November 11

They came home.

The day is for the living.

Memorial Day is for the dead. This day is for the ones who served and came back. The hour is the hour the guns stopped in 1918. The debt is older than the holiday. It starts with the army of 1775.

A man comes home to a woman and a boy. An Appeal to Heaven flag hangs by the door.

The eleventh hour

Of the eleventh day. Of the eleventh month.

117 films on this shelf. Every scored picture with War among its genres, and the ones whose own words are about a veteran. Sorted by the number. A high score is not a parade. Read the line under the name before you press play.

1775

There was no such day in 1776.

There was an army. On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress created the Continental Army. Washington took command at Cambridge in July. Through 1776 the army lost New York, kept a cause, and on the night of December 25 crossed the Delaware. Trenton followed on the 26th. Princeton followed on January 3. Men enlisted for months. Pay arrived late or not at all. A promise of land was made and often broken.

In March 1783, at Newburgh, that unpaid army nearly refused to go home. Washington’s address on March 15 is the reason the republic did not begin as a government of officers. In May the officers formed the Society of the Cincinnati, the first veterans’ society of the war. Most of the men who had carried the muskets were not in it. They went back to farms, shops, and debts.

1818

The country owed the living.

On March 18, 1818, Congress passed a pension for Continental veterans who had served at least nine months and were in need. It was the first time the United States, as a nation, paid the living who had fought its first war, because they had fought it and were poor. The act of 1832 widened that to a service pension. A man no longer had to prove he was destitute. He had to prove he had served.

After the Civil War the pension rolls became enormous. The Grand Army of the Republic was founded in Decatur, Illinois, on April 6, 1866, by and for Union veterans. Confederate veterans kept their own associations. The argument over who counted was already the argument of the country.

1868

The dead were given a day first.

On May 5, 1868, General John A. Logan, commander of the Grand Army, issued General Order No. 11. May 30 would be Decoration Day. Flowers on the graves of the Union dead. Towns in the North and the South had already been doing it. Waterloo, New York, and Columbus, Georgia, both claim an early observance. The federal Monday in May is the heir of that day. It is Memorial Day.

Memorial Day is for the dead. Veterans Day is not that day. Mixing them is how a country forgets which debt it is paying.

1918

The eleventh hour.

In a railway carriage at Compiègne, in the early morning of November 11, 1918, the armistice was signed. The guns were to stop at 11 a.m. French time. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. Men died in the hours between the signature and the silence. The fighting stopped. The legal peace did not. The Treaty of Versailles was signed on June 28, 1919. The United States ended its state of war by the Knox–Porter Resolution on July 2, 1921.

Wilson proclaimed the first anniversary, November 11, 1919, as Armistice Day. On June 4, 1926, Congress asked the president to call the country to it each year. On May 13, 1938, it became a legal holiday, dedicated to the cause of world peace and to the veterans of what was then called the World War. One war. The next one had not yet renamed the day.

1954

The name changed, because the living had multiplied.

A day named only for 1918 could not hold the men who came home from 1945, or from Korea. On November 11, 1947, Raymond Weeks, a veteran of the Second World War, organized a National Veterans Day in Birmingham, Alabama, for everyone who had served. He is often called the father of the day. In Emporia, Kansas, Alvin J. King pressed for the new name, and the town kept the day under that name in 1953.

On June 1, 1954, President Eisenhower signed the law that amended the act of 1938. Armistice Day became Veterans Day. The purpose was no longer one armistice. It was every American who had served in the armed forces, living or dead, and especially the living, who already had no day of their own.

1978

They moved it to a Monday. The country moved it back.

The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 took effect in 1971 and put Veterans Day on the fourth Monday in October, so the federal week could have a long weekend. The date people actually meant was November 11. States kept the old day. In 1975 President Ford signed the return. From 1978 the federal holiday was November 11 again, whatever day of the week it fell on.

Armed Forces Day, the third Saturday in May since 1950, is for those still in uniform. Memorial Day is for the dead. Veterans Day is for the ones who served and came home. That is the whole distinction. Keep it.

The pictures

Sorted by the number.

Seventy and above can be sat with. Under 45, leave it. The shelf is every scored film with War among its genres, plus the ones that speak of a veteran and are not filed as war pictures. 16 of them clear 70.