Don’t get me wrong. We’ve had some fine Pres­i­dents. And we’ve had some dread­ful ones. But I’m uncom­fort­able with the degree of cel­e­bra­tion we’ve had over any of them.

Early in our nation’s his­tory, our lead­ers were anti-​​royalists. Cel­e­bra­tion and rev­er­ence were expected to be reserved for the Con­sti­tu­tion, or per­haps the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence. It was the Age of Enlight­en­ment, which was the source of the words:

We hold these Truths to be self-​​evident, that all Men are cre­ated equal, that they are endowed by their Cre­ator with cer­tain unalien­able Rights, that among these are Life, Lib­erty and the pur­suit of Happiness.

A belief that “all Men are cre­ated equal” is not par­tic­u­larly com­pat­i­ble with rev­er­ence of roy­als. And yet, here it is, “Pres­i­dents’ Day”, a day we have gen­er­ally come to accept is devoted to cel­e­brat­ing our Pres­i­dents, in almost a sense of royalty.

But some­thing hap­pened to us over the past two cen­turies. We began to treat our Pres­i­dents differently.

In 1879, Con­gress insti­tuted our first per­ma­nent cel­e­bra­tion of a Pres­i­dent, with the estab­lish­ment of George Washington’s Birth­day as a national holiday.

Abra­ham Lincoln’s Predecessor

The next, per­haps more sig­nif­i­cant, change occurred in 1909, the 100th anniver­sary of Abra­ham Lincoln’s birth. For the first time in Amer­i­can his­tory, our money depicted the vis­age of a real per­son, when, at the request of Pres­i­dent Theodore Roo­sevelt, the obverse of the one cent coin was changed from that of a non­spe­cific Native Amer­i­can man to the bust of Lin­coln. It was a move that harkened to other nations, whose heads of state have been placed on coins since Alexan­der the Great first graced Greek elec­trum coins nearly 2,400 years ago.

George Washington’s Predecessor

It remained the only coin in the United States with a real per­son on it until 1931, when the anthro­po­mor­phic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of Lib­erty was replaced by the bust of George Wash­ing­ton. Then the nickel fol­lowed fairly quickly there­after, with Thomas Jef­fer­son replac­ing the Native Amer­i­can on the five-​​cent piece in 1938. Franklin Roo­sevelt then sub­sti­tuted for Lib­erty (with wings) on the ten-​​cent piece in 1946, and non-​​President Ben­jamin Franklin (the first real non–Pres­i­dent to grace our coins) took over for Lib­erty on the half-​​dollar in 1948. The fifty-​​cent piece got its first Pres­i­dent when John Kennedy took the spot in 1964. The last coin to receive a President’s face was the dol­lar, which was stamped with Dwight Eisen­hower instead of Lib­erty begin­ning in 1971.

Now all of our coins and cur­rency have Pres­i­dents on them, other than the par­tic­u­larly uncom­mon Saca­gawea dol­lar. We even have a series of dol­lar coins that, by 2016, will have depicted every for­mer Pres­i­dent that has since deceased.

It seems to me that Theodore Roo­sevelt did our nation a great dis­ser­vice by replac­ing the Age of Enlight­en­ment notion of rev­er­ence for our nation with rev­er­ence for our nation’s lead­ers. But he couldn’t have done it alone. We all (or our ances­tors, at least) let it happen.

What hap­pened? Why do we cel­e­brate Pres­i­dents’ Day (or Washington’s Birth­day) in Feb­ru­ary, instead of a mid-​​September day hon­or­ing the adop­tion of our Con­sti­tu­tion? Why have we been evolv­ing ever toward treat­ing Pres­i­dents as a tem­po­rary monarch, pay­ing homage to these elected peo­ple instead of the doc­u­ments of rea­son from the Age of Enlight­en­ment? Have we as a nation become less enlight­ened over the past century?

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