In today's post we will be looking at the history & origins of Father's Day. This will be a shorter post but will give us a look into how Father's Day came to be.
The first Father's Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, in the state of Washington. However, it was not until 1972; 58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother's Day official; that the day honoring fathers became a nationwide holiday in the United States.
The campaign to celebrate the nation's fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm- perhaps, as one florist explained, "fathers haven't the same sentimental appeal that mothers have."
On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation's first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had in the previous December's explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday. The next year, a Spokane, Washington woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother's Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful: Washington State celebrated the nation's first statewide Father's Day on June 19, 1910.
Slowly, the holiday spread. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father's Day. Today, the day honoring fathers is celebrated in the United States as well as Canada on the third Sunday of June. In other countries- especially in Europe and Latin America- fathers are honored on St. Joseph's Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19.
Many men, however, continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, "they scoffed at the holiday's sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products- often paid for by the father himself."
During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother's Day and Father's Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents' Day. Every year on Mother's Day, pro-Parents' Day groups rallied in New York City's Central Park- a public reminder, said Parents' Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, "that both parents should be loved and respected together."
Paradoxically, however, the Great Depression derailed this effort to combine and de-commercialize the holidays. Struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father's Day a "second Christmas" for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods, and greeting cards. When World War II began, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father's Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father's Day may not have been a federal holiday, but it was a national institution. In 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father's Day a federal holiday at last.
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