The Time FDR Tried to Change the Date of Thanksgiving

Our American Stories

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.3 • 737 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:02.6	Guaranteed Human.
0:13.9	This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.
0:18.6	On October 3, 1863, mere months after the deadliest man-made disaster
0:24.0	in American history took place in Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln followed in the
0:29.5	footsteps of our nation's first president and issued a Thanksgiving proclamation. That
0:35.5	proclamation would go into effect on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving
0:40.2	as we know it was born, and that's all she wrote, right? Well, wrong. Here's Melanie Kilpatrick
0:48.8	with the story. So what happened after the war ended?
0:57.5	The tradition of the president calling a national Thanksgiving Day was well established.
1:03.9	Every president subsequent called one.
1:07.8	But there still was no official approval of the date. As the years went by,
1:14.8	every president from Lincoln issued a Thanksgiving proclamation naming a day of Thanksgiving.
1:21.2	The states would accept the date that the president had named, and everybody would celebrate on that date.
1:32.5	Until FDR, Franklin Roosevelt decided that he was going to change the date.
1:43.6	He announced this in a press conference on August 14th.
1:48.9	Without any warning, he said,
1:52.4	I, Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of the United States of America,
1:59.1	do hereby designate Thursday, 23rd of November, 1939, as a day of general
2:08.1	Thanksgiving.
2:09.7	Instead of having Thanksgiving take place on the traditional date, which was the last Thursday
2:15.4	of November, he was going to see that the holiday was celebrated
	...

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