Father's Day was founded in Spokane,
Washington at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas.
Its first celebration was in the Spokane YMCA on June 19, 1910. Her father, the
Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six
children there. After hearing a sermon about Jarvis' Mother's Day at Central
Methodist Episcopal Church in 1909, she told her pastor that fathers should
have a similar holiday honoring them. Although she initially suggested June 5,
her father's birthday, the pastors did not have enough time to prepare their
sermons, and the celebration was deferred to the third Sunday of June.
Father's Day is a celebration honoring
fathers and celebrating fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of
fathers in society. The tradition was said to be started from a memorial
service held for a large group of men who died in a mining accident in
Monongah, West Virginia in 1907. It was first proposed by Sonora Dodd of
Spokane, Washington in 1909. It is currently celebrated in the United States
annually on the third Sunday in June.
It did not have much success initially. In
the 1920s, Dodd stopped promoting the celebration because she was studying in
the Art Institute of Chicago, and it faded into relative obscurity, even in
Spokane. In the 1930s Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the
celebration again, raising awareness at a national level. She had the help of
those trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday, for example the
manufacturers of ties, tobacco pipes, and any traditional present to fathers.
Since 1938 she 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. 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."
A bill to accord national recognition of the
holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson
went to Spokane to speak in a Father's Day celebration and wanted to make it
official, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialized.
US President Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed by
the nation, but stopped short of issuing a national proclamation. Two earlier
attempts to formally recognize the holiday had been defeated by Congress. In
1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of
ignoring fathers for 40 years while honoring mothers, thus "[singling] out
just one of our two parents". In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued
the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third
Sunday in June as Father's Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent
national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.
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