Pardon Day
<p>On Sunday 8 September 1974, Gerald Ford sat alone at his Oval Office desk and signed Proclamation 4311, granting Richard Nixon “a full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offences he might have committed as president. It was a politically suicidal act — Ford’s approval rating collapsed almost overnight, and many believe it cost him the 1976 election — and it remains the most famous pardon in American history. That the calendar’s Pardon Day falls on this same 8 September is, depending on your taste, either a pointed coincidence or a fitting one. Either way it pins the day’s gentle theme of forgiveness to a hard, documented case in which one man absolved another and paid dearly for it.</p>
<h2 id="where-the-day-comes-from">Where the day comes from</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The plain truth is that no founder, charity or proclamation can be reliably credited with creating Pardon Day as an observance, and it would be dishonest to invent one. It surfaced among the American “national day” calendars and spread by listing and repetition. What its date does is borrow the gravity of a real event: the 8 September pardon of 1974 gives an otherwise vague day of good feeling something concrete to think about. Forgiveness is easy to recommend in the abstract; Ford’s decision shows it as a costly, contested act with real consequences, which is a far more honest starting point.</p>
<h2 id="the-many-meanings-of-pardon">The many meanings of “pardon”</h2>
<p>The word carries several weights, and the day touches all of them. At its lightest, to ask someone’s pardon is a small courtesy — “I beg your pardon” after an interruption. In the middle register, to grant a pardon is a private choice to release another person from blame. At its heaviest, a pardon is a formal act of state power. The English word descends through Old French <em>pardon</em> from the Late Latin <em>perdonare</em>, “to give wholeheartedly, to remit” — the same <em>donare</em>, “to give”, that sits inside “donate”. Built into the very word, then, is the idea that forgiveness is a kind of gift, something handed over freely rather than owed.</p>
<h2 id="a-history-of-mercy-as-power">A history of mercy as power</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The formal pardon is one of the oldest features of organised government, because the power to punish has nearly always travelled with the power to forgive. The Code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon and the edicts of Egyptian pharaohs included acts of clemency. In England, the royal prerogative of mercy — the monarch’s right to pardon — was established in law for centuries; the Act of Settlement of 1701 even limited it, barring the Crown from using a pardon to block an impeachment. When the framers of the United States Constitution gave the president the pardon power in Article II in 1787, they were consciously importing this royal prerogative into a republic, and the debate over whether a single official should hold such absolute mercy was sharp even then.</p>
<p>History is full of pardons that turned hinges. In 1660, Charles II’s Act of Indemnity and Oblivion pardoned most of those who had fought against the Crown in the English Civil War — while pointedly excluding the regicides who had signed his father’s death warrant. After the American Civil War, presidents Lincoln and Johnson issued sweeping amnesties to former Confederates in an effort to knit the nation back together. In 1977, on his first full day in office, Jimmy Carter pardoned the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had evaded the draft during the Vietnam War, an act explicitly aimed at national reconciliation. Each shows the same logic Ford acted on: that at certain moments, mercy is not weakness but the only available route to peace.</p>
<p>Some of the most moving pardons have arrived far too late to help their recipients, and they reveal forgiveness as an act a society performs on its own conscience. In 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted a posthumous royal pardon to Alan Turing, the mathematician whose code-breaking helped win the Second World War and who had been convicted of “gross indecency” in 1952 for being homosexual, chemically castrated, and who died in 1954. The pardon could do nothing for Turing; it was Britain admitting it had wronged him. A 2017 law extended the same pardon to thousands of other men convicted under the repealed statute. A pardon, these cases show, is not only mercy extended forward to an offender but sometimes an apology extended backward to a victim.</p>
<p>The religious roots run just as deep. The Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the oldest fixed day of seeking and granting forgiveness in continuous practice, its rituals described in the Book of Leviticus. Christianity placed forgiveness at its centre, with the Lord’s Prayer binding the forgiveness we ask to the forgiveness we extend. Islam holds <em>al-‘Afuww</em>, “the Most Forgiving”, among the names of God. The instinct to set aside time for reconciliation, which Pardon Day inherits, is among the most universal in human culture — and it sits close to other days that take seriously the work of repairing what is broken, such as the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-of-peace/">International Day of Peace</a>, with which it shares both a season and a spirit.</p>
<h2 id="why-forgiveness-is-worth-a-day">Why forgiveness is worth a day</h2>
<p>The case for forgiveness has, in recent decades, moved from the pulpit to the laboratory. The psychologist Everett Worthington, who studied forgiveness for years and then found his own mother murdered in 1996, has argued from clinical evidence that holding a grudge is physiologically expensive: chronic resentment is associated with elevated stress hormones, raised blood pressure and poorer sleep. Researchers at institutions including Stanford, where Frederic Luskin ran forgiveness training projects, have reported that structured forgiveness reduces anger and depressive symptoms. The striking finding running through this work is that forgiveness benefits the forgiver at least as much as the forgiven; it is less a gift to the other person than a release for oneself.</p>
<p>This is the argument the day quietly presses. Resentment feels like holding the other person accountable, but it more often functions as a slow self-injury, a wound kept open by repeated examination. To pardon is partly to stop paying that cost.</p>
<p>It helps to be clear about what forgiveness is not. Worthington and other researchers in the field are careful to distinguish forgiveness from reconciliation, from excusing, and from forgetting. To forgive a person is not to declare that what they did was acceptable, nor to invite them back into your life, nor to pretend the harm never happened. It is the narrower, internal act of releasing the grip of resentment while leaving the moral judgement intact. That distinction matters, because the most common objection to forgiveness — that it lets wrongdoers off the hook — quietly assumes the two are the same. They are not. A person can forgive a betrayal completely and still, sensibly, never trust the betrayer again.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-observed">How it is observed</h2>
<p>Because Pardon Day is rooted in private reflection rather than public ceremony, observance is individual and quiet. People use it to reach out to someone they have fallen out with — a call, a letter, a message that breaks a long silence. Others reflect privately, naming a grievance they have carried and consciously choosing to set it down, or extending forgiveness to themselves for an old mistake that has been hard to release. Faith groups, schools and counsellors sometimes mark it with discussions of conflict resolution and restorative justice — the movement, pioneered in places like New Zealand’s youth courts, that brings offenders and victims face to face. The day’s value lies in the restorative power of these acts; the same impulse toward repairing harm rather than only punishing it animates the wider work celebrated on the <a href="/specialdate/world-day-of-social-justice/">World Day of Social Justice</a>.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>Gerald Ford carried a copy of a 1915 Supreme Court ruling, <em>Burdick v. United States</em>, which held that accepting a pardon carries “an imputation of guilt” — Ford reportedly kept it to argue that Nixon’s acceptance was itself an admission of wrongdoing.</li>
<li>The Latin root of “pardon”, <em>perdonare</em>, literally means to give <em>thoroughly</em> — the <em>per-</em> intensifies the giving, so a pardon is, etymologically, an over-generous gift.</li>
<li>In 2001 the John F. Kennedy Library awarded Ford its Profile in Courage Award for the very pardon that had wrecked his popularity, a near-complete reversal of public judgement across a quarter-century.</li>
<li>The English “prerogative of mercy” was once so absolute that monarchs could and did pardon people for crimes not yet committed, a loophole long since closed.</li>
<li>Yom Kippur’s practice of seeking forgiveness specifically requires reconciling with other people <em>before</em> seeking it from God — interpersonal repair is treated as the precondition, not the afterthought.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>What the Ford episode exposes, and what an easy day of good feeling can obscure, is that forgiveness is frequently unpopular. The person who lets go of a grievance is often accused of going soft, of betraying the wronged, of forgetting. Ford was. Carter was. The forgiver rarely gets thanked in the moment and sometimes never does. Perhaps that is the harder thing a day like this can offer — not the warm assurance that pardoning will make us feel lighter, true as that may be, but the more demanding recognition that the most worthwhile pardons are usually the ones nobody around us approves of, granted not because the other person has earned them but because we would rather not spend the rest of our lives holding the knife.</p>
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