Father's Day: A salute to fathers (and money)

Jun. 9—The histories of Father's Day and of Mother's Day are so intertwined that groups over the last 100 years have pushed for them to be merged into a single holiday: Parents Day.

Both holidays trace their roots to Middle Age Christian observances — Mother's Day to Mothering Sunday and Father's Day to Saint Joseph's Day, which commemorates the earthly father of Jesus — but the United States' observances both began in the early 1900s.

America's Mother's Day began when Anna Jarvis and her supporters held a celebration of Jarvis's late mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, in 1908 in Grafton, W.Va.

A couple of months later, the Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South (now Central United Methodist Church) in Fairmont, W.Va., held a "Father's Day" service to commemorate the deaths of 361 men — 250 of them fathers — in the Monongah Mining Disaster the previous December. Proposed by Grace Golden Clayton, the event did not have repercussions outside of Fairmont, according to an article on Wikipedia.com.

The next year, in Spokane, Wash., Sonora Smart Dodd heard a sermon about Jarvis's Mother's Day, and she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar day honoring them.

Dodd was born in Arkansas in 1882, daughter of Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart and his wife, Ellen. In 1889, when Sonora was 7 years old, the Smart family moved from Marion, Ark., to a farm west of Spokane, Wash., according to a Wikipedia article about Dodd.

"When Sonora was 16, her mother died in childbirth with her sixth child," the article said. "Sonora was the only daughter and shared with her father William in the raising of her younger brothers, including her new infant brother Marshall."

After hearing about the Mother's Day event, Dodd approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and suggested her own father's birthday of June 5 as a day to honor fathers. The alliance chose the third Sunday in June instead because the pastors didn't have time to write sermons by June 5, according to another Wikipedia article.

Dodd's Father's Day service was celebrated June 19, 1910, at the YMCA in Spokane, Wash. It had some success but didn't take off the way Mother's Day did. President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed Mother's Day the second Sunday in May in 1914, and in 1916 he spoke at Spokane's Father's Day event. He wanted to make Father's Day official too, but Congress resisted because they thought it would become commercialized — which is exactly what happened with Mother's Day. President Calvin Coolidge called for all states to celebrate the day in 1924.

Dodd herself stopped promoting Father's Day in the 1920s while she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. When she returned to Spokane in the 1930s, she picked it back up again and raised awareness at a national level, according to Wikipedia.

Mother's Day became a national holiday in part because of the support of retailers such as florists, confectioners and greeting card companies — and the Wannamaker department store that backed Anna Jarvis from the beginning. Father's Day also had support from trade groups that hoped to benefit, such as the makers of ties, tobacco pipes and other traditional gifts for fathers. Their efforts redoubled during the Great Depression, according to an article at History.com, and during World War II advertisers argued 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," the History.com article said.

The fears of commercialization were well-founded.

"Since 1938 she [Dodd] had the help of the Father's Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion," the Wikipedia article said. "Americans resisted the holiday during a few decades, perceiving it as just an attempt by merchants to replicate the commercial success of Mother's Day, and newspapers frequently featured cynical and sarcastic attacks and jokes. But the trade groups did not give up: They kept promoting it and even incorporated the jokes into their adverts, and they eventually succeeded. By the mid-1980s the Father's Council wrote that '(...) [Father's Day] has become a Second Christmas for all the men's gift-oriented industries.'"

It was in 1966 — more than 50 years after Mother's Day was proclaimed — when a proclamation from President Lyndon B. Johnson designated the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. The day was made a permanent national holiday six years later when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.