On the 11th of November every year, the U.S. honors and celebrates its military veterans. When did the U.S. holiday begin?
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World War I, dubbed back then as “The Great War,” officially ended on June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was signed. But months before the treaty was signed, fighting had already stopped. A ceasefire or armistice between the Allied nations and the Axis Powers occurred on 1918’s eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
On the same day in 1919, U.S President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the date as Armistice Day, calling on the nation to commemorate the conclusion of “the war to end all wars.”
However, around two decades after, World War II erupted, the war which saw the U.S. mobilize the highest 16 million members of the military, its highest deployment in history. Years after the Second World War ended, various veterans’ service organizations lobbied to the Congress to make a change on the holiday and replace the word “Armistice” with “Veterans.” The idea behind the change was to expand the holiday to celebrate all war veterans, and not just those who served during WWI.
On June 1, 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Congress’s amendment, renaming the holiday Veterans Day.
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Meredith Iler supports veterans through The Wounded Hero Program, an organization she founded that seeks to provide homes to wounded veteran soldiers. Read more about it here.
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