The History of Father's Day - Daily Dose Documentary

The History of Father’s Day

the history of fathers day with a father and son silhouette

On July the 5th, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly honoring fathers, which was a one-time sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died the year before in a coal mining disaster near Monongah.

The following year, Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six Spokane Washington siblings who had been raised by their widower father, proposed an official equivalent to Mother’s Day in honor of fathers everywhere. She canvassed local churches, government officials and small business owners to drum up support for her idea, leading to the nation’s first statewide celebration of Father’s Day on June 19th, 1910.

Support for Father’s Day built slowly at first, until President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to formally observe Father’s Day on the third Sunday in June beginning in 1924.

Parents’ Day

Men, for the most part, continued to push back against a full-on celebration of Father’s Day, since many felt the holiday was a commercial gimmick designed to shower men with gifts paid for from their own wallets, which led to a movement in the 1920s and early 30s to scrap both Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in lieu of Parents’ Day.

Pro-Parents’ groups rallied yearly on Mother’s Day in New York’s Central park, leading Parents’ Day activist and radio personality, Robert Spere, to proclaim “that both parents should be loved and respected together.” The movement quietly lost steam during the Great Depression when struggling retailers and advertisers promoted Father’s Day as a “second Christmas” for men.

Father’s Day

Congress officially recognized Father’s Day in 1956 with the passage of a joint House and Senate resolution. Ten years later, President Lyndon Baines Johnson issued a proclamation calling for the third Sunday in June to be formally recognized as Father’s Day, while in 1972, in the middle of a hard-fought presidential re-election campaign, Richard Nixon signed yet another proclamation making Father’s Day a federal holiday.

Today, with over 121 million fathers in the United States, the National Retail Federation’s annual survey of retailers estimates that in 2021, Americans will spend more than $16 billion on Father’s Day gifts, making the annual observance a high-water moment for loving fathers everywhere.