Why Do We Celebrate Veterans Day? It Was Once in October

An American company pinned down by a German machine gun north of Verdun learned at 10:30 on the morning of November 11, 1918, that the war would end at 11. As the hour approached, Private Henry Gunther, a 23-year-old from Baltimore, rose with his rifle and ran through thick fog. The men of his company shouted at him to stop, and so did the Germans, but he kept running and firing.

His death was recorded at 10:59 a.m., one minute before the armistice took effect. The regiment’s Roman Catholic chaplain gave that account to Gunther’s family in early March 1919, as the Baltimore Sun retold it in 2008. The BBC says Gunther “is now recognised as the last soldier to be killed in action in WWI.”

That deadline was the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

Why do we celebrate Veterans Day?

We celebrate Veterans Day to thank everyone who served honorably in the US military, in wartime or peacetime, and the Department of Veterans Affairs says it is largely meant for living veterans. It falls on November 11 because it began as Armistice Day, marking the 11 a.m. ceasefire between Germany and the Allies in 1918.

Since 2016, 36 U.S.C. 145 has directed the president to issue a proclamation each year calling for two minutes of silence on the day, beginning at 2:11 p.m. eastern standard time, which is 11:11 a.m. in the Pacific time zone.

The ceasefire came six hours after the signing

The armistice was agreed at 5 a.m. on November 11, after talks in a railcar in the Forest of Compiegne, the National WWI Museum records. Marshal Ferdinand Foch then sent word to Allied commanders that “Hostilities will be stopped on the entire front beginning at 11 o’clock, November 11th (French hour).”

The BBC’s account says the six-hour wait was so that troops on the front line would be sure of getting the news. Robert Casey, an American artilleryman the museum quotes, wrote that day: “In three hours the war will be over. It seems incredible even as I write it.”

Men kept dying until the deadline: the American author Joseph Persico has calculated that the war’s final day produced nearly 11,000 casualties, the BBC reported.

The peace treaty came in 1919, or 1921 for the United States

Calling November 11 the end of World War I is a shorthand. An armistice is a temporary cessation of hostilities, and the VA’s history of the holiday dates the official end of the war to the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919. That treaty took effect on January 10, 1920.

The United States never ratified that treaty. It fell seven votes short in the Senate on March 19, 1920, and the US signed its own peace with Germany, the Treaty of Berlin, on August 25, 1921, according to the State Department’s Office of the Historian.

States made November 11 a holiday before Congress did

President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day in November 1919, the same year Congress overrode his veto to repeal wartime daylight saving. The original idea was a day of parades, public meetings and a brief suspension of business beginning at 11:00 a.m.

When Congress passed a concurrent resolution on June 4, 1926, asking the president for a proclamation, its text observed that “the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday.” Federal law caught up on May 13, 1938, with an act that made the day a legal holiday “dedicated to the cause of world peace” under the name Armistice Day.

In 1954, Congress crossed out one word

After World War II and Korea, the 83rd Congress acted “at the urging of the Veterans service organizations,” the VA records, and amended the 1938 act “by striking out the word ‘Armistice’ and inserting in its place the word ‘Veterans.’” The bill was approved on June 1, 1954, and from then on November 11 honored American veterans of all wars.

Who started the push is disputed. On Veterans Day 1982, Ronald Reagan presented the Presidential Citizens Medal to Raymond Weeks of Birmingham, Alabama, a World War II veteran who had directed the National Veterans Day Celebration there for 36 years, and called him “the driving force behind the congressional action which in 1954 established this special holiday as a day to honor all American veterans.”

In 2003, Congress agreed to a concurrent resolution declaring Emporia, Kansas, “the founding city of Veterans Day” and naming Alvin J. King, a local shoe cobbler, as its founder, with credit to Representative Ed Rees. Its preamble says Veterans Day “was first organized and celebrated in Emporia” in 1953.

For seven years, the federal Veterans Day fell in October

The Uniform Holiday Bill, signed on June 28, 1968, put four holidays on Mondays to give federal employees three-day weekends, and set Veterans Day on the fourth Monday in October. The change took effect on January 1, 1971. Only Oklahoma and Mississippi never moved Veterans Day off November 11, but most other states soon passed laws moving it back: by 1975, a Congressional Research Service report notes, 46 had either never changed the date or returned to it.

The VA’s history of the holiday puts the result in one sentence: “The first Veterans Day under the new law was observed with much confusion on October 25, 1971.”

In September 1975, President Gerald Ford signed a bill returning Veterans Day to November 11 beginning in 1978, so the October date was used seven times, from 1971 through 1977. In his statement he said the move “supports the expressed will of the overwhelming majority of our State legislatures, all major veterans service organizations, and many individuals.” Since 1978 the holiday has fallen on November 11 whatever the day of the week.

Veterans Day thanks the living, Memorial Day the dead

The VA separates the two holidays by who is honored. Memorial Day is for military personnel who died in the service of their country, especially those killed in battle or by wounds sustained in battle.

	Veterans Day	Memorial Day
Date	November 11	Last Monday in May
Honors	Everyone who served honorably, mainly the living	Those who died in service
Flag code	A display day, with no half-staff rule	Half-staff until noon
Poppies in the US	Not customary	Customary

The noon rule sits in the same section of the flag code that sends a flag to the top of the pole for an instant before it is lowered to half-staff. The poppies trace to John McCrae’s 1915 poem In Flanders Fields, the VA says, and Americans traditionally wear them on Memorial Day, while many Canadians wear them on November 11.

The VA also settles the spelling: Veterans Day takes no apostrophe, “because it is not a day that ‘belongs’ to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans.”

The holiday that mainly thanks the living keeps the date of a ceasefire that came one minute too late for Henry Gunther. For seven years Congress even moved it to October, then gave November 11 back. Strictly FYI.