Franksgiving

The president did it again. Governing unapologetically by executive fiat, he steamrolled over Congress and issued a sweeping order that was sure to raise the ire of his Republican opponents.

Their complaint was as familiar as his offense. Big, potentially divisive challenges should be resolved through a deliberative, bipartisan legislative process, Republicans insisted, and not by diktat. “If the change has any merit at all,” groused a certain former GOP presidential nominee, “more time should have been taken in working it out so as to assure wholehearted co-operation instead of springing it upon an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.” (That’s right. Hitler. He went there.)

John McCain complaining about Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration? Nope. That was Alf Landon, the former Kansas governor, rebuking Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The year was 1939—exactly 75 years ago—and FDR had just announced that he was moving Thanksgiving up by one week.

The origins behind the change were innocent enough.

In August 1939, leaders from the American Retail Federation and the National Retail Dry Goods Association (the latter of which represented over 5,700 department, specialty and dry goods stores nationwide) contacted Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins. By tradition, but not by statute, presidents since Abraham Lincoln had designated the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving. As 1939 was one of those rare years in which there were five Thursdays, the holiday fell on the last day of the month. Store owners were concerned that an abbreviated holiday shopping period would hurt sales in an already sluggish economy.

“There is never any Christmas buying until after Thanksgiving,” a prominent merchant in Boston explained. “The November 30 date would give us six days less to sell than we had last year.”

To accommodate retailers, FDR made the switch, and his opponents howled. According to Gallup, Republicans disapproved of the plan by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent. Democrats split more evenly, with 52 percent in favor and 48 percent opposed. “Dictatorship,” “whimsy” and “just upsetting everything he can” were among the most frequent negative responses to an open-ended Gallup poll. “In general,” the BostonGlobe reported, “the comments of the Republican man-in-the-street echo the sentiments of Alf M. Landon.”

That fall, Americans celebrated two Thanksgivings: In states where conservatives controlled the levers of government, the holiday fell on November 30. Where New Dealers were in control, November 23. So it remained for two years, until FDR signed legislation officially designating the fourth November of every year as Thanksgiving.

Even as late as 1942, Hollywood was still poking fun at the political gamesmanship. In the hit movie, Holiday Inn, starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, a cartoon turkey shuffles confusedly between the last two Thursdays of the November calendar before shrugging and walking off the page. Everyone got the joke.

Why did “Franksgiving,” as it came to be known, excite so much partisan acrimony? Wasn’t Roosevelt simply trying to help Main Street businesses?

The answer is rooted in the broader political context of 1939, a year that saw congressional Republicans and Southern Democrats unite in common cause to stop the New Deal in its tracks. Though of different parties, members of the rising “conservative coalition” and their grassroots supporters chafed at the growth of the federal state and the concurrent expansion of executive authority. Not unlike today, they found themselves very much the masters of their own destiny. Eagerly anticipating Franklin Roosevelt’s last year in office, they seized every opportunity to lash out at the president. Little could they have known that they weren’t soon to be rid of him.

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At first blush, the vitriol with which Republicans denounced FDR seems comically disproportionate. Styles Bridges—the cantankerous senator from New Hampshire, whom one prominent journalist characterized as “an aggressive reactionary on most issues,” “pertinaciously engaged in a continual running fight with the [Congress of Industrial Organizations—a federation of unions], the Roosevelt family and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”—offered that the president might as well “abolish Winter.” From Wyoming, Gov. Nels Smith sneered, “This is the first time the President has done something that hasn’t cost the taxpayers a lot of money.” Which, for the sake of clarity, he did not mean as a compliment.

Though Republicans were louder in articulating their opposition, the split between Thanksgiving and “Franksgiving” states was not strictly partisan; rather, it was ideological. Among those states that shunned Roosevelt’s designated holiday were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Texas, home of Vice President John Nance Garner, split the baby and recognized both dates as a holiday. While Georgia did adhere to FDR’s decree, the editor of the Warm Springs Mirror—effectively FDR’s hometown paper when he wasn’t in Washington—echoed the criticism of conservative Democrats when he suggested that the president move his birthday “up a few months until June, maybe … I don't believe it would be any more trouble than the Thanksgiving shift.”

Were people angry, as some editorialists suggested, that the president was ruining collegiate football (after all, most of the big rivals had long before scheduled their Thanksgiving games, and for many schools, the season ended entirely the Saturday following the holiday)? Perhaps that was part of it. But mostly, it was a shifting political ground that gave conservative opponents of the New Deal from both parties greater confidence to criticize and ridicule a widely popular president.

Until 1937, opponents of the New Deal constituted a small and divided minority of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, patiently biding their time until FDR and his band of...