Changes

Father's Day origins in the United States derive from 1908, soon after Mother's Day was initiated by Anne Jarvis. Similar to Mother's Day, the origin relate to mourning of a loss of a father. This time, it was Grace Golden Clayton, from Fairmont, West Virginia, who was morning her father. However, she lost her father in a very tragic mining accident in December 1907, where 361 men died in a major incident in Monogah, West Virginia. She had asked the local pastor in Fairmont to celebrate not just her father but all fathers lost on July 5, 1908in the mining accident. Unlike Jarvis, Clayton was far less vocal and the tradition did not spread far outside of Fairmont for some time.<ref>For more on the earliest modern Father's Day in the United States, see: Hawes, J. M., & Shores, E. F. (2001). <i>The family in America: an encyclopedia</i>. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO.</ref>

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 and celebrate her father decided to make it the third sunday Sunday of June for the official sermon and celebration on fatherhood. This created this date as the tradition in the United States.<ref>For more on Dodd's efforts, see: Colo 2012: 49 </ref>

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 increasingly 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 Dayin their own private way or with their communities.<ref>For more on the efforts in trying to make Father's Day an official holiday, see: LaRossa, Ralph. (1997). <i>The Modernization of Fatherhood: A Social and Political History</i>. University of Chicago. Chicago. </ref>

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 businesses that saw a potential benefit from Father's Day did begin to help Dodd in promoting Fathers Day in the 1930s. An association of businesses even formed to promote the holiday. 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 commercializedor simply became fatigued. Thus, Father's Day did not gain in much popularity in the 1930s-1940s, although it was celebrated and promoted throughout the country (Figure 2).<ref>For more on the early commercialization efforts in relation to Father's Day, see: Cross, Gary. (2000). <i>An All-consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America</i>. Columbia University Press. New York, pp. 52 </ref>