A Turkey of a Day

Dedicated btw fans know that we have posted about the history of the presidential turkey pardon in the past.

But this year, let’s switch it up a bit and examine a different Thanksgiving history angle. (And no, it’s NOT going to be about Pilgrims, Native Americans, and what they might or might not have agreed to eat.) Instead, let’s learn a bit about how presidents have gotten involved in the timing of Thanksgiving.

Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a U.S. holiday in November 1863. At the time, Lincoln said that the holiday should be observed on the last Thursday of November. But sometimes, November has four weeks and sometimes it has five weeks. So, in a five-Thursday November, the shopping time between Thanksgiving and Christmas got tight. (Even during the Great Depression, it seems that Thanksgiving-to-Christmas shopping was a BIG deal.)

This variation of Shopping Days Before Christmas became a problem for President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. The November of 1939 has five weeks, so Roosevelt asked the nation to observe Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday. This would allow an extra week of holiday shopping, which would be helpful for retailers who were still suffering from the Great Depression that had started in 1929. Unfortunately, Roosevelt’s decision was NOT viewed as a good idea by small businessmen.

As you can see from the image below, small business owners felt they benefitted MORE in shorter shopping seasons, because the overcrowding in the national chain department stores drove more shoppers to local, smaller shops.

As a result of all of the controversy, in 1941 Congress eliminated the issue by passing legislation declaring that the official Thanksgiving Day holiday would–from that time foward–be celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November.

Source: The details of this story were taken from the Our Presidents Tumblr page “1939: The Year of Two Thanksgivings”. Our Presidents is a great Web site run by the National Archives. It uses our nation’s presidential libraries as a resource for archive document scans, historical photos, and lots of fun information about United States history.