teran's Day and Labor Day are 20th century creations. Thanksgiving was a local New England custom and the German immigrants brought us Christmas. No right-thinking Enlightenment republican would have made a national holiday of Easter. But Washington's day was a great feast in the civic calendar.
Washington deserves his own birthday. I think Lincoln would agree. Here's one of the many stories Lincoln famously told to entertain his fellow lawyers on the long nights riding the circuit on the Illinois frontier:
One of the leaders of the American Revolution -- I forget now who it was, Ethan Allen, perhaps -- visited England after the war. His host entertained him comfortably, but was the sort of fellow who constantly disparaged America and Americans generally (no, it didn't start with George W. Bush) and never could get over the fact we had beaten them in the war.
To amuse himself and to twit his American guest, the host hung a print of George Washington in his outhouse. It had been there for a few days, and the host knew the American must have seen it, but he had said nothing. Finally overcome by curiosity, the host asked his guest what he thought of the picture of Washington.
"It is most appropriately hung," the American replied. "Nothing ever made the British shit like the sight of George Washington."
Parson Weems and his biography of Washington loom large in the "Lies My Teacher Told Me" industry. Wretched literalists love to remind everyone who will listen that George Washington never chopped down a tree, never said "I cannot tell a lie," and never skipped a silver dollar across the Potomac. They claim these things are, or recently were, taught in schools as facts. They chew endlessly on the juiciness of a pious writer inventing a story -- a lie -- to illustrate the badness of lying.
Why did Parson Weems lie? I say he wasn't lying. I say he was inventing mythology.
We easily forget how new representative government was in Washington's day. The United States in 1787 became something that had not existed since before Christ, and the Founders harked back to ancient blueprints when they set up the American system.
They knew, for instance, that all the classical republics -- the ancient mixed government demi-democracies of Greece and Italy -- had hero-founder stories to bind them together. Athenian Theseus, Romulus in Rome, Lycurgus the lawgiver of Sparta. All the old republics built up public religions about supermen or demi-gods who taught the city-states how to live, how to grip the dangerous fire of freedom. Even the modern republics had such stories. William Tell is an example. Myth mattered; fact was irrelevant. Theseus's deeds in Athens were a pure fiction, and an astute Athenian who had read Homer certainly knew this.
Centuries later, Plutarch (himself something of a "parson:" he served as one of the two priests at the temple of Apollo at Delphi) looked out on the Roman Empire wracked by the tyranny of Nero and the bloodbath of civil war, and he sat down and wrote the "Parallel Lives." He knew his biographical information was unreliable. He had no intention of deciding what was true or of telling histories: he was setting up characters as lessons (or anti-models), to teach his readers about being citizens, being virtuous -- being human. Emerson called the "Lives" "a bible for heroes."
Parson Weems knew this new country of America also needed myths and hero-founders to bind it together in its diversity. His biographies of the founders are the American equivalent of Shakespeare's English history plays. Like Athens, we were a nation born myth-less. We were absent from the catalogue of ships, so Weems gave us a Mount Vernon Theseus to fill the bill. Like Rome, the United States (which still took a plural pronoun in those days) could not survive without common civic virtues. He gave us Washington as their exemplar.
George Washington, as a compendium of biographical details, hardly mattered to that purpose. And I believe Washington would have endorsed that. Which is exactly why George Washington ought to be put back on his 