Left Center Left

Derek offers his thoughts on - and support for - Juneteenth. I agree that there’s a strong case that emancipation of American slaves was a key moment in the Republic’s development of its liberal ideals - as well as the playing out of the nation’s civil conflict - and thus deserves to be celebrated as a commemorative holiday. A couple of countervailing considerations, though:

1) The name Juneteenth strikes me as too colloquial for proper commerative holiday stature. It sounds like some local Riverfest-y event. Emancipation Day is much better.

2) I hate to say it, but popular will for a new holiday may be affected by the perceived value in having a holiday a scant three weeks after Memorial Day. That is, public holidays always involve stated, nominal reasons and unstated real reasons. Successful public holidays are ones that tap into both. To my mind, our most successful holidays are Thanksgiving and Independence Day, since they’re universal and involve cultural tradition over and beyond the specific cause of commemoration.

3) At some point it’s a zero sum decision: I doubt, on practical grounds, that we’re going to add another national or state holiday, so adding a new one probably means taking away a former holiday. Which will it be? As a reminder, here’s what we currently have:

Federal
New Year’s Day
Martin Luther King’s Birthday
Washington’s Birthday/Presidents’ Day
Memorial Day
Independence Day
Labor Day
Columbus Day
Veterans Day
Thanksgiving
Christmas  

Massachusetts
Patriot’s Day

Boston
Evacuation Day
Bunker Hill Day

These do not include religious holidays, such as Easter or Yom Kippur, not set as public holidays by law yet often treated as holidays by business and schools.

The list is heavy on Revolutionary Era events, yet doesn’t have one to recognize Emancipation or the Civil War, which were huge deals obviously. If we’re to have an Emancipation public holiday, my vote would be for Bunker Hill Day to go, though that would still mean adding a holiday to the state and/or national calendar. If I had to axe a national holiday? Columbus Day, without a doubt.

Also, I’m wondering if there’s redundancy in having both Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day, given the specific referent of World War I and even World War II are rapidly fading into the historical horizon.

4) Then again, touching an existing holiday will be read as an insult. It’s easier to add a holiday than to take one away.

5) Assigning a public holiday should involve at least some measure of consensus, but sadly I don’t see how any holiday related to slavery or the Civil War can help but touch a deep nerve of ethnic or regional conflict. Especially if you cut another holiday, like Columbus Day.

6) By nature the list of holidays slants conservative, since it’s difficult to get a new one on the books, and hard to remove them once they’re set by law. Too much emphasis on Founding Fathers for my taste, when in fact Emancipation, full suffrage or opening up to immigration are just as important to the shape and character of the nation.

7) Whatever the next public holiday added is to be, let’s just hope these folks don’t have their day.

ADDENDUM: Derek rebuts. His points are well taken, though just as he thinks I’m selling the holiday’s chances a little short, I think he’s selling them a little long. Currently nineteen states have official observance of Juneteenth, but I can only find one, Texas, who treats it as a bona fide state holiday (i.e. government and business closing), and even they keep state offices partially staffed, as they do on LBJ day, San Jacinto Day, Cesar Chavez Day, Texas Independence Day and (!!!) Heroes of the Confederacy Day. (What a weird, complicated state!) I certainly don’t want to downplay what a positive thing it would be to have a public commemoration of Emancipation - and some of my points above are in the aim of getting a holiday that really works, in practice as well as in name - but the state-by-state track record suggests what I was getting at above: that political bodies (cities, states, nations) are relatively willing to have an official “day” that doesn’t require lost economic activity, but public holidays are difficult to establish, for cultural, economic and political reasons. That shouldn’t keep proponents from trying of course, but their success may be helped by reflecting further on what makes a successful public holiday and why there’s resistance to new public holidays in the first place.

By the way, Derrick Jackson has a good op-ed on the subject online.