Presidents and the Origin of Father’s Day
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, President Woodrow Wilson issued the first Mother’s Day presidential proclamation in 1914. The popularity of Mother’s Day grew quickly. Father’s Day had a much slower start. Fifty-two years passed before the first presidential proclamation about Father’s Day.
President Lyndon Johnson issued America’s first presidential Father’s Day proclamation in 1966. In his proclamation, Johnson acknowledged that “the third Sunday in June [had] for many years been observed as Father’s Day.” He proclaimed:
In the homes of our Nation, we look to the fathers to provide the strength and stability which characterize the successful family. If the father’s responsibilities are many, his rewards are also great—the love, appreciation, and respect of children and spouse.
President Johnson performs his role of father of the bride
at the wedding of his daughter Lynda at the White House in 1967.
President Johnson with his daughter Luci
and his newborn grandson Patrick
However, it wasn’t until 1972 that Congress passed an act making Father’s Day an official national holiday, and President Richard Nixon signed it into law.
Richard Nixon, then serving as vice president,
with his wife Pat and daughters, Patricia and Julie,
on a beach in New Jersey in 1953
President Nixon performs his role as father of the bride
at the wedding of his daughter Tricia
in the White House Rose Garden in 1967.
Let’s review a little Mother’s Day and Father’s Day history. Anna Jarvis of West Virginia is considered to be the founder of Mother’s Day. Anna was the 9th of her mother’s 11 children. During the Civil War, Anna’s mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, led her community’s work to take care of both Union and Confederate soldiers. Citizens of Virginia were so divided about the Civil War, that the western part of the state seceded from Virginia during the war and became the State of West Virginia.
After the war, Ann Reeves Jarvis worked to heal divisions between those in her community who had disagreed about the war. Mrs. Jarvis was a Sunday School teacher. She had long desired that a day be set aside to honor mothers and once told her Sunday School class that she hoped and prayed that someone would establish a day to honor mothers. After Ann’s death, her daughter, Anna Jarvis, began working to found a national Mother’s Day. Her efforts succeeded quickly. She organized a local celebration in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1908. Six year’s later, Woodrow Wilson made that first Mother’s Day presidential proclamation.
In 1909, 27-year-old Sonora Smart Dodd of Spokane, Washington, attended a Mother’s Day church service. During the service, Dodd decided that America needed a day to honor fathers, too. She loved and respected her own father, William Jackson Smart, who was a Civil War veteran. William Smart had become a single parent of Sonora and her five brothers when his wife died in childbirth. Sonora convinced the local ministerial alliance to hold a service in honor of fathers. Mrs. Dodd proposed June 5 which was her father’s birthday, but the alliance decided to hold the first Father’s Day service on June 19, 1910, which was the third Sunday in June.
The holiday did not become popular as quickly as Mother’s Day though President Wilson recognized Father’s Day in 1916. Some sources say that President Calvin Coolidge urged states to observe the day in 1924, ”to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children, and to impress upon fathers the full measure of their obligations.”
President Coolidge had a deep respect for his own father. What he said about his own father is a worthy aspiration for any father:
My father had qualities that were greater than any I possess. He was a man of untiring industry and great tenacity of purpose . . . He always stuck to the truth. It always seemed possible for him to form an unerring judgment of men and things. He would be classed as decidedly a man of character. I have no doubt he is representative of a great mass of Americans who are known only to their neighbors; nevertheless, they are really great.
Coolidge remained close to his father all his life and wrote him many letters. In one letter, he said, “I am sure I came to it [i.e., the presidency] largely by your bringing up and your example.”
President Calvin Coolidge and his father John Coolidge
The daughter of a single father who first proposed honoring fathers on a special day lived to see President Nixon sign Father’s Day into law in 1972. Mrs. Dodd had studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, become a painter, and worked in fashion design in Hollywood. She died in 1976 at 96 years old. Mrs. Dodd is called the “Mother of Father’s Day.”
Honor your father and mother
(which is the first commandment with a promise),
so that it may be well with you,
and that you may live long on the earth.
Ephesians 6:2