There’s always more than meets the eye. As many of you intrepid readers will know, Veterans Day did not start out as Veterans Day, but as Armistice Day which was intended to commemorate the end of WWI, but didn’t. OK, let me explain.
WWI was officially ended by the Treaty of Versailles which was signed by the previously warring parties on June 28, 1919, but hostilities had terminated (I guess they just stopped pulling the triggers) on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. Many of our European friends and some of our enemies had the good sense to recognize November 11 as Armistice Day well before it occurred to us. It was designated a holiday in the United States by an Act of Congress in 1926. I dunno what happened between 1918 and 1926, but I suspect we didn’t get a long weekend and the banks didn’t close.
There’s more. Since the War to End All Wars didn’t do what it advertised, WWII soon transpired. Ultimately we had VE Day (May 7/8, 1945) and VJ Day (August 17/September 2, 1945) to deal with as well. I know the dates are confusing. Armistice Day started to not make much sense even to our elected representatives. Thank god for the common man and common sense. One Mr. Edwin Rees sussed this out and decided to do something about it. On November 11, 1953 he mounted the 1st ever event to honor the veterans of all time and all wars in Emporia, Ks. (You almost couldn’t make this up). It was such a success he set about a one man lobbying effort to contact the governors of all states to solicit their support for changing Armistice Day to Veterans day. He pretty much ignored Washington until he had the momentum to insure a done deal. I guess he didn’t want to risk a bunch of back room politicos inside the beltway (which didn’t exist at that time) screwing the deal up. Congress, with appropriate gubernatorial prodding, enacted and President Eisenhower signed legislation on June 1, 1954 changing the name of the “Official US Holiday” to Veterans Day. As a small footnote to history, there’s been more than a little to-ing and fro-ing about grammatical correctness of Veteran’s, Veterans’ or Veterans. You’ll be pleased to know that Veterans is right, but it took more than 4000 government clerks and a lot of bureaucratic wrangling to make it so.
And there’s even more. In an unseemly display of self interest, government workers at all levels agitated for increasing the number of three day weekends, and Veterans Day was deemed a reasonable target. On June 28, 1968 Congress approved changing the date of Veterans Day from November 11th to the 4th Monday in October, whatever date that might be. If you’re in Congress you can do this kind of stuff. Ignore history and pander to voting blocs, I mean. Fortunately, after 10 years of urging by veterans groups and others the date reverted to the original November 11th by yet another Act of Congress. And there it remains….I hope.
Of course, what really makes a Veterans Day are the veterans. Active duty, honorably discharged, retired, volunteer or conscript, brave or not so brave, killed and wounded in action or having served with nary a scar. Peace time and wartime. Fighters and rear eschelon troopers. Soldiers, sailors, aviators and marines. Academy graduates and forty day wonders. Men and women, young and old. Reluctant warriors, Rambos and outright pacifists. My father, your husband, her son, his uncle, your grandmother. Distant lovers, and the divorced while fighting. College graduates and the high school drop outs. Generals and privates. Rich and poor. Veterans all.
In our 12 “officially recognized wars” (see In Memoriam, May 25, 2007) our armed forces have suffered more than one million killed and about the same number wounded. Strangely, I cannot find any source that defines the total number of people who have served in our military establishment. I do know that in every year since 1941 we’ve had more that 1,000,00 active duty personnel. From a high of over 12 million in 1945 to a low of about 1,400,000 today. If I were to venture a guess to the total having served since the inception of the United States it might number around 100 million. In any case an enormous price to pay to expiate the frailties of human nature and our desire to periodically commit mayhem on one another.
Would that Einstein were correct in saying that, “peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding”. But I fear that not to be the case. It may be an eternal truism that a modicum of force, judiciously applied, at the right time may be a requisite of our future survival. We should, however, heed the wisdom of the ages which is manifest in de Toqueville’s insight that, “no protracted war can fail to endanger the freedom of a democratic country”. Else we will all become pray to the thinking of ostensibly benevolent dictators like Pervez Musharraf and allow our leaders to behave as if the state is more important than democracy. I hope we don’t need many more veterans, but we probably will.
Perhaps we should treat them a little better.
