The Eleventh Hour Of The Eleventh Day
In the United States we have Veteran’s rather than Armistice Day. According to Wikipedia:
In 1953, an Emporia, Kansas shoe store owner named Al King had the idea to expand Armistice Day to celebrate all veterans, not just those who served in World War I. King had been actively involved with the American War Dads during World War II. He began a campaign to turn Armistice Day into “All” Veterans Day. The Emporia Chamber of Commerce took up the cause after determining that 90% of Emporia merchants as well as the Board of Education supported closing their doors on November 11, 1953, to honor veterans.
(Emporia? Could Thomas Pynchon have made up a better name?). It’s a testament to the sentiments of the time—too easily simplified—that the merchants were in favor of closing their doors.
Lessons in sourcing—the Veteran Administration’s online history of the day refers only to the “urging of the veterans service organizations”; no mention of Chambers of Commerce. But it notes—no sources needed—that “World War II had required the greatest mobilization of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen in the Nation’s history… [and that since then] American forces had fought aggression in Korea.” Having the day acknowledge a war more recent and more devastating to America and Americans must have seemed only right and proper, though one might ask: why not add another day, V-E or V-J day? Or did World War Two render quaint and naïve the original legislation’s declaration that the day was to be commemorated because:
the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed
Only in 1968 did the Uniform Holiday Act move the celebration of the holiday to a Monday. According to the VA, the act was
intended to ensure three-day weekends for Federal employees by celebrating four national holidays on Mondays: Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Columbus Day. It was thought that these extended weekends would encourage travel, recreational and cultural activities and stimulate greater industrial and commercial production.
In a way, both this homogenization and the original shift in emphasis away from the Armistice are natural: the United States fought in the Great War, but it wasn’t our war as it was for the Europeans. In northern France you can still find stray munitions in the fields, and the re-vegetated mounds and ditches left by the trench warriors, and driving through Picardie, over the lovely swell of wheat fields approach, frequent as Starbucks in New Jersey, little cemetery rectangles, set aside with iron fences, and within them the distinctive white graves.
But is there some unfortunate collateral damage to dropping the old word, Armistice, and updating the day’s purpose? As intended, it now sets no expiration date or limits on remembrance; it’s ready to receive all veterans of future wars. Saying “Armistice Day” directs our thoughts back to perhaps the one moment when, among the leading world powers, the thought of no more war—ever—was most prevalent, urgent and plausible. The War To End All Wars. How soon after World War Two were the Allies ready to go at it?
In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the right cited appeasement and Munich 1938 and the left cited quagmires and Vietnam. We might have better considered how 1914 went awry. Adam Gopnik wrote in 2004, in an excellent rundown of then-newly published histories of World War One:
[It was] a fear of being humbled, “reduced to a second-rate power,” that drove the war forward. The keynote is insecurity, an insecurity that arose, above all, from the German paranoia about encirclement, matched by Britain’s insecurity about its naval power.
And this:
The intellectuals of 1914… wanted war as a way of driving out moral equivalence—ending relativism and decadence and materialism and all the other familiar evils of a shopping and pleasure-seeking society. They exulted in the moral clarity of the coming confrontation after the debasing decades of bourgeois pleasures, and welcomed the end of their long holiday from history…
…The war began on August 4th. By August 29th, there were two hundred and sixty thousand French dead.
The war continued for four years and three months, until the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Armistice Day.
