Franksgiving

BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuff.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. We’ll begin 75 years ago this past summer. That’s when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt stood before the press and casually announced that he was moving Thanksgiving. Now the last time a president had meddled with a date of the holiday was 75 years earlier. That’s when Abraham Lincoln proclaimed it would fall on the last Thursday of November.

But in 1939, the last Thursday fell at the very end of the month, and retailers were concerned that that would compress the Christmas shopping season. And so FDR bumped Thanksgiving up a week earlier with the idea that the depression-ravaged economy could use those few extra days of buying presents. No big deal, right? Think again.

SENATOR STYLES BRIDGES: I wish Mr. Roosevelt would abolish winter. Millions of people can’t enjoy their vacations for thinking that in a few months they will again be paying tribute to the fuel barons.

ED: Those are the words of Senator Styles Bridges, Republican, of New Hampshire. He was one of many critics on the right who claimed that FDRs Thanksgiving Proclamation amounted to the executive overreach. Letters poured in from concerned citizens around the country.

SHELBY BENNETT: Mr. President, I see by the paper this morning where you want to change Thanksgiving Day to November 23rd of which–

ED: This missive came from one, Shelby Bennett of Shinnston, West Virginia.

SHELBY BENNETT: Now, there are some things that I would like done, and I would appreciate your approval. One, have Sunday changed to Wednesday. Two, have Mondays to be Christmas. Three, have it strictly against the will of God to work on Tuesday. Four, have Thursday to be payday with time and 1/2 for overtime. Five, require everyone to take Friday and Saturday off for a fishing trip down the Potomac.

ED: The sarcasm ran deep. Atlantic City’s mayor, a Democrat, dubbed the president’s proposal, Franksgiving, and it was parodied on the radio and on the big screen. Here’s The Three Stooges short from 1940.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK]

-Where is everybody?

-Maybe it’s the Fourth of July.

-The Fourth of July in October?

-You never can tell. Look what they did to Thanksgiving.

[AUDIO PLAYBACK ENDS]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: Many Americans refused to budge. 22 states kept Thanksgiving’s traditional date on their books. A few states played it down the middle deciding to observe both the old and the new Thanksgivings.

PETER: So you may be asking, why all the fuss about a little date change. Well, for one it messed up people’s calendars. Football games would have had to be rescheduled, and people weren’t too happy about that. But there was a larger issue.

In his six and 1/2 years in office, FDR has issued well over 2,000 executive orders. That amounted to almost one per day, more than any president before or after. And he had even attempted to pack more justices onto the Supreme Court, so that his laws would not be overturned. To FDR’s critics, Franksgiving was just the latest in a long line of unilateral declarations by the president.

Or as FDR’s erstwhile election opponent, Alf Landon, put it.

ALF LANDON: Another illustration of the confusion which impulsiveness has caused so frequently during his administration. If the change has any merit at all, more time should have been taken working it out, instead of springing it upon an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.

PETER: Franksgiving remained in place the following year as well, but by 1941 it was clear that moving the holiday wasn’t having the desired economic impact. In November of that year, FDR signed a joint resolution by Congress setting in stone the fourth Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day.

BRIAN: There’s little doubt that Americans like their Thanksgiving football, but it’s also fair to say that the ferocious response to Franksgiving indicated a far deeper anxiety. It’s an anxiety about the proper role of the president in a democratic republic, and that’s an anxiety that’s been there since the beginning.

PETER: Late last month, President Obama announced a sweeping new executive action, that would among other things, exempt up to five million undocumented immigrants from deportation. Obama says he’s taking immigration reform into his hands because Congress won’t, and that he’s well within his legal authority to do so, but leaders of Congress don’t see it that way. They say his action smacks of overreach, and they’re not the only ones.

This week 17 states, lead by Texas, announced they’re suing the Obama administration for violating the constitutional limits on presidential power.

BRIAN: Now many, including the president himself, have pointed out the administration has issued fewer executive actions then most of its predecessors, and yet it seems like everybody’s worried about presidential overreach in this administration. And so today on the show, this is the question we’re considering. What should we make of these outbursts of tyrannophobia, as some political scientists have called this fear of executive power, and do these outbursts expose something about America’s conflicted attitude toward power?