Happy Veterans Day!
ADDRESS TO FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN
The White House, November 11, 1919.A year ago today our enemies laid down their arms in accordance with an armistice which rendered them impotent to renew hostilities, and gave to the world an assured opportunity to reconstruct its shattered order and to work out in peace a new and juster set of international relations. The soldiers and people of the European Allies had fought and endured for more than four years to uphold the barrier of civilization against the aggressions of armed force. We ourselves had been in the conflict something more than a year and a half.
With splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns, we remodeled our industries, concentrated our financial resources, increased our agricultural output, and assembled a great army, so that at the last our power was a decisive factor in the victory. We were able to bring the vast resources, material and moral, of a great and free people to the assistance of our associates in Europe who had suffered and sacrificed without limit in the cause for which we fought.
Out of this victory there arose new possibilities of political freedom and economic concert. The war showed us the strength of great nations acting together for high purposes, and the victory of arms foretells the enduring conquests which can be made in peace when nations act justly and in furtherance of the common interests of men.
To us in America the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service, and with gratitude for the victory, both because of the thing from which it has freed us and because of the opportunity it has given America to show her sympathy with peace and justice in the councils of nations.
WOODROW WILSON
At 11 o’clock on the 11th of November, 1918 an armistice was declared between the warring bodies of World War I. One year later, President Woodrow Wilson gave the address printed above.
On June 4, 1926 Congress would formally request that President Calvin Coolidge issue an annual observance on November 11 for the commemoration of the armistice.
It would take another twelve years; May 13, 1938; before a Congressional Act would be passed (52 Stat. 351; 5 U.S. Code, Sec. 87a) making November 11 an annual national holiday; “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as ‘Armistice Day’.”
On May 26, 1954 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a bill into law changing the name to “Veterans Day” and also officially opening the holiday to celebrate all veterans, not just those that perished in World War I.
That is the basic history of Veterans Day. So to all those that served…
Thank You!!
Share in the suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. No one serving as a soldier gets entangled in the concerns of civilian life; he seeks to please the recruiter.
2 Timothy 2:3-4
