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.
History
Father's
Day was inaugurated in the United States in the early 20th century to
complement Mother's Day in celebrating fatherhood and male parenting.
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.
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.
In addition to
Father's Day, International Men's Day is celebrated in many
countries on November 19 for men and boys who are not fathers.
A "Father's
Day" service was held on July 5, 1908, in Fairmont, West Virginia, in the Williams Memorial
Methodist Episcopal Church South, now known as Central United Methodist Church. Grace
Golden Clayton was mourning the loss of her father when, on December 1907,
the Monongah Mining Disaster in nearby Monongah killed 361 men, 250 of them fathers,
leaving around a thousand fatherless children. Clayton suggested her pastor
Robert Thomas Webb to honor all those fathers. Clayton chose the Sunday
nearest to the birthday of her father, Methodist minister Fletcher Golden.
Clayton's event did
not have repercussions outside of Fairmont for several reasons, among them: the
city was overwhelmed by other events, the celebration was never promoted
outside of the town itself and no proclamation was made in the City Council.
Also two events overshadowed this event: the celebration of Independence Day July 4, 1908, with 12,000
attendants and several shows including a hot air balloon event, which took over
the headlines in the following days, and the death of a 16-year-old girl on
July 4. The local church and Council were overwhelmed and they did not even
think of promoting the event, and it was not celebrated again for many years.
The original sermon was not reproduced in press and it was lost. Finally,
Clayton was a quiet person, who never promoted the event or even talked to
other persons about it.
Clayton also may have
been inspired by Anna
Jarvis' crusade to establish Mother's Day; two months prior, Jarvis
had held a celebration for her dead mother in Grafton, West Virginia, a town about 15 miles
(24 km) away from Fairmont.
In 1911, Jane Addams proposed
a citywide Father's Day in Chicago, but she was turned down.
In 1912, there was a
Father's Day celebration in Vancouver, Washington, suggested by Methodist pastor
J. J. Berringer of the Irvingtom Methodist Church. They believed mistakenly
that they had been the first to celebrate such a day. They followed a 1911
suggestion by the Portland
Oregonian.
Harry C. Meek, member
of Lions Clubs International, claimed that he had first
the idea for Father's Day in 1915. Meek claimed that the third Sunday of
June was chosen because it was his birthday (it would have been more natural to
choose his father's birthday). The Lions Club has named him
"Originator of Father's Day". Meek made many efforts to promote
Father's Day and make it an official holiday.
The US Open golf tournament is
scheduled to finish on Father's Day, as was the 2016 NBA Finals.
The FireKeepers Casino 400 NASCAR auto race is often
held on Father's Day.
Spelling
In the United States, Dodd
used the "Fathers' Day" spelling on her original petition for the
holiday, but the spelling
"Father's Day" was already used in 1913 when a bill was introduced to
the U.S. Congress as the first attempt to establish the holiday, and it
was still spelled the same way when its creator was commended in 2008 by
the U.S. Congress.
Reference : https://goo.gl/v5yyRI
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