Father's Day: 58 years late, but now a $1 billion holiday

“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

-- Mark Twain

I spent part of the morning doing a little research and I discovered that Father’s Day, which is so widely and thoroughly embraced in these times, didn’t officially exist until 1972 – 58 years after Mother’s Day became a national holiday.

Today, Father’s Day is a $1 billion holiday, the fourth most popular, according to Hallmark. In addition to the $1 billion in presents exchanged  -- ties and flowers are popular – there are 87 million cards given to fathers on their special day.

Sonora Dodd of Spokane, Wash., is credited with creating Father's Day in 1909 after listening to a Mother's Day sermon. Dodd sought to honor her father, William Smart, a Civil War veteran and widower, and picked June 17, 1910, in honor of his birthday.

President Lyndon Johnson issued a proclamation in 1966 issuing the third Sunday in June as Father's Day and President Richard Nixon signed it into law during the 1972 presidential campaign.
Though Father’s Day was celebrated by many beginning in the years after World War II, it’s establishment as an official holiday suffered many ups and downs.

Here’s a summary provided by History.com:

… Mother’s Day did not become a commercial holiday until 1908, when–inspired by Jarvis’s daughter Anna, who wanted to honor her own mother by making Mother’s Day a national holiday–the John Wanamaker department store in Philadelphia sponsored a service dedicated to mothers in its auditorium. Thanks in large part to this association with retailers, who saw great potential for profit in the holiday, Mother’s Day caught on right away. In 1909, 45 states observed the day, and in 1914, President Woodrow Wilson approved a resolution that made the second Sunday in May a holiday in honor of “that tender, gentle army, the mothers of America.”

Origins of Father’s Day

The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm -- perhaps because, as one florist explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.” On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah, but it was a one-time commemoration and not an annual holiday. The next year, a Spokane, Wash., woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents.

She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful: Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on July 19, 1910. Slowly, the holiday spread. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. However, many men continued to disdain the day. 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.”

Father’s Day: Controversy and Commercialism

During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park -- a public reminder, said Parents’ Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere, “that both parents should be loved and respected together.”

Paradoxically, however, the 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 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.