Legal Research

Thanksgiving: The Legal History Edition

By Mariko

As much of an uproar as there has been over the policies of President Obama, he has yet to try to change the date of a traditional holiday.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the other hand, has. In the throws of the Great Depression, he decided in 1939 that moving Thanksgiving forward a week, to the second to last Thursday of the month, would give retailers a little more time to profit from pre-Christmas sales that might just make a dent in the economy.

This wasn’t a very popular move, seeing as the last Thursday had been tradition since Lincoln’s declaring it so in 1863, and many states still celebrated Christmas on the last Thursday of the month.  Indeed, in 1941, the House passed a bill fixing Thanksgiving as the last Thursday in November, but the Senate decided on a compromise, making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday of the month.  Roosevelt signed the bill on December 26, 1941, and since then Thanksgiving is usually one of the last few days of the month, but occasionally there’s another Thursday afterwards.

For more information on the celebration and FDR’s attempt to change the holiday, check out the Wikipedia article on Thanksgiving and Melanie Kirkpatrick’s Wall Street Journal article “Happy Franksgiving“.

Full post as published by Ross-Blakley Law Library Blog on November 21, 2010 (boomark / email).