HAMLET - June 17th is the third Sunday of the month and thus designated as Father’s Day in the United States.
A celebration honoring fathers, fatherhood, and paternal bonds has existed since the Middle Ages but was not officially celebrated in the U.S. until the 20th century, and was not designated as an official holiday in this country until 1972.
Catholic Europe celebrated a version of Fathers’ Day on March 19th (St. Joseph’s Day) and the tradition was carried to Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese explorers.
The date of July 5th, 1908 is generally accepted as the first attempt in the United States to recognize the solemnity of the role of fathers. Fairmont, West Virginia was the site of this initial ceremony when Grace Golden Clayton asked that her pastor, Robert Thomas Webb of Williams Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church (now known as Central United Methodist Church) honor the fathers who were killed in the December, 1907 Monongah Mining Disaster. A thousand children were left fatherless when 361 men (250 of them fathers) lost their lives in that accident.
Subsequent attempts to elevate Father’s Day to official status in the United States met with varying degrees of success. Subsequent to Anna Jarvis’ successful promotion of Mother’s Day in Grafton, West Virginia, Jane Addams proposed in 1911 that a citywide Father’s Day celebration be held in Chicago; her request was denied. However, another 1911 attempt was successful when the Portland Oregonian organized such an event in that city. In 1912, at the suggestion of Methodist pastor J.J. Berringer of the Irvington Methodist Church in Vancouver, Washington, a Father’s Day celebration was held there.
One individual who is often cited as the “father” of Father’s Day in this country is Harry C. Meek. A member of the Lions Clubs International, Meek claimed in 1915 to have been the first to come up with the idea. Although it was 7 years after Grace Clayton’s 1908 conceptualization, Meek’s continual efforts to promote the “holiday” received sufficient notoriety to gain traction. While his claim of origination is subject to debate, Meek may well be responsible for the designation of the third Sunday in June as the “official” date for Father’s Day – that day just happened to have been his birthday in 1915.
Meek’s claim as the progenitor of Father’s Day is certainly not uncontested. It may well be that Sonora Smart Dodd was the true originator of what we now call Father’s Day in the United States. In a manner similar to Grace Clayton two years earlier, after hearing a sermon about Jarvis’ Mother’s Day at Central Methodist Episcopal Church in Spokane, Washington, Dodd approached her pastor at Old Centenary Presbyterian Church (now Knox Presbyterian Church) about a similar recognition for fathers. Her father, William Jackson Smart, had been a Civil War veteran and single parent who raised six children at the local YMCA. Dodd suggested a date of June 5th (her father’s birthday) but the pastors did not have sufficient time to prepare that quickly so it was delayed until June 19th, which just happened to be the third Sunday. This was in 1910.
The Father’s Day celebration in Spokane faded in the 1920’s. Dodd had moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute and, without her constant encouragement, the people of Spokane lost interest. However, she returned home in the early 1930’s and reignited the movement, promoting the idea through trade groups that stood to profit by such a day. By 1938 the New York Associated Mens’ Wear Retailers founded a Father’s Day Council to consolidate and systematize the holiday’s commercial promotion.
The political history of Father’s Day is similarly characterized by fits and spurts of attempts to establish it as an officially recognized occurrence. A bill had been introduced in Congress as early as 1913 to recognize Father’s Day, but it failed. President Woodrow Wilson promoted it to coincide with a trip that he made to Spokane to speak at a Father’s Day celebration, and President Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that it be observed on a national level but did not issue any type of proclamation in support of such. A Father’s Day proposal was made yet again in Congress in 1957, only to once more fall short of acceptance. It was not until 1966 when President Lyndon Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers that the day was finally officially denoted, and another six years before President Richard Nixon elevated it to national holiday status in 1972.
NOTE: The “correct” spelling of the day of recognition for fathers remains under debate. Although Dodd used the plural possessive “Fathers’ Day” in her original petition and logic would dictate that the day belongs to all fathers everywhere (and thus represents plurality), the singular possessive “Father’s Day” was nevertheless maintained by Congress to coincide with Anna Jarvis’ specifically requested spelling of “Mother’s Day” as a singular possessive designed to commemorate one’s own parent.
But no matter how you choose to spell it, the meaning remains universal: honor thy father on this, HIS day of recognition, for the role he has played in molding you into the person whom you have become.
