Federal Holiday Quotes
In 1840 Benbow traveled the countryside promoting his one month general strike. He was arrested and imprisoned a few days before the strike was scheduled to begin. This did intimidate all the other strike leaders and the strike was called off. Benbow died in prison the following year.
This is the first state to make Christmas a legal holiday. The reason that this is important is when there were many legal battles of public schools and municipalities celebrating Christmas and exhibiting crèches and Christmas trees, several of the proponents argued the doctrine of originalism—namely that we should not declare unconstitutional anything that was common and accepted at the time of the Constitution’s writing, debating, and ratification. They argued that the First Amendment was not intended to cover celebrations of Christmas as the founding fathers would not have made unconstitutional that which was common. While the principle of originalism has advocates and critics, the originalism theory does not hold regarding Christmas because Christmas was not commonly celebrated in early America. See {629845} and {629843} for more evidence on this point.
