History.com
The nation’s first Father’s Day was celebrated on June 19, 1910, in the state of Washington. However, it was not until 1972—58 years after President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day official—that the day honoring fathers became a national holiday in the United States.
Father’s Day in the United States is held annually on the third Sunday in June. In 2026, Father’s Day occurs on Sunday, June 21. The holiday’s date has remained consistent ever since the first Father’s Day in the early 20th century.
The campaign to celebrate the nation’s fathers did not meet with the same enthusiasm as Mother’s Day –perhaps because, as one florist explained, “fathers haven’t the same sentimental appeal that mothers have.”
On July 5, 1908, a West Virginia church sponsored the nation’s first event explicitly in honor of fathers, a Sunday sermon in memory of the 362 men who had died in the previous December’s explosions at the Fairmont Coal Company mines in Monongah. The one-time commemoration did not jumpstart an annual holiday as the first Mother’s Day events had earlier that year.
The next year, a Spokane, Washington, woman named Sonora Smart Dodd, one of six children raised by a widower, tried to establish an official equivalent to Mother’s Day for male parents. She went to local churches, the YMCA, shopkeepers and government officials to drum up support for her idea, and she was successful: Washington State celebrated the nation’s first statewide Father’s Day on June 19, 1910.
Slowly, the holiday on the third Sunday of June spread. In 1916, President Wilson honored the day by using telegraph signals to unfurl a flag in Spokane when he pressed a button in Washington, D.C. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge urged state governments to observe Father’s Day. Many men, however, continued to disdain the day. As one historian writes, they “scoffed at the holiday’s sentimental attempts to domesticate manliness with flowers and gift-giving, or they derided the proliferation of such holidays as a commercial gimmick to sell more products–often paid for by the father himself.”
During the 1920s and 1930s, a movement arose to scrap Mother’s Day and Father’s Day altogether in favor of a single holiday, Parents’ Day. Every year on Mother’s Day, pro-Parents’ Day groups rallied in New York City’s Central Park for a public reminder, as Parents’ Day activist and radio performer Robert Spere once said, “that both parents should be loved and respected together.”
The Great Depression derailed this effort to combine and decommercialize the holidays. Paradoxically, struggling retailers and advertisers redoubled their efforts to make Father’s Day a “second Christmas” for men, promoting goods such as neckties, hats, socks, pipes and tobacco, golf clubs and other sporting goods as well as greeting cards.
When America entered World War II, advertisers began to argue that celebrating Father’s Day was a way to honor American troops and support the war effort. By the end of the war, Father’s Day was a widespread tradition—but still not a national holiday.
At Congress’ request, President Lyndon Johnson declared June 19, 1966, would be the first official Father’s Day across the country. “I urge all our people to give public and private expression to the love and gratitude which they bear for their fathers,” Johnson shared in his proclamation. He also directed officials to display the American flag on all government buildings that day.
Because Johnson only mentioned 1966, nationwide observance of Father’s Day continued unofficially over the next five years. Finally, in 1972, while in the middle of a hard-fought presidential reelection campaign, Richard Nixon signed a proclamation making Father’s Day a permanent national holiday at last.
Today, the holiday is one of the most celebrated days of the year in the U.S. In 2025, Americans were projected to spend a record $24 billion on Father’s Day, according to the National Retail Federation and Prosper Insights & Analytics. Popular purchases include greeting cards, clothing, special outings, gift cards and personal care products.
In other countries–especially in Europe and Latin America–fathers are honored on St. Joseph’s Day, a traditional Catholic holiday that falls on March 19.