If it seems as if Father's Day has always been around, it's because it has, in a way. This year marks its centenary, conventional accounts of its origin being 1910 and the brainchild of a determined Spokane, Washington, lady who thought the attention given to American motherhood was a disservice to an equally important component of the parenting partnership. Sonora Dodd, the Washington state matron who became the driving force behind Father's Day, would not have put it that way, but that was essentially her sentiment.
Although Father's Day was from the start envisioned as a moneymaker--Mrs. Dodd herself did not object to its promotion as a commercial enterprise--it was also supposed to be a day for reflecting on the real burdens that fatherhood imposes and the considerable sacrifices it requires. For at least one day each year, not just kids were to honor their fathers, but the country was to recognize them for performing the crucial job of providing children sustenance, sheltering them from a harsh world, and guiding them along proper paths to deal with that world when the time came for them to take it on. It says something about modern times that such an idea would spring into being in the first place, and even more that it would take root as an institution as the years passed. There is something curiously modern about the ceremony that our forebears would have found peculiar.
In the century prior to Mrs. Dodd's epiphany about overlooked dads, Americans would have been mildly surprised at best, and possibly appalled, by the notion that fathers merited a "day." Americans of the nineteenth century were more attuned to the instruction that children should honor both parents each and every day as a matter of custom, a form of mental hygiene to match the physical one of brushed teeth and scrubbed ears.
One of the consequences of the notion that fathers should have at least one day of their own is an expectation that fathers should behave a certain way for the other 364. Under the catch-all rubric of "parenting skills," not only must they play catch, they must act as psychological counselors, must be chauffeurs and cheerleaders, and otherwise generally become genial servants to their children, supplying not just material needs but bending their adult perspectives to accommodate the presumed wisdom of childish innocence. Gone are the days of autocrats at the breakfast table or of Clarence Day's imperious authority made famous in Life with Father (even if often and delightfully subverted by Mrs. Day), and it makes one wonder if what has replaced them is any better. It is probably best to leave to others an objective assessment of how a few decades of permissive, cloying obeisance to the tots of the household has worked out.
Most noticeable from an historical perspective, though, is how this changing attitude has altered our perception of the way parents behaved in the past. That altered perception has prompted increasingly harsh judgments regarding that behavior. When John Adams ultimately resigned himself to the fact that one of his sons was an irredeemable alcoholic and disowned him, nobody at the time concluded that the boy's boozing was his father's fault or that the father's hard response to his son's profligacy was particularly objectionable. When Henry Clay was secretary of state, one of his boys crawled into a bottle during a spree in Philadelphia and wound up in jail for bad debts. Clay sent a check but tightened the reins. Later, when his oldest son plainly lost his mind and held a neighbor's family at gunpoint for a few tense hours, Clay cooperated in the proceedings that committed the young man for the rest of his life to an insane asylum. Nobody at the time probed the past of the Clay family for insufficient parenting skills toward the boy bounder or criticized him for insensitivity toward his criminally insane son.
The modern lens, though, distorts the past as woefully deficient in therapeutic outreach. It observes from a superior vantage to find parents at the root of all the child's shortcomings and especially condemns fathers for insensitive responses to misconduct. The famous father, in this formulation, imposes even greater burdens on hapless children by casting a long shadow and saddling them with unrealistic expectations. In the case of Clay, for many years many biographers either ignored his family life, particularly his conduct as a father, or they dismissed it as inconsequential except to note the "famous father" curse, until it has become a cliché. The shifting attitude embodies a therapeutic insistence. Eventually a modern observer even labeled Clay a "wretched father."
Strange, that. And moreover, it is patently unfair as an observation and spectacularly inaccurate as an assessment. In fact, Henry Clay was devoted to all of his eleven children and was devastated by the afflictions that assailed them, was gutted by the loss of six daughters, and if anything was overly attentive to the point of hovering over the boys who survived. When Clay was dying in 1852, one of those sons, James, poignantly declared that "he has been to me the best of fathers, and in losing him, I shall also lose the best & almost only true friend I have ever had." In 1910, Sonora Dodd thought fathers deserved a special day. James Clay had beaten her to it fifty-eight years earlier with a quiet tribute to a man he had come to know as very great indeed, no burdens or strings attached.
Posted June 25, 2010