America’s greatest tradition: inventing spurious traditions

Fredericksburg, Virginia

Americans crave traditions. The older they are the more we cherish them. Thanksgiving, which beats out Christmas, was invented by Abe Lincoln in 1863 but it is an outgrowth of the timeless harvest festival celebrated by the generations of mankind that formed the earliest agricultural communities. Much harder is inventing traditions from something new. In this we are unsurpassed. Take the president’s annual State of the Union address to congress. Ever since Thomas Jefferson’s time, a clerk from the House of Representatives read it in a rapid drone and then left. But in 1917, facing entry into Europe’s first world war, President Woodrow Wilson decided to deliver the address in person. Since then the speech has always been delivered by the president himself, in keeping with tradition.