Dear UMPI Community:
President’s Day is observed annually on the third Monday in February. Since 1971, it has been part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, established in 1968 by an Act of Congress to create a series of three day holiday weekends (this also includes the recognition of the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. on the third Monday in January). Although originally established in 1885 to honor President George Washington (on the date of his birthday, February 22), since the 1980s, this has been most commonly known as President’s Day. Maine recognizes the day as both Washington’s Day and President’s Day.
I thus thought it appropriate to note a portion of George Washington’s first Annual Message to Congress, delivered on January 8, 1790. In this paragraph, he speaks specifically of the importance of the knowledge of “science and literature”– implicitly, I would argue that this speaks to the role of public higher education for all individuals:
…there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of Science and Literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of Government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the Community as in ours it is proportionably essential. To the security of a free Constitution it contributes in various ways: By convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration, that every valuable end of Government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people: and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of Society; to discriminate the spirit of Liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last, and uniting a speedy, but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the Laws.
You can read Washington’s address to Congress in its entirety here.