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→Early Development in the United States
In 1910, another woman, Sonora Smart Dodd from Spokane Washington, was listening to a Mother's Day sermon when she wanted to have a Father's Day celebration. Mostly she felt mothers were getting more attention than fathers who had also sacrificed a lot or sometimes dealt with adversity in raising their children. In fact, her father was a war veteran who raised six children by himself after the death of his wife. He often worked long hours to provide for his family on his meager farm. Initially, she wanted to celebrate the day on June 5th, which was her father's birthday, but the Methodist Church she asked to preach about fathers decided to make it the third sunday of June for the official sermon and celebration on fatherhood.
In the first few years after 1910, the idea of Father's Day spread throughout the country and prominent politicians such as William Jennings Bryant and members of congress proposed a bill to celebrate Father's Day in 1913. The bill was slow to come to the floor and Woodrow Wilson made a new push to celebrate it officially in 1916 by wanting it declared as a federal holiday. By then, however, it became evident that Mother's Day had become very commercialized. Congress feared it was simply making a commercial holiday or benefit rather than a real holiday to celebrate fathers. Members of Congress killed the proposal and the idea faded again until President Coolidge proposed it being celebrated by Americans in 1924. Recognizing the problems with commercialism in Mother's Day, he simply recommended people celebrate Father's Day.
Meanwhile, Dodd continued promoting the idea of Father's Day, where the third Sunday of June had become the holiday people celebrated. Similar to Mother's Day, many business that saw a potential benefit from Father's Day did begin to help Dodd in promoting Fathers Day in the 1930s. Perhaps the Great Depression helped create incentive for them to replicate the success of Mother's Day by this time promoting male-oriented gifts such as pipes. However, this was probably off-putting to Americans who were not impressed with how Mother's Day became so commercialized. Thus, Father's Day did not gain in much popularity in the 1930s-1940s.
==Today's Father's Day in the United States==