It’s that time of the year, again.
The season when the cable stations fill their time slots with holiday-themed films. The old black-and-white classics and the modern Technicolor wanna-bes. Usually leading off the seasonal schedule is the appropriately named Holiday Inn. Released in 1942, produced by Paramount Pictures, and starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, the film is best remembered for introducing the song “White Christmas”, by Irving Berlin.
That’s the part that’s become a treasured keepsake of our cultural memory box. But there’s another part that’s been tossed into the dustbin of Americana, which I’ll discuss in a moment.
In the movie, der Bingle plays an entertainer who, to the dismay of his partner (Astaire), gives up show business. He moves to Connecticut and converts an old house into an inn. The gimmick, which provides the name to both the hostelry and the film, is that the inn is open only for holidays. The plot covers the events of a year by advancing from holiday to holiday, starting with New Year’s Eve, 1940. Each holiday “chapter” is introduced by a brief animated sequence.
If you’ve seen Holiday Inn, then the Thanksgiving opener might have left you scratching your head. It depicts the calendar leaf for November, 1941, with a frustrated tom turkey dashing back and forth between the third and fourth Thursdays of the month. As soon as the bird lands on the Thursday red-lettered as Thanksgiving Day, the designation shifts and the other Thursday becomes Thanksgiving. The befuddled tom finally gives up and shrugs his shoulders in exasperation.
It’s obviously some sort of topical in-joke, but one that most of us are seventy years too late to get.
Those of you who have been with my Deck Log from the beginning will recall my first Thanksgiving entry, back in 2007. There, I wrote of how Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of the influential magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, spent seventeen years lobbying to establish Thanksgiving as a national, annual holiday. After countless editorials and petitioning five presidents, Mrs. Hale finally succeeded when, in an 1863 proclamation, President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday.
Lincoln specified that Thanksgiving was to be observed on the final Thursday in November. And that worked just fine . . . until 1939.
The November of 1939 began on a Wednesday, which created the unusual circumstance of having five Thursdays in the month. The fifth Thursday would be 30 November---the last day of the month---and thus, would be Thanksgiving Day.
This was no big deal, except to one group of folks. When retailers took a look at the new calendars printed up for 1939 and saw Thanksgiving would fall on the last day of November, they had a fit. It would leave only twenty-four days before Christmas. That would cut into the traditional holiday-season shopping time and, they feared, would cut into their sales. There was only one recourse: see if they could get the Federal government to change its mind about Thanksgiving that year.
Fred Lazarus, Jr., head of Federated Department Stores, a holding company which included Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s, and Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, presented the situation to Harry Hopkins, the Secretary of Commerce and close personal friend and advisor of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The truncated shopping season would be a disaster for the retail industry, they argued. Hopkins agreed. He took their case to President Roosevelt personally.
You can’t really blame F.D.R. for what he did next. The United States was in its tenth year of the Great Depression and the economy still looked bleak. The merchants of America needed whatever help they could get.
Anyway, it would only be a small change.
On 31 August 1939, Roosevelt, in his Thanksgiving proclamation, announced that the date for this year’s Turkey Day would be moved up one week---to 23 November.
There. Done. All taken care of, thought F.D.R., no doubt. Time to get back to the important stuff, like what’s going on in Europe.
Then the telegrams and the letters started coming in. From the stationery companies, whose calendars were now inaccurate. From boards of education across the country, because schools now had to reschedule mid-term exams and holiday vacations. From industries with factories that had to readjust their production schedules.
Worst of all, the President had tampered with the great national religion of---football! Thanksgiving had become a hub of the football season, professional and collegiate. Rival teams scheduled their games for Turkey Day, knowing the stands would be filled with crowds taking advantage of the day off. With Thanksgiving moved back a week, now all of these “Big Games” would play to shoestring attendance, at best. Sales of tickets and concessions would suffer.
Most retailers were grateful for getting an extra shopping-week before Christmas. But F.D.R. wasn’t getting much love from anywhere else over moving Thanksgiving. The Republicans in Congress howled, calling it an abuse of presidential power, and the Democrats, instead of defending their man in the White House, simply looked the other way. A Gallup poll released in September stated that sixty-two percent of all voters disagreed with the change.
Newspaper editorials argued that moving Thanksgiving Day was a slap in the face of Lincoln and tradition. Mayor of Atlantic City Thomas D. Taggart, Jr., derogatorily referred to the new date as “Franksgiving”. And the name stuck.
But, perhaps, the harshest criticism came when Alf Landon, the former governor of Kansas who ran against Roosevelt in 1936, accused the President of acting “with the omnipotence of a Hitler.” The comparison was particularly severe, given that Nazi Germany had just invaded Poland.
The forty-eight states in the Union were pretty much divided in half over the matter. Twenty-three governors followed F.D.R.’s lead and declared Thanksgiving Day to be 23 November, while twenty-two governors disagreed and insisted on the traditional date. Colorado and Mississippi and Texas observed both dates and let their municipalities work it out.
And, somehow, November, 1939, came and went without the world coming to an end.
The big question, of course, is: did it work? That was left to the actuaries and accountants. They analysed the holiday sales figures reported from the states observing the earlier Thanksgiving, compared to those from the states that celebrated Turkey Day one week later. And the answer was---no. At least, as far as providing retailers with extra profits was concerned.
What the bean-counters discovered was, in the states with the earlier Thanksgiving, customer spending was, more or less, evenly distributed across the entire shopping season. However, in the states with the later Thanksgiving, spending was light at first, but followed by a huge spike in sales during that last-week rush before Christmas. For both groups of states, though, the amount of spending was virtually the same.
It was obvious that the President was stuck with a . . . er . . . turkey on his hands.
Nevertheless, that following year, a stubborn F.D.R. again proclaimed Thanksgiving to fall on the third Thursday of the month---even though the November of 1940 had the standard number of Thursdays. This time, “Franksgiving” was a bit more popular; thirty-one states followed suit. And its critics had gotten less vicious, preferring to damn the President’s folly with mockery, instead.
Even Hollywood took a potshot or two. In the Three Stooges short No Census, No Feeling, Larry, Curly, and Moe play census takers. All the residents of a small town are drawn to a football game between two heated rivals, leaving the boys mystified at finding nobody on the street.
CURLY: “Maybe it’s the Fourth of July,”
MOE: “The Fourth of July! In October?”
CURLY: “You never can tell. Look what they did to Thanksgiving.”
In 1941, Roosevelt announced early in the year that, yet again, Thanksgiving Day would be celebrated on the third Thursday of November. More from the fact that he hated to give in to Republicans than anything else---especially after receiving a report from the Department of Commerce that spring. After tabulating the economic data from the 1939 and ’40 Christmas seasons, Harry Hopkins’ people confirmed what the store owners had already found out: moving Thanksgiving Day back a week had not resulted in any significant expansion in customer sales.
Eventually, even F.D.R. had to kid self-effacingly about the whole debacle.
“Two years ago, or three years ago, I discovered I was particularly fond of turkey! So we started two Thanksgivings,” he said, while vacationing at his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia. “I don’t know how many we ought to have next year. I’m open to suggestion.”
Privately, though, the President conceded that the economic benefits of moving Thanksgiving back a week had not been worth all the turmoil.
Congress agreed. On 26 December 1941, by joint resolution, it passed a law forevermore affixing Thanksgiving Day to the fourth Thursday in November.
So, now you have an interesting nugget of conversation to toss out at the dinner table this afternoon, while you’re chowing down on turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing.
And to any New Deal Democrats out there: sorry that this is a week late.
* * * * *
From Cheryl and myself, to all of you, our fondest wishes for a Happy Thanksgiving Day, and many more of them!
Replies
Terrific piece as always, Commander! Glad to see the Thanksgiving Deck Log tradition continue. Happy Thanksgiving!
Another gem, Commander!
Best wishes to you and yours, and everyone here for a very Happy Thanksgiving!
Great piece of obscure history, entertaining as usual.
A footnote to the above: White Christmas was originally written with an opening couple of lines about "It's such a lovely day/In Beverly Hills LA/But it's December 24th/And I'm longing to be up north" (which crop up on some versions I hear on the radio now). That was how Berlin wrote it, for some project that never materialized. But when Berlin put it in Holiday Inn, those lines made no sense because the inn was in Vermont, so he had them cut it. And after hearing Crosby sing it without the whimsical opening, Berlin realized how much better it played that way and had the sheet music for the song (back in the days when sheet music was still big business) rewritten accordingly. And so the version we know entered history.
This according to White Christmas by Jody Rosen, which also says it's now the song with the most covers in American history.
Many thanks for the kind words, fellows. It's what makes me keep doing this after nine years.