When was thanksgiving moved up one week

Why do you suppose that Mr. Arnold felt compelled to mention that he had consulted with other groups before writing to the president? This letter gives the economic argument for opposing the change; what other arguments can be made for staying with the traditional date? Is this view more likely to be held by an urban shop keeper or a rural shop keeper? Why do you suppose that is the case?

FDR Library. Subsequent presidents issued Thanksgiving Proclamations, but the dates and even months of the celebrations varied. It wasn't until President Abraham Lincoln's Proclamation that Thanksgiving was regularly commemorated each year on the last Thursday of November.

In , however, the last Thursday in November fell on the last day of the month. Concerned that the shortened Christmas shopping season might dampen the economic recovery, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a Presidential Proclamation moving Thanksgiving to the second to last Thursday of November. As a result of the proclamation, 32 states issued similar proclamations while 16 states refused to accept the change and proclaimed Thanksgiving to be the last Thursday in November.

White, who would bestow an enduring name on the controversy. When New Jersey's Democratic governor, Harry Moore, agreed to move the date, White announced , tongue in cheek, that Atlantic City would celebrate the earlier date only "as 'Franksgiving,' in honor of our President. In the end, only 23 out of 48 states ended up moving the holiday to FDR's preferred date — with a few others, including Texas and Colorado, celebrating on both Thursdays.

The confused turkey in Holiday Inn , unsure of Thanksgiving's date. Screencap: Kimberly Guise. As began, the controversy still raged, with FDR setting that year's date for the particularly early November That year, two-thirds of states opted to go along.

An animated sequence in the film Holiday Inn — which starred Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire and premiered the song "White Christmas" by Irving Berlin — portrayed a confused turkey jumping back and forth between those two dates on the calendar, as you can see above. But in May of that year, Roosevelt changed his mind again, and announced he'd move the date back in The Times reported that FDR "conceded frankly that the Commerce Department had found that expected expansion of retail sales had not occurred" — and he had concluded it was an "experiment" that "had not worked.

A study by professor Robert Urbatsch of Iowa State found that "an earlier Thanksgiving appears to serve as economic stimulus in the labor market. However, things didn't go back entirely to the way they were before. At the end of , Congress passed, and Roosevelt signed, a joint resolution setting Thanksgiving as not the final but the fourth Thursday in November.

Essentially, that means that Thanksgiving will fall between November 22 and 28 — never on the month's last two days. The new law struck a sensible balance between the business interests of retailers and Americans' beliefs that Thanksgiving shouldn't be too early, and it has lasted ever since. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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