The Thanksgiving holiday has long been baked in tradition, whether that meant the common culinary trappings or the actual day it’s celebrated — the fourth Thursday of November.
But that date, originally the last Thursday of the month, existed for decades without any official underpinnings. From the end of the 19th century, presidents would simply issue proclamations staking out the time to celebrate and state governors would follow suit. Tradition took hold.
In 1939, however, circumstances converged to fly in the face of tradition and move the president to declare an earlier, alternate date. And amid the predictable backlash, Colorado became one of three states to endorse two dates when residents could give thanks for their blessings and gorge themselves on the customary menu.
The tale of how that came to be was born of dire economics, politics and compromise.
With Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House, the nation still was reeling from the economic disaster of the Great Depression. Years earlier, Roosevelt had campaigned for the presidency with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to measures that might help the country regain its economic footing.
In a presidential campaign address in 1932 at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Roosevelt had laid out part of his approach to meeting the crisis.
“The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” he said. “It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”
He would repeat that phrase — “bold, persistent experimentation” — again and again, signaling his willingness to try all sorts of potential economic remedies.
“That concept of being willing to give any proposal at least a hearing, in some sort of attempt to recover from the Great Depression, is really what leads us to the chaos of Thanksgiving at the end of the 1930s,” says Derek Everett, who teaches history at both Colorado State University and Metropolitan State University of Denver.
An idea to extend holiday shopping
In 1939, the holiday was scheduled to be celebrated on Nov. 30, the fifth Thursday of the month.
Even back then, Thanksgiving was seen as the kickoff to the Christmas holiday shopping season. And so American merchants approached Roosevelt with an idea: If Thanksgiving marked the start of consumer spending for the Christmas holiday, why not signal to the public that the buying season would begin a week earlier than usual?
“And Roosevelt, being open to any conceivable idea and the fact that Thanksgiving was really within his power,” Everett explains, “issues a proclamation in 1939, about a month or so before Thanksgiving, announcing that Thanksgiving will be on the 23rd instead of the 30th, to try this idea out.”
Predictably, not everyone was on board, whether owing to differences of political opinion (Roosevelt was a Democrat) or simply devotion to longstanding tradition. Some even trolled the president by dubbing the altered state of the holiday “Franksgiving.”
Meanwhile, state governors had to determine whether to play along with Roosevelt’s declaration in support of extending consumer spending or proclaim that Thanksgiving would remain officially celebrated on Nov. 30. Colorado’s recently elected governor, Republican Ralph Carr, was observing his first Thanksgiving in office.
In Colorado and in a lot of states it becomes a political thing. Republicans like Carr would say, ‘We’re going to celebrate the day we usually do, and we’re not going to go with the latest insane idea that’s come out of the Roosevelt administration,’ and Democrats tended to be more supportive of the president.
— Derek Everett, Colorado historian
“In Colorado and in a lot of states it becomes a political thing,” Everett says. “Republicans like Carr would say, ‘We’re going to celebrate the day we usually do, and we’re not going to go with the latest insane idea that’s come out of the Roosevelt administration,’ and Democrats tended to be more supportive of the president.”
There was a third option — compromise by declaring both dates worthy of Thanksgiving designation, thereby offering both traditionalists and fans of a possible economic bump a chance to have their turkey and eat it, too.
And that’s the tack Carr eventually took.
The issue was argued all over, especially on the pages of local newspapers. The Denver Post firmly endorsed the double dates with the reasoning that the nation could count an abundance of blessings at a time when the world was literally blowing up.
“The American people have so much to be thankful for that they are justified in devoting two days to Thanksgiving this year,” the Post wrote. “Just the fact that we have kept out of the European war, have no reason to become involved in it, and are so firmly determined to stay out is enough to justify a special Thanksgiving.”
Of course, things changed. But in the moment, Everett notes, the fact that the United States had not yet been pulled into global conflict — Germany had invaded Poland just two months earlier while Japan and China already were at war — was indeed reason to give thanks.
“The peace that we thought we had achieved at the end of World War I is crumbling,” he explains. “And if there was ever a time to be grateful that we have these big oceans that are protecting us, insulating us from the drama in Asia and in Europe, this is a time to have two Thanksgivings. So there’s a lot of contextualizing.”
Everett cites a newspaper editor from the Craig Empire Courier, Charles Stoddard, who said in an Oct. 4 response to the Thanksgiving controversy: “If we have two Thanksgiving days this year, it won’t be too many for me to express my thanks that I am privileged to live in the United States, not to mention the many lesser blessings which I have enjoyed in the past year. So if President Roosevelt wants me to be Thankful on one day and Governor Carr on another, I can comply with both requests.”
Dealing with two Thanksgivings
Overall, the nation was fairly evenly split between the two options. But while Carr preferred to stick with the original Thanksgiving date, he felt the economic pressure from business interests hoping for a more robust holiday shopping season. So he joined two other states — Texas and Mississippi — that elected to recognize both dates.
“Carr, ever the pragmatist, decided that there are more important things in the universe to fight about,” Everett says. “And so he announced that officially, Colorado would celebrate Thanksgiving on 30th but that the 23rd would be a perfectly valid option for Thanksgiving as well. Businesses could choose for themselves whether they were going to be open or closed on one of the days or both of the days.”
And so the season quickly became tinted by just a bit of chaos. Banks faced a conundrum.They couldn’t be open on days the federal government was closed, so ultimately decided to close for both dates. Schools had to decide whether to alter their schedules.
Sports schedules figured into the mix: the Colorado School of Mines stuck to the traditional Thanksgiving date in part because it had scheduled a football game with Regis College for Nov. 30.
“For the vast majority of Coloradans, you essentially picked one,” Everett says. “Very, very few people, from what I can tell, actually went through the hassle and the expense and all the work of trying to put two Thanksgiving meals together sequentially, getting family and friends together. It was a bit much. So most people just ended up picking whichever one worked for them.”
But did the concept actually work from a commercial standpoint? Everett notes that it was difficult to prove effectiveness with definitive evidence. For the most part, it depended on whom you asked. Businesses declared it a success and pushed for doing it again the following year (which, in fact, Colorado did).
But what the exercise definitely did was convince just about everyone of the need to codify the observance as an official federal holiday with a firm date, rather than just an enduring tradition.
“After you did this for two years, there was very much a public consensus that we need to nail this down,” Everett says. “And so that’s how you get Congress passing the law in 1941 that says, ‘It’s going to be the fourth Thursday. This was a charming little adventure. This was a delightful idea, and it’s run its course, and we’re going to go back to the day that we’ve been most familiar with.’”