America's Public Holidays: 1865-1920. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2002 by Elizabeth Pleck

America's Public Holidays: 1865-1920. By Ellen M. Litwicki (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2000. ix plus 293 pp. $39.95).

Ellen Litwicki's Public Holidays takes its place among several recently published and valuable studies of historical memory and commemorative activities in the U.S. between the Civil War and World War I. In this concise and readable book chapters are devoted to Memorial and Decoration Days, black Emancipation days, labor and socialist holidays, ethnic holidays, and efforts of late nineteenth century and Progressive era reformers to inculcate patriotism and environmental consciousness in schoolchildren. The main organizers of these holidays were middle-class men and women or trade unionists, socialists, and anarchists. The book is a national study, which also draws heavily on case studies of holiday celebrations in Tucson, Chicago, and Richmond. Litwicki emphasizes the history of secular holidays celebrated once a year in the schools or in public venues, although she cannot help but stray into offering observations about parades, floats, female symbols of the nation, flag-waving, public statues, and patriotism .

Memorializing the Civil War was one of the main reasons for the large number of public holidays suggested and celebrated in this period. Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis all emerged as regional heroes. (Lincoln was too much disliked in the South to be a national one.) Because the Civil War remained a source of conflict, the best national heroes came from an earlier era. Thus, Washington (and to a lesser extent, Christopher Columbus) provided the least contested historical figures. The other reasons for cluttering the calendar in these decades were the rise of socialism and of organized labor, the need for immigrant and black self-definition, and the desire of the white middle class to promote law-and-order, patriotism, and the assimilation of immigrants. Many holidays remained state or regional events, even though some leaders hoped to make them national ones. Black politicians were unable to secure much white support for federal Emancipation Day. Constitution Day never became a national holiday because the American people did not feel an emotional connection to it.

Voluntary associations, often working in tandem with the press, organized most of these holidays and pressed for them to become state or national holidays. Women usually played supporting roles, figuring as symbols of the nation on floats, and as behind-the-scenes organizers, but not as public orators. There was virtually no agreement in the nation over what events were worthy of celebrating. Thus, there were continual struggles between blacks and whites, natives and immigrants, capital and labor, socialists and the American Federation of Labor over what holidays to recognize and how they should be celebrated. Ethnic groups were also internally divided by religion and attitudes toward temperance and gambling.

Litwicki's study of racial and ethnic holidays is exceptionally rich; she mines pamphlets and newspapers, including the foreign language press. She pays special attention to the development of Mexican Independence Day in Tucson and a variety of ethnic holidays in Chicago from Kosciusko's birthday to St. Patrick's Day. Virtually all ethnic holidays, she argues, were organized by the middle class, which tried to forge a dual ethnic identity of loyalty to the American nation and to the homeland but also sought to promote middle-class values of order, temperance, and morality. Middle-class Mexican-American journalists, ranchers, merchants and professionals in Tucson much preferred to encourage the celebration of Mexican Independence Day to the fiesta of St. Augustine, which, after the religious celebration ended, seemed to develop into three weeks of drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Because disputes were so common, two separate and non-cooperating committees often had to be formed to stage a holiday. Organi zers usually deliberately slighted organized labor because of their belief that national unity was an overriding goal as their anti-labor attitudes. They ignored African Americans entirety or presented them as amusing caricatures. Litwicki agrees with recent books by David Blight and Cecelia Elizabeth O'Leary which argue that the North and South eventually reconciled in celebrating Memorial Day mainly because both sides agreed to overlook the role black soldiers played in the war.

Litwicki shows that holiday instruction in the public schools began because civic elites wanted to encourage support for law and order and quell anarchism and labor violence. Progressives at the turn of the century broadened the definition of patriotism to include civicmindedness and participation in community life. Litwicki's portrait of Progressive reformers is similar to that in most recent textbooks: they emerge as racist, interested in assimilating immigrants to the dominant culture, and environmentalist. On Bird Day schoolchildren learned about the needless slaughter of birds to provide feathers for women's hats. On Arbor Day schoolchildren planted trees to learn the value of reforestation. Progressive educators regarded tree planting as an expression of the concept of community spirit and community spirit as the building block to develop an emotional attachment to the nation.