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Article Excerpt
Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.
Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition
"NATURE," AS ERNST CASSIRER CONCEIVED IT, "YIELDS NOTHING without ceremony" (1955: 38-9). The national holiday is one of ceremony's vessels. Holidays are times set aside by custom or law to commemorate great events and their men--or gods. They recur weekly, as in Sabbath observance, or, in the case of national life, annually, as in the celebration of the Fourth of July. In either case, holidays are "seedbeds of virtue" (Etzioni, 2001) that oppose the natural tendency to forget the past. The opening chapters of Deuteronomy provide the best examples. Moses has led his people to the Promised Land, but before they go to possess it he gives them a series of warnings. He knows that his people will soon live in a new world: cities, houses, vineyards, and olive groves in whose making they had no part. These are an inheritance, not an acquisition: "When you eat your fill there, be careful not to forget the Lord" who gave these to you. And when you have plenty to eat and live in fine houses of your own building "do not become proud and forget the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt." To this end, three holidays must be observed: first, the Passover, then the Feast of Weeks, then the Feast of Tabernacles (Deuteronomy 5-9, 16). When the conditions of life change drastically, the most decisive historical events will seem irrelevant, but holidays, Moses declares, will make the people remember and keep them together.
Collective memory, whose content holidays sustain, refers to the social distribution of beliefs, feelings, and moral judgments about the past. The primary vehicles of collective memory are history--the establishing and propagating of facts about the past through research monographs, textbooks, museums, and mass media--and commemoration: the process of selecting from the historical record those facts most relevant to society's ideals and symbolizing them by iconography, monuments, shrines, place-names, and ritual observance. Mediating the relation between history and individual belief, holidays are major parts of all commemorative repertoires.
Two analytic models orient the analysis of holiday rituals and their link to collective memory. The "conflict model" conceives ritual observances in terms of elites' quest to maintain power and construes holidays as control devices inducing individuals to transfer commitment from local communities to the state. From the 1870s onward, Eric Hobsbawm (1983) observes, the rise of electoral democracy in Europe and America meant the masses could no longer be relied upon to follow their masters; therefore "rulers and middle-class observers rediscovered the importance of 'irrational' [ritualistic] elements in the maintenance of the social fabric and the social order" (268). Mabel Berezin (1997) describes Italian leaders' efforts to condition citizens against democracy by melding the public and privates spheres of their lives. Fascist programmers worked largely through holidays built upon a traditional infrastructure, the cult of the family, and church (see also Falaca-Zamponi, 1997.) Even "by the latter part of the twentieth-century," John Bodnar (1992) declares, America's "public memory [embodied in national holidays] remains a product of elite manipulation, symbolic interaction, and contested discourse" (20; see also Litwicki, 2000).
The "commitment model," in contrast, presumes that elites and masses reaffirm their moral values together. Commitment holidays are subsumed under Robert Bellah's definition of "practices of commitment," namely, "shared activities that are not undertaken as means to an end but are ethically good in themselves.... A genuine community--whether a marriage, a university, a whole society--is constituted by such practices" (1985: 335). Whatever the political context--authoritarian or democratic--practices of commitment include ritual co-presence, and ritual co-presence, not historiography, prefigures all shared memory. In ancient Judaism, "memory flowed ... through two channels: ritual and recital" (Yerushalmi, 1982:11). Early Christian memories, Halbwachs observed, "were closely tied to rites of commemoration and adoration, to ceremonies, feasts, and processions" (Coser, 1992: 222). If, in some cases, these holy days expressed elite domination of the people (Bultmann, 1962 [1934]), in most cases they presupposed leaders' unity with the people (Kirk, 2005). Christian churchmen served the faithful in many ways, including the segregation of Easter and Passover holidays, a tactic ensuring the integrity of Christian communities (Zerubavel, 1984). More recently, Yankee City rediscovered itself through grand tricentennial ceremonies that deliberately included every religious and ethnic group.
Emile Durkheim's statement, however, is the classic:
There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings, where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments ... (1965 [1915]: 475. See also Etzioni, 2000; Shils and Young, 1975).
When we think of holidays in the Durkheimian sense, we think of them as devices enabling the individual to become part of a sacred past. Indeed, in many religious communities, death rates dip as a crucial holiday approaches, then rise, a way of culture compensating nature, so to speak, after the holiday ends (Idler and Kasl, 1992). This socio-somatic effect, or whatever accounts for the death dip, affirms simultaneously the individual's commitment to his community and its tradition.
At question is whether the concepts comprising the conflict and commitment models are sufficient to capture the meaning and function of most holidays. Whether Presidents' Day, America's most peculiar holiday, upholds collective sentiment, or upholds anything, is questionable. Whether its function is to sustain the hegemony of a dominant class is even more problematic. The case of Presidents' Day suggests the need for a more concrete model, an "abortive holiday" model whose essence the conflict and consensus models fail to capture. Abortive holidays are those that refer to the past without instructing or inspiring, and, at least in the case of Presidents' Day, indicating what precisely they refer to. To abort is to interfere with some process, to prevent a course of development from completing itself. The adjective "abortive" is synonymous with "fruitless," "unsuccessful," "imperfectly formed or developed," "failure to achieve an intended result." This incomplete character gives to Presidents' Day a sense of what postmodern observers call "hyperreality" (Baudrillard, 1983:146)--a connotation prompted by the alternating images of Washington and Lincoln, on the one hand, and, on the other, all the men who have filled the presidential office from George Washington to George W. Bush. No one can identify which of these two sets of presidents the holiday celebrates. Few are bothered by this ambiguity--perhaps because Presidents' Day points to so little beyond itself.
Presidents' Day manifests other postmodern properties, including historicism--the random cannibalizing of all objects, events, styles, and actors of the past. History's replacement by historicism, according to Frederic Jameson, weakens the relation between what we learn in history books and lived experience "of the current multinational, high-rise, stagflated city of newspapers and of our daily life." Accordingly, the same "waning of affect" and "depthlessness" that sedate the postmodern mind show up in postmodern holidays. The old feelings are still there but are now free-floating, disorganized, not focused on any person or event, not creative of any commitment. We move, in this connection, from the awesomeness of the "sublime" to the confusion of the "hysterical sublime" (Jameson, 1984: 61-2; 65-6; 69; 76-71; 89), from objects that are representable, inspiring, and embraceable to objects that are unrepresentable and inaccessable; from traditional holidays that define virtue and human greatness, to Presidents' Day, whose multiple forms confound and disorient.
In contrast to holidays ignored or overlooked (for example, Armed Forces Day, Flag Day), abortive holidays are well publicized, involve at least partial interruption of normal affairs, and possess all the characteristics of solemn holidays--except that very few people understand their meaning or are engaged by them. The broader question, then, is whether Presidents' Day, epitome of the abortive holiday, constitutes a readjustment to or an erosion of the tradition of which its original object, George Washington, is part.
WASHINGTON IN THE AMERICAN MIND: BEFORE PRESIDENTS' DAY
Holidays remain vital as long as the objects they celebrate are taken seriously. The Great Depression and World War II were the last eras in which George Washington's legacy was recognized, and they constitute a benchmark for gauging the meaning of Presidents' Day. During the Depression years, newspaper editors marked Washington's Birthday by placing his image on their front pages, above the fold, and printing articles indicating where business, professional, trade, civic, and religious organizations would meet to celebrate. In many communities, "Washington Day" was an occasion for basketball games, movie features, and special community and family events, including the photographing of children. In 1938, 50 patriotic organizations gathered in Carnegie Hall to celebrate the day. Five thousand people attended the annual memorial mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral (New York Times, February 22, 1938: 23). Newspapers throughout the country published cartoons keying the time's economic despair to Washington's military tragedies. The Chicago Daily Tribune (1932) captured the day's relevance by its cartoon, "Inspiration" (figure 1), which represents Uncle Sam with his left arm upon the shoulder of a young man (both with their hats respectfully removed) looking upon a painting of George Washington beside his suffering men at Valley...
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