The Story Behind Dad’s Special Day
On the third Sunday in June, many of us will gather to pay tribute to Dad. The national holiday to honor fathers, which did not come about until the early 1970s, had it origins in the campaign to create a national Mother’s Day some 60 years earlier.
In 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd, whose father had been in the Civil War, heard a sermon about Anna Jarvis and a service she held at her Methodist Episcopal Church in West Virginia in 1908, paying tribute to mothers across the country and around the world. A year later, she held the first official Father’s Day celebration in Spokane, Washington, at the local YMCA. Mrs. Dodd proposed June 5 as the first Father’s Day, but organizers did not have enough time to prepare their sermons by that date and pushed the first celebration back to the third Sunday, June 5, 1910.
The early support for a national Father’s Day was substantial, and by 1913, supporters had a bill before Congress, though it did not pass. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson urged Senators and Representatives to create an official holiday, but they resisted, mostly due to fears about commercialization.
After initial enthusiasm for the holiday, popularity waned. Even Dodd stopped celebrating and promoting it, primarily because she had enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. When she graduated, though, she returned to Spokane and renewed her efforts to have a national holiday set aside. To help promote the idea, she enlisted the efforts of companies that would benefit most from such an event—her earliest supporters were mostly manufacturers of products that men liked, such as ties and tobacco pipes.
In 1938, Dodd created the Father’s Day Council, in cooperation with the Men’s Wear Retailers Association of New York, but encountered resistance, as the public generally perceived the campaign as an effort to duplicate and benefit from the commercial success of Mother’s Day. Undaunted, Dodd and her compatriots kept pushing the idea, finally getting a presidential signature on a proclamation in 1966 and on a bill officially designating the third Sunday as Father’s Day in 1972.
