Hail to the Chief.... by Bill Bryson

It's President's Day tomorrow. I know. I can hardly stand the excitement either.

President's Day is a new holiday to me. When I was growing up, we had two presidential holidays in February- Lincoln's Birthday on February 12th and Washington's Birthday on February 22. I may not be exactly right on those dates, or indeed even very close, because frankly it's been a long time since I was growing up and anyway they weren't very interesting holidays. You didn't receive presents or get to go on a picnic or anything.

The obvious shortcoming with having a holiday on a date like February 12 and February 22 is that it can fall on any day of the week, whereas most people like to have their public holidays on Mondays, which gives them a long weekend. So for a while American celebrated Washington's Birthday and Lincoln's Birthday on the Mondays nearest the appropriate dates. However, this bothered some people of a particular nature, so it was decided to have a single holiday on the third Monday of February and call it Presidents Day.

The idea now is to honor all the presidents, whether they were good or bad, which I think is swell because it gives us an opportunity to commemorate the more obscure or peculiar presidents- people like Grover Cleveland, who reportedly had the interesting habit of relieving himself out of the Oval Office window, or Zachary Taylor, who never voted in an election and didn't even vote for himself.

Far more noteworthy in my mind is the great Chester A. Arthur, who was sworn in as president in 1881, posed for an official photograph, and then, as far as I can make out, was never heard from again. If Arthur's goal in life was to grow rather splendid facial hair and leave plenty of room in the history books for the achievements of other men, then his presidency can be ranked a sterling success.

Also admirable in their way were Rutherford B. Hayes, who was president from 1877 to 1881 and whose principal devotions were the advocacy of "hard money" and the repeal of the Bland-Allison Act, preoccupations so pointless and abstruse that on one can remember now what they were, and Franklin Pierece, whose term of office from 1853 to 1857 was an interlude of indistinction between two longer periods of anonymity. He spent virtually the whole of his incumbency hopelessly intoxicated, prompting the affectionate slogan "Franklin Pierce, the Hero of Many a Well-Fought Bottle".

My favorites, however, are the two presidents Harrison. The first was William Henry Harrison, who heroically refused to don an overcoat for his inaugural ceremony in 1841, consequently caught pneumonia and with engaging switfness expired. He was president for just thirty days, nearly all of it spent unconscious. Forty years later, his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, was elected president and succeeded in the challenging ambition of achieving as little in four years as his grandfather had in a month.

As far as I'm concerned, all these men deserve public holidays of their own. So you may conceive my dismay at news that moves are afoot in Congress to abolish President's Day and return to observing Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays separately, on the grounds that Lincoln and Washington were truly great men and, moreover, didn't pee out the window. Can you believe that? Some people have no sense of history.

excerpt from Bill Bryson's "I'm a Stranger Here Myself."

images from Married to the Sea

Happy President's Day! Who's YOUR favorite President?