spanish influenza was still killing millions.

Over in Germany the fleet had mutinied, the Kaiser fled the country, Communist uprisings seized many local governments. Even before truce negotiations, millions of soldiers had already dropped their guns and started walking home. Corporal Adolf Hitler went hysterically blind.

Pat Buchanan insists that the Allies double-crossed Germany – that Germany only wanted a temporary cease-fire for peace talks, and the Allies forced a surrender. But an “armistice” was only face-saving. The top generals had ordered the Kaiser to quit, and the government to surrender. They had lost, and they knew it, and a quick surrender was the only way to stop complete chaos.

Soldiers soon “forgot” that they had deserted in millions, and the generals proclaimed that THEY hadn’t lost the war, no sir… they’d still have pulled it out, but they were stabbed in the back by civilians – especially socialists, diplomats, and Jews.

Germans were appalled and enraged by how HARSH the peace terms were, though actually they were based on the terms that Germany forced onto France in 1871. Loss of territory. Occupation of territory. Expensive reparations. Plus they lost their emperor, and had to substitute a struggling republican government. All of which seemed utterly unreasonable when applied TO Germany, rather than BY Germany.

Reparations for France and Belgium seem more reasonable when we remember that Germany laid plans long before the war to rule any conquered ground with mass murder, and that’s exactly what they did. In addition to that they stole much of the occupied territories’ industry and took it back to Germany, and as they retreated they destroyed what was left.

German voters rejected Hitler, of course – repeatedly – and he was shoehorned into power by a backroom deal. At the heart of the deal was the filthy truth that President von Hindenburg had decided to destroy democracy… in collaboration with the generals, the industrialists, the financiers, the Catholics, the monarchists, the Nazis, the other right-wing groups, and most of the Protestants.

France, of course, in similar straits following 1870, had pulled itself together, paid its reparations AHEAD of time, and built an honest-to-goodness democracy. The 1918 Armistice ended the Great War, but it didn’t deliver the new world that most people dreamed of. But the problem wasn’t with the peace, or even with the Treaty of Versailles. Germany, Russia, Italy, and Japan were not doomed by destiny. They had plenty of choices on how to use the peace. The choices they made were bad, and they dragged the rest of the world down with them.