Father’s Day is Sunday, June 17th, and here is a brief history of the holiday:
The campaign to celebrate Father’s Day did not have the same enthusiasm as Mother’s Day. It was not until July 5th, 1908, that a West Virginian church sponsored the nation’s first event to honor fathers. They held a Sunday service in memory of 362 men who had perished in an explosion at the Fairmont Coal Company mine in Monogah, West Virginia the previous December.
In 1910 in Spokane, Washington, a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official holiday equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, shopkeepers, the YMCA, and government officials, in attempts to gather support for her idea. She was successful and Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.
The holiday slowly spread and in 1916, President Woodrow honored the holiday by using the telegraph to spread the message and in 1924, President Coolidge urged State governments to observe Father’s Day. Today, Father’s Day is celebrated in the United States on the third Sunday of June. In other countries, especially in Europe and in Latin America, fathers are honored on St. Joseph’s Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19th.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, a movement arose to remove Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and combine it with a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Each year on Mother’s Day, Parents’ Day activists rallied together to remind the public that both parents should be respected and loved together, not individually. Ironically, the Great Depression halted the efforts to combine the two holidays. Retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men and promoted gifts such as greeting cards, neckties, socks, hats, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and various other sporting goods.
After World War II broke out, advertisers argued that Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. After the end of the war, Father’s Day was not a federal holiday, but it was a national institution. In 1972, 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. For all the fathers, we want to take a moment to honor and congratulate you on Father’s Day. May you and your loved ones have a wonderful holiday.
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