A Holiday Created By Grateful Children

Happy Father’s Day!  As is true of many things when you try to trace their origins, there is some conflicting history about the roots of this holiday.

The two prominent stories about the beginnings of Father’s Day in the United States happened around the same time on opposite sides of the nation.  And both are stories of women who wanted to honor the fathers in their lives.

Grace Golden Clayton of West Virginia

On July 5, 1908 in Fairmont, West Virginia, a Father’s Day service was held after a terrible mining accident took the lives of hundreds of men.  A local minister’s daughter, Grace Golden Clayton had the idea to hold a service to honor fathers, particularly those lost in the mining accident.  Not many people outside of the community knew about the service and it didn’t become an annual event.

Sonora Smart Dodd of Washington

In 1909 while attending a Mother’s Day service at her church, Sonora Smart Dodd had the idea to create a similar holiday to honor fathers.  Her father, William Jackson Smart, a Civil War veteran, was a twice widowed father of 14 children.  Sonora’s mother Ellen died giving birth to her youngest child, leaving William a single father to 16 year old Sonora and her five younger brothers.  Both Ellen and William had been widowed prior to their marriage and both had children from those previous marriages.  Ellen had three children from her previous marriage and William had five children with his first wife before her death.

Sonora later said, “I remember everything about him.  He was both father and mother to me and my brothers and sisters.”

Sonora worked with the Spokane Ministerial Association and the local YMCA to put together a day in June to celebrate fathers.  On June 19, 1910, the first Father’s Day events were held- ministers around Spokane delivered sermons dedicated to fatherhood, boys from the YMCA passed out roses, Sonora gave out presents to handicapped fathers, and both the mayor of Spokane and governor of Washington issued proclamations.

The Long Road to National Holiday

After the success of this first year, Sonora began her work to have Father’s Day recognized as a national holiday just as Mother’s Day was in 1914.  She gained support from her congressman who help her to lobby for recognition as a national holiday.  The first bill to make Father’s Day a national holiday was introduced in Congress in 1913, but it didn’t pass. 

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson, who had supported the bill to recognize Father’s Day as a holiday, celebrated Father’s Day in Spokane.  In 1921, President Coolidge signed a resolution in favor of Father’s Day “to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”  In 1966, President Johnson signed an executive order that the holiday be celebrated on the third Sunday in June.  It wasn’t until 1972, when Sonora was 90 years old, that Congress passed an act officially making Father’s Day a national holiday.

So why did it take so long for Father’s Day to become a national holiday while Mother’s Day was accepted early on in its organizers’ efforts to get recognition?  In addition to Grace Golden Clayton and Sonora Smart Dodd, there were others who tried and failed to organize Father’s Day events and national recognition.  Jane Addams, the woman credited as being the “mother” of my profession of social work was one of these people.  She requested that a day be set aside in Chicago to honor fathers but was turned down by city officials.

Many people scoffed at the idea of creating a day honoring fathers in the same way as mothers because of the associations with the Mother’s Day holiday as being seeped in flowers and gift giving, sentimentalism, and the idea of honoring mothers who were often underappreciated. Congress of course politicized the issue and at one point, there were even discussions of having a “Parents’ Day” instead of individual holidays.

Ironically, despite the attempts of the holiday organizers to keep commercialism out of the holiday, it was retailers and advertisers who really propelled the idea of Father’s Day into being a national institution even before it was an official holiday. During the Great Depression, struggling retailers promoted Father’s Day as a “second Christmas” for men and marketed ties, pipes and tobacco, sporting goods, and cards. During World War II, the advertising industry pushed the narrative of celebrating Father’s Day as a way to honor American troops and to support the war effort.

A Holiday Created by Grateful Children

Despite the work that women like Sonora Smart Dodd did to try and honor the fathers in their lives with a special holiday, Father’s Day was not officially recognized in the United States until nearly sixty years after Mother’s Day became a holiday.  And today in 2024, it has moved pretty far from those earliest visions they had of honoring the men they cared about into yet another commercialized holiday.  According to the National Retail Federation, last year’s Father’s Day spending reached a record $22.9 billion (still about $10 billion behind Mother’s Day spending).  But as with every holiday that suffers from this same affliction of trying to cling to its roots, we can choose to remember and honor the purity of its purpose.  And at its roots, Father’s Day was a holiday that was created by grateful children who wanted to acknowledge the special men who raised them.  Just like Sonora Smart Dodd and Grace Golden Clayton, children of fathers around the world will honor their fathers in their own unique ways on this holiday.

As for me, I could not have been luckier with who I was blessed to have as a father and my two grandfathers.  I have such a loving and supportive father who has always put his family first and demonstrated a Christ-like example throughout our lives.  Proverbs 14:26 says that “Whoever fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for their children it will be a refuge.”  I am grateful that my brother and I have that refuge.  And now, I am blessed again to get to watch my husband be that kind of father to our daughter on their second Father’s Day together.

I hope that everyone has a wonderful Father’s Day weekend!