“Every day added to the list we now have imposes a very serious handicap on industry, by increasing its costs, decreasing its production, and making it more difficult than ever for it to survive in competition with industries in other States that have fewer holidays,” The Journal warned. But not everyone liked the idea: The Providence Journal’s editorial board argued Rhode Island lawmakers should cancel an existing holiday rather than add a ninth in the form of Victory Day. Veterans groups had been pushing for a World War II holiday since as early as 1946, the year after the war ended, and Windsor’s bill had initially passed the House in March 1947 with bipartisan support. (The legislature changed the law in the late 1960s to set the holiday as the second Monday in August.) Richard Windsor, a long-serving East Providence Republican, to designate Aug. Rhode Island established Victory Day in March 1948, almost three years after the end of World War II, when the General Assembly passed a bill sponsored by Rep. 14 deserves special attention for its interplay of state, local, national, and even international politics.” Senate report on the topic.Īs far back as the 1950s, The New York Times wrote that Victory Day – which the paper, like many news outlets then and now, referred to as “V-J Day” – was “always a big legal holiday in Rhode Island.” Author Len Travers, in his “Encyclopedia of American Holidays and National Days,” remarks: “The tenacity of Rhode Island in celebrating Aug. (Arkansas state employees were given their own birthdays off.) While some websites claim Victory Day used to be a federal holiday, too, that appears to be a myth – there is no mention of it in an authoritative 1999 U.S.
14 commemoration, which had been adopted back in 1949, according to state historian David Ware. Rhode Island has been an outlier with Victory Day since 1975, the year Arkansas lawmakers adopted a new list of legal holidays that left off the state’s Aug. It has always been called “Victory Day” on the statute books, going all the way back to its establishment in 1948. And despite what many residents believe, the legal name of Rhode Island’s holiday was never “V-J Day” (short for “Victory Over Japan”). 14 - when Japan’s surrender was announced in the United States - the holiday is today observed on the second Monday in August. While the actual event that Victory Day commemorates happened on Aug. Monday is Rhode Island’s 74th annual Victory Day, continuing the state’s custom of being the only place in America that honors the end of World War II with a legal holiday.
(WPRI) – Like Del’s Lemonade or the Gaspee parade, Victory Day is one of the Ocean State’s unique summertime traditions.
0 kommentar(er)
