A Short and Glorious Life

   When, in 1939, I arrived in the United States, there were two holidays—meaning no school!—that were certainly new to me. On February 12, my own birthday, the birth of President Abraham Lincoln was celebrated. And only ten days later, February 22, George Washington’s birthday got us another day off. Later on, much later, those two national holidays were combined into a single Presidents’ Day and moved to the third Monday of February so to create a three-day week end.

   I never thought much about those holidays, although my recent “research” showed that neither Britain, France, nor Germany had elevated a historical figure to that status. No national celebration of Napoleon, say, nor of Bismarck—though there is  no surprise about that. The few other countries I surveyed only turned up a Benito Juárez Day in Mexico. The vast majority of holidays are geared to religious events—Christian in the world I looked at—plus a few secular ones, such as Labor Day or Independence Day.

   The question I now want to raise is a narrow one and I have no idea about the answer. Why Washington’s birthday is on the national holiday list is not mysterious. He was the leading general that won the United States its independence; he was the new country’s first president; and, most heroically, he turned down continuing service as president so as not to mimic the defeated British royalty. He was truly the father of our country.

   Perhaps a few unreconstructed Southerners would deny that Lincoln was a great president. That about fifteen thousand books have been written about him surely says a good deal more. His actions and character play an unparalleled role in U.S. history. Still, I wonder whether my birthday would have fallen on Lincoln’s birthday if, instead of being murdered in Ford’s Theater a few days after Lee’s surrender of the Confederate army, he had retired after the end of his second term as president and grown old in his home state of Illinois, perhaps moving from Springfield to the bigger hub of Chicago, doing what retired presidents do, such as writing memoirs and in various ways, subtle and not-so subtle, explain and justify the important measures they enacted while in office, then dying peacefully at the then old age of 68, when a reasonably like-minded Rutherford B. Hayes was in the White House. Does it take to be martyred to have your birthday become a national holiday?

   What brought this question to my mind was not just the occurrence, a bit over a month ago, of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but the following passage in the New Yorker (Jan. 26, 2015, p. 21):

"There are more than six hundred and fifty street names for Martin Luther King, Jr., in the                Untied States, but, perhaps more significant, there are streets, parks, and monuments             dedicated to him in Australia, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Senegal South Africa, and Zambia . . . ."

   Again, except for (probably the same) unreconstructed Southerners, none would deny the greatness of King’s accomplishments, nor the fact that even though he had partners in his fight for civil rights of Negroes (in the language of the day), there was none that was in his class, capable of assuming the leadership of that complex movement—leadership that called for, in equal measure, deep conviction, organizational skills of the highest order, and soaring eloquence. That is what it took to attract and hold followers on a path that was anything but a picnic. The film, Selma, coming half a century later, celebrates King’s achievements.

  MLK was born a couple of years after I was. I’m still around, as he might very well be, perhaps at the head of a church or of a foundation devoted to hammering in and carrying further the changes he brought to the country. It was not to be; he was murdered when not yet forty years old.

  The question I am raising, I say again, is whether you have to be martyred—or at least pass from this world at the apex of your career for your accomplishments to be acknowledged in so signal a way as having the anniversary of your birth become a holiday?

   The classical case is Achilleus. The hero of the Iliad was said to have been given a choice and opted for the short but glorious life and so Homer presents him. Would he have played that starring role if, after the defeat of the Trojans, he had gone home (straight home, not, like Odysseys, wandering all over creation) and cultivated the land of what I’ll anachronistically call his estate? In short, is the brevity of Achilleus’ life an ingredient in his fame? Siegfried is another hero whose life was cut short by a treacherous act of Hagen. Would he be the hero celebrated by Wagner, if he and Brünhilde had settled down to a comfortable old age, hunting in the forest and raising a brood of kids?

   I do not know the answer to these questions and there may here not be a single answer for all such cases one might cite.  Nor do I know what research or what kind of thinking one would have to undertake to come up with answers.  Even so, I don’t think that the question is foolish, because I do believe that those two myths from very different cultures express something that, consciously or subliminally, many believe.