Happy Father's Day

You might think that Father’s Day is one of those holidays that’s been around for a long time. You’d be wrong. In fact in the US Father’s Day has only existed since 1972. It’s possible that fathers lingered so far behind mothers because they didn’t pose such a ready and obvious market for the flower and card industries, but the origin of the holiday could be traced back to July 5, 1908, when a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers. This Sunday sermon was held to memorialize 362 men who perished in a December 1907 explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah. This was a one-time commemoration, though, and it wasn’t until a year later that Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. Dodd went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers, and government officials in her quest to garner support and she was successful. In 1910 Washington State became the first in the nation to celebrate a statewide Father’s Day.

The holiday slowly spread across the country. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to remotely unfurl a flag in Spokane. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge made the case for state governments to observe Father’s Day. However, ironically, it was men themselves who stood in the way of the holiday’s acceptance. 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.”

In the 1920s and 1930s a movement to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in favor of a single holiday called Parents’ Day gained support. Rallies were held in New York’s Central Park on Mother’s Day. In a stroke of irony, it was the Great Depression that came to the rescue of Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day, though it hadn’t become official). Struggling retailers and advertisers rallied behind the idea of another holiday to promote sales, redoubling their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men and 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.

So, 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. Today, economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts.

Here’s a hearty Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. I hope you find your Dad’s Day stocking filled with all sorts of manly goodness.