The Many Origins of Father’s Day.

 

The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm as that of the Mothers’ Day. This, perhaps, was because “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.”  

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 on the third Sunday of June: Father’s Day 2017 occurs on June 18; the following year, Father’s Day 2018 falls on June 17.

 

In other countries, especially in Europe and Latin America, fathers have always been honored on St. Joseph’s Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19.  

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 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.

And finally, in 1972, during a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.