Roses used to be a traditional flower to give dads on Father’s Day.
Each June, stores roll out their Father’s Day best — sales on ties, watches, and barbecue grills. But when Father’s Day was first created, a much smaller token was given out to dads: roses. Flowers aren’t as heavily advertised for Father’s Day now as they are for mothers in May, yet the link between dads and the delicate blooms comes from the earliest American celebrations of the holiday.
The first known Father’s Day is tied to the West Virginia mining community of Fairmont. On July 5, 1908, the town held a church service honoring the lives of fathers in their community, many of whom had perished the December before in what is widely considered the worst mining disaster in U.S. history. However, the church event was held just one time, and another city propelled the holiday into national view.
In 1909, Sonora Smart Dodd launched her campaign to honor fathers from her home in Spokane, Washington. As the daughter of a Civil War veteran and widower who had raised six children, Dodd believed fathers deserved recognition for their roles. Within a year, she had drummed up community support, and on June 19, 1910, Washington became the first state to celebrate Father’s Day. Dodd’s first festivities included an exchange of roses; children gave red roses to their fathers and pinned color-coded buds to their shirts — red for living fathers and white roses in honor of the deceased. The activist even rode through the city, handing out flowers and gifts to fathers who couldn’t leave home. Over time, the tradition of giving roses to dads faded away, but the holiday stuck around. After years of rallying, Father’s Day became a federally recognized holiday in 1972.
Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have long been honored as separate holidays, but in their earliest years, some organizers considered merging the two. A few American activists pushed for a replacement “Parents’ Day” during the 1920s and ’30s, with plans for the festivities to be held on the second Sunday in May (overwriting Mother’s Day). Robert Spero, one of the idea’s most ardent supporters, regularly led Parents’ Day festivities in New York City’s Central Park; in 1931 he argued separate holidays created a “division of respect and affection” within families that should be replaced with a date that instead served as a “reminder that both parents should be loved and respected together.” However, Spero’s efforts never took hold on a grand scale, in part because of the Great Depression. Retailers capitalized on Father’s Day to generate gift-giving dollars in a tight economy, and with the onset of World War II, the date became a new way to honor men’s contributions to the war effort.
