20 Holidays Governments Invented To Control The Public

The German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed May 1, 1933, a new paid national holiday, the “Day of National Work,” a demand German unions had been agitating for decades. Goebbels held huge rallies that promised workers the benevolence of their government. The following day, Nazi SA and SS paramilitaries swooped in on union offices around the country, arresting labor leaders and bringing their members into one big labor front controlled by the state. As Goebbels’s diary makes clear, the whole scheme was laid out before the first rally even started.

President Grover Cleveland signed legislation establishing Labor Day as a federal holiday on June 28, 1894. The Pullman Strike, a nationwide rail boycott spearheaded by labor activist Eugene V. Debs, had shut down railroads around the country, and anger over it simmered in an election year. Congress had pushed the bill through rapidly to placate the unrest. But five days later, Cleveland deployed 12,000 U.S. soldiers to break the very strike the new holiday was created to quell. The resulting confrontations would be violent and deadly.

Soviet military commissar Leon Trotsky and the city council of Moscow established “Red Army Day” on February 23, 1922, to promote recruitment into the Red Army, created four years earlier. During the rule of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, historians said Soviet soldiers had fought a heroic battle against German troops in Pskov on that date in 1918. Military records reveal that Soviet troops were actually in retreat from Pskov on that day. Nevertheless, the myth endured, and the holiday continues in Russia.

The 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, did not have a standard Thanksgiving to refer to. Prior to 1863, the holiday was irregular and sometimes non-existent depending on what the governor of each state proclaimed. Following Union success in both the Battle of Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg, Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of a popular magazine, argued to Lincoln that a standardized holiday would boost morale during the war. The October 1863 presidential proclamation designated the last Thursday of November each year as a day of thanksgiving. Seven years later, Congress established Thanksgiving Day as an annual federal holiday.

After the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Emperor Meiji’s government had to find ways to substitute allegiance to local warrior clans with allegiance to one central authority, that is, the emperor. They instituted a national holiday, called Kigensetsu, or Empire Day, on Feb. 11. This date was chosen because it corresponded with the legendary accession date of Japan’s first emperor, Jimmu, calculated on the basis of records to have occurred in 660 BC. It now appears to have been nothing more than an origin myth. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the Allies outlawed the holiday during their occupation of the country.

Amid a period of anti-Catholic sentiment, Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States, received a request from the Knights of Columbus to establish a Columbus Day holiday and sought to retain the support of Italian-American Catholics within the New Deal. In April 1934, Congress passed a joint resolution calling for an annual observance. Roosevelt then issued a September 1934 proclamation declaring October 12 the first annual observance of Columbus Day.

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader known as Il Duce, came to power when his Blackshirt militias marched on Rome, and King Victor Emmanuel III chose to name him prime minister instead of going to war. In 1923, Mussolini’s administration designated October 28 a national holiday, commemorating his ascent to power with compulsory parades of young fascists. Three years later, Mussolini issued a decree requiring all documents to bear not just the current year, but also the number of years since the dictator took power.

The French lawmakers of the Third Republic were looking for a national holiday that both republicans and conservative monarchists, two camps that couldn’t agree on much of anything, could agree to. Conservatives were reluctant to celebrate the bloody storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, so republican deputy Benjamin Raspail and Senator Henri Martin suggested celebrating a peaceful unity celebration held exactly a year later. The resulting 1880 law only specified the month and day, not the year, just “July 14,” thus leaving it up to the various factions to put their own spin on the date.

Guy Fawkes attempted to assassinate King James I of England in 1605, when he was caught trying to blow up Parliament in what became known as the Gunpowder Plot. In January 1606, Parliament approved a law mandating that all citizens attend church on November 5 of every year and express their gratitude that the king had survived. Church ministers were required to give an anti-Catholic sermon on that day. The law remained in effect for more than 250 years before being repealed in 1859.

The Nazi government did not create Mother’s Day in Germany. Instead, florists had been promoting an unofficial version in the 1920s. In May 1933, the Nazi regime assumed control, renaming the day the “Day of Honor of the German Mother” and organizing rallies that glorified mothers for giving birth to children for the Nazi state. The Cross of Honor of the German Mother was established five years later. Women with four or more children received the medal on that day.

Lenin’s new Soviet government, which came to power after the Bolsheviks overthrew Russia’s Provisional Government in late 1917, proclaimed the next year that November 7 would be the annual commemoration of the revolution. But it was left to Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin, to make the occasion into a full-blown celebration: In 1927, he established it as a two-day public holiday, complete with Red Square military parades and armaments exhibitions, using the ceremony to assert the might of the single party on an annual basis.

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and B.R. Ambedkar, who headed the drafting committee that penned its constitution, completed the document after independence from Britain. But instead of enacting it immediately, the country’s leaders waited a while longer, finally putting the document into effect on January 26, 1950. That date was chosen because it was the 20th anniversary of the Indian National Congress’s 1930 proclamation of full independence from Britain.

In October 1911, the Wuchang Uprising led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty, bringing down 2,000 years of imperial rule. Following the revolution, Sun Yat-sen assumed the role of provisional president of China’s new republic. In September of the following year, the provisional council enacted legislation to designate October 10 as the national day, also known as “Double Tenth Day.” The law was meant to solidify the legitimacy of the new provisional government established by Sun. It continues to be celebrated in Taiwan.

The Norwegian constitution was signed on May 17, 1814. But European powers forced the country into a union under Swedish King Karl XIV Johan. Norwegians continued to celebrate May 17 as an unofficial day of independence until the king banned all festivities in 1828. Citizens disobeyed the order the next year, and Swedish cavalry broke up the celebration in Oslo with violence. The ensuing public outcry caused the king to rescind the ban.

Irish-American Catholics were a huge bloc of political power in Boston by the early 1900s. But in part because of Massachusetts’s church-state law and in part because of Protestant opposition, they could not get a day off work to observe St. Patrick’s Day. They did find a loophole, though. March 17, 1776, was the date that the British abandoned Boston during the Revolutionary War. In 1938, Massachusetts established “Evacuation Day” as a legal holiday for Boston and the surrounding municipalities. This allowed the city to throw Irish parades without technically violating any church-state rules.

With labor unions on strike and socialists mobilizing, liberal politicians in the Netherlands needed something that would unite Dutch citizens. They decided that, rather than oppose the monarchy, they should create a national celebration in honor of it. In 1885, they introduced Princess’s Day, which marked the fifth birthday of Princess Wilhelmina (who would later become Queen Wilhelmina). When she ascended to the throne in 1890, it became Queen’s Day. For the politically divided electorate, Queen’s Day offered something to celebrate instead of fight over.

On May 19, 1919, Ottoman military officer Mustafa Kemal Atatürk arrived at the port of Samsun. He had come to organize resistance in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse and spark the beginning of Turkey’s War of Independence. Nearly two decades later, Turkey’s parliament made May 19 a national holiday, annually commemorated as Youth and Sports Day with sporting parades. The effort aimed to turn Turkish youths’ loyalties from religious traditions of the Ottomans to the secular state of the Atatürk era.

Fearing an American invasion following the Canadian Rebellions in the late 1830s, the provincial legislatures declared Queen Victoria’s birthday a public holiday in 1845, the first holiday honoring a monarch’s birthday in the British Empire. Following her death in 1901, the Canadian federal government passed a law making Victoria Day permanent, an annual pledge of allegiance to Britain and a rejection of its southern, republican neighbor.

Poland’s adoption of Europe’s first modern written constitution on May 3, 1791, was short-lived. Russia, Prussia, and Austria soon partitioned Poland, banning any celebration of the date for more than a century. When Poland regained its independence after World War I, its new Chief of State, Józef Piłsudski, supported a law restoring May 3 as a national day, tying together the formerly partitioned country. It was banned again by Nazi and Soviet rulers before finally returning for good decades later.

The Italian public voted in a referendum in June 1946 to end the monarchy because the House of Savoy, King Umberto II’s family, was associated with the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini’s regime and its notorious 1938 race laws. A year later, the government of Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi decreed that June 2 would be “Festa della Repubblica,” a national holiday created to eradicate symbols of the monarchy and replace them with a celebration of the nation’s new, anti-fascist democracy.

This content was created with the help of AI.