Father's Day 2020

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Today, June 21, is celebrated as Father's Day in the U.S. In May, moms had a national day of celebration. This holiday belongs to dads. After reading about its start, I'm sharing some of the holiday's history here.

Many assume Father’s Day (and Mother’s Day as well) are holidays designed by greeting card makers for profit motives (not a bad assumption at that). But it's not the real backstory on how it became a national holiday. That was largely the efforts of two women plus a decades-long fight to get fathers their overdue day of recognition.

Father’s Day This ’n That

Father's Day was inaugurated in the U.S. in the early 20th century to complement Mother's Day and to celebrate fathering, and fatherhood. It took years to attain holiday status.

The campaign to establish a national holiday for fathers surprisingly was spearheaded by two women, (Grace Clayton and Sonora Dodd) two years apart and in two different U.S. states to honor their late fathers on their birthdays. (Why didn't it surprise me that women were involved?)

The celebration wasn't immediately accepted after being proposed (several times). It didn’t become a national U.S. holiday until 1972, compared to Mother’s Day which was officially over 50 years before in 1914. 

Men were said to have scoffed at what they saw as sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with gift-giving. The proposed celebration was viewed as a commercial ploy to sell more products paid for by the head of the house, dad.

This lack of enthusiasm, led a florist to reportedly comment that fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal of mothers. This wasn't a popular sentiment in the least.

The woman credited as the holiday's founder, Sonora Smart Dodd, spelled it Fathers' Day on her original petition for the holiday. However, the spelling "Father's Day" was already used in 1913 when a bill was introduced in Congress at the first attempt to establish the holiday.

At the onset of WWII, advertisers widely suggested 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 wasn’t yet a federal holiday, but it had become a national institution.

Where It Began — The Women Behind Father’s Day

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In July 1908, Grace Golden Clayton, the daughter of a Methodist minister, proposed a Father’s Day service in Fairmont, West Virginia to honor fathers, not only her late father, but men who had died in the worst mining accident in U.S. history. In December 1907, the Monongah Mining Disaster in West Virginia had killed over 300 men, many were fathers.

Clayton, who asked her pastor to honor these fathers, chose the Sunday nearest to her late father's July birthday. But, the Fairmont observance didn't become an annual event outside of the town. It wasn't promoted by the local church or City Council because of other local events. Instead, local headlines focused on a July 4 celebration that drew 12,000 attendants and the death of a young girl. Additionally, Clayton never promoted or discussed the event, the original sermon wasn't reproduced and was lost. The event wasn't celebrated again locally for years.

Across the country in Spokane, Washington, another woman, Sonora Smart Dodd, was similarly inspired to honor fathers, especially her own.

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In June 1910, Dodd convinced the Spokane Ministerial Association and the YMCA to set aside a Sunday in June to celebrate fathers. She also suggested the date as her late father’s birthday, June 5. Instead, the ministers selected the third Sunday in June.
They wanted more time after Mother’s Day (the second Sunday in May) to prepare their sermons. On June 19, 1910, Dodd delivered presents to handicapped fathers at the YMCA and city ministers devoted their sermons on fatherhood.

Arkansas native Dodd wanted to honor her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran and single parent who had raised six children after his wife's death. After attending a Mother’s Day service in 1909, Dodd was thought to have been inspired by another woman’s crusade to establish a Mother's Day celebration. (Two months before, Anna Jarvis held a celebration for her late mother in Grafton, West Virginia. Jarvis is now widely considered the founder of the Mother's Day holiday.)

As the earlier Fairmont West Virginia event, this one also didn’t meet with much success. Dodd was studying in Chicago, stopped promoting it, and it faded into obscurity.  But, unlike Clayton, who gave up on the idea, Dodd returned to Spokane a decade later and actively promoted the celebration, helped by trade groups that would benefit most from a celebration. These included manufacturers of ties, tobacco, pipes, and any (at that time) traditional present for fathers.

Most Americans perceived it as a merchandising attempt to replicate the commercial success of Mother's Day. But trade groups persisted by promoting it. By the mid-1980s, Father’s Day was recognized as a second Christmas for men's gift-oriented industries.

What Happened Later

A bill to give the holiday national recognition was introduced in Congress in 1913. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson spoke at a Father's Day celebration in Spokane. He wanted to make it an official holiday. Congress resisted fearing that the holiday would become commercialized as was already happening with the Mother's Day holiday. (If only they knew, how right that thinking was years ago.) 

In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged states to observe Father’s Day nationwide, but didn't issue a national proclamation. Two earlier attempts to formally recognize the holiday had met with Congressional defeat once again.

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When the efforts reached one of its Congressional stalemates, U.S. Senator, Margaret Chase Smith (a vocal New Englander) issued a sharp rebuke, declaring: Either we honor both our parents, mother and father, or let us desist from honoring either one. But to single out just one of our two parents and omit the other is the most grievous insult imaginable. Smith, a Maine native, ranked as the longest-serving (1949-1973) Republican woman in the senate and was serving when it became a national holiday.

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers and designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. But it wasn't an official holiday until 1972, when President Richard Nixon signed a Congressional resolution making it a national holiday. (This was eight years after Clayton's death and six years before Dodd’s death at the age of 96.)

Today as always, we remember ❤️ our late fathers, Anthony (left) and Robert (right) shown with their sons. The toddler is my younger brother, Tony; the young boy is my husband, Patrick (Grenville here).