Father’s Day 2023
Origins of Father’s Day
Did you know that that first Father’s day was celebrated on June 19, 1910? I was fascinated by the origins of Father’s day and read that “fathers do not have the same sentimental appeal that mothers have,” according to a florist. The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers was not met with the same enthusiasm as Mother’s Day.
On July 05, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event in honor of fathers. It was a Sunday sermon suggested by Grace Golden Clayton in memory of her father and the 362 men who had died in explosions the previous December at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, West Virginia which left a thousand children fatherless. Clayton suggested her pastor, Robert Thomas Webb, honor all those fathers and chose the Sunday nearest to the birthday of her father, Methodist minister Fletcher Golden. Unfortunately the sermon was never reproduced in the press and has since been lost.
The following year, a woman from Spokane, Washington named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official Father’s Day. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shops, and government officials. Through her tenacity, she was successful and Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.
Former President Woodrow Wilson honored the day in 1916 when he pressed a button in Washington, DC and by using telegraph signals a flag was unfurled in Spokane, Washington.
In 1924, former President Calvin Coolidge also supported the holiday.
Many men, however, continued to scoff at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving. It was thought to be a commercial gimmick to sell more products, often paid for by the father himself at that time.
During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement emerged to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in favor of a single holiday, Parent’s Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park, as a public reminder, that both parents should be loved and respected together.
Ironically, 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 neckties, hats, socks, golf clubs, other sporting goods.
When World War II began, advertisers began to promote 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 nationally recognized.
In the middle of the 1972 presidential re-election campaign and 58 years after Mother’s Day was established, former President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday.
Today, we celebrate Father’s day in the United States on the third Sunday of June. It appears that fathers are ok with it now since economists estimate that Americans spend more than $1 billion each year on Father’s Day gifts! Father’s Day in 2023 occurs on June 18th. In other countries, especially in Europe and Latin America, fathers are honored on the Catholic holiday, St. Joseph’s Day, which falls on March 19. I quite like this approach, since I am Catholic!
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY TO ALL FATHERS from the Silent Freedom Team!
https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/fathers-day
