In 1939, Lew Hahn, the head of the Retail Dry Goods Association in the US, noticed something that gave him cause for concern: Thanksgiving would fall on November 30 that year, the latest possible date. Since it was thought poor form to start hawking Yuletide goodies before Thanksgiving was over, this would mean a brief Christmas spending season.
Hahn was concerned that consumers would spend less, damaging an already weak economy, to say nothing of the prosperity of the members of the Retail Dry Goods Association. And so he had a word with the secretary of commerce, Harry Hopkins, who had a word with President Franklin D Roosevelt, who had a word with the nation. He explained that as Thanksgiving was a federal holiday it was the president’s job to select the date — and he was choosing November 23 instead.
The move was controversial. Alfred Landon, the Republican who had been defeated by Roosevelt in the presidential election of 1936, compared FDR’s high-handedness to that of Adolf Hitler, thus beginning a hallowed tradition in US political commentary. For a couple of years, half the country celebrated on the old Thanksgiving date while the other half marked the new “Franksgiving” instead; a couple of states sat on the fence and made both days a holiday.