ORIGINS OF FATHER’S DAY
The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with
the same enthusiasm as Mother's Day–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, Washington 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.”
