The Time FDR Tried to Change the Date of Thanksgiving

On this episode of Our American Stories, most Americans grew up thinking Thanksgiving had always fallen on the same Thursday in November. In Lincoln’s time, it was set on the last Thursday of November, and that habit settled in for generations. Then Franklin D. Roosevelt shifted the holiday earlier, hoping that a longer shopping season would lift a struggling Depression-era economy. The change split the country, with some governors following FDR and others keeping the old date, and for a few years, families marked Thanksgiving on different Thursdays depending on where they lived.

Melanie Kirkpatrick walks us through why FDR and Thanksgiving became linked to a calendar fight and how Congress finally fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November.

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