Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

The president did it again. Governing unapologetically by executive fiat, he steamrolled over Congress and issued a sweeping order that was sure to raise the ire of his Republican opponents.

Their complaint was as familiar as his offense. Big, potentially divisive challenges should be resolved through a deliberative, bipartisan legislative process, Republicans insisted, and not by diktat. “If the change has any merit at all,” groused a certain former GOP presidential nominee, “more time should have been taken in working it out so as to assure wholehearted co-operation instead of springing it upon an unprepared country with the omnipotence of a Hitler.” (That’s right. Hitler. He went there.)


John McCain complaining about Barack Obama’s executive order on immigration? Nope. That was Alf Landon, the former Kansas governor, rebuking Pres. Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The year was 1939—exactly 75 years ago—and FDR had just announced that he was moving Thanksgiving up by one week.

The origins behind the change were innocent enough.

In August 1939, leaders from the American Retail Federation and the National Retail Dry Goods Association (the latter of which represented over 5,700 department, specialty and dry goods stores nationwide) contacted Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins. By tradition, but not by statute, presidents since Abraham Lincoln had designated the last Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving. As 1939 was one of those rare years in which there were five Thursdays , the holiday fell on the last day of the month. Store owners were concerned that an abbreviated holiday shopping period would hurt sales in an already sluggish economy.

“There is never any Christmas buying until after Thanksgiving,” a prominent merchant in Boston explained. “The November 30 date would give us six days less to sell than we had last year.”

To accommodate retailers, FDR made the switch, and his opponents howled. According to Gallup, Republicans disapproved of the plan by a margin of 79 percent to 21 percent. Democrats split more evenly, with 52 percent in favor and 48 percent opposed. “Dictatorship,” “whimsy” and “just upsetting everything he can” were among the most frequent negative responses to an open-ended Gallup poll. “In general,” the Boston Globe reported, “the comments of the Republican man-in-the-street echo the sentiments of Alf M. Landon.”

That fall, Americans celebrated two Thanksgivings: In states where conservatives controlled the levers of government, the holiday fell on November 30. Where New Dealers were in control, November 23. So it remained for two years, until FDR signed legislation officially designating the fourth November of every year as Thanksgiving.

Even as late as 1942, Hollywood was still poking fun at the political gamesmanship. In the hit movie, Holiday Inn, starring Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, a cartoon turkey shuffles confusedly between the last two Thursdays of the November calendar before shrugging and walking off the page. Everyone got the joke.

Why did “Franksgiving,” as it came to be known, excite so much partisan acrimony? Wasn’t Roosevelt simply trying to help Main Street businesses?

The answer is rooted in the broader political context of 1939, a year that saw congressional Republicans and Southern Democrats unite in common cause to stop the New Deal in its tracks. Though of different parties, members of the rising “conservative coalition” and their grassroots supporters chafed at the growth of the federal state and the concurrent expansion of executive authority. Not unlike today, they found themselves very much the masters of their own destiny. Eagerly anticipating Franklin Roosevelt’s last year in office, they seized every opportunity to lash out at the president. Little could they have known that they weren’t soon to be rid of him.

***

At first blush, the vitriol with which Republicans denounced FDR seems comically disproportionate. Styles Bridges—the cantankerous senator from New Hampshire, whom one prominent journalist characterized as “an aggressive reactionary on most issues,” “pertinaciously engaged in a continual running fight with the [Congress of Industrial Organizations—a federation of unions], the Roosevelt family and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”—offered that the president might as well “abolish Winter.” From Wyoming, Gov. Nels Smith sneered, “This is the first time the President has done something that hasn’t cost the taxpayers a lot of money.” Which, for the sake of clarity, he did not mean as a compliment.

Though Republicans were louder in articulating their opposition, the split between Thanksgiving and “Franksgiving” states was not strictly partisan; rather, it was ideological. Among those states that shunned Roosevelt’s designated holiday were Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Texas, home of Vice President John Nance Garner, split the baby and recognized both dates as a holiday. While Georgia did adhere to FDR’s decree, the editor of the Warm Springs Mirror—effectively FDR’s hometown paper when he wasn’t in Washington—echoed the criticism of conservative Democrats when he suggested that the president move his birthday “up a few months until June, maybe … I don't believe it would be any more trouble than the Thanksgiving shift.”

Were people angry, as some editorialists suggested, that the president was ruining collegiate football (after all, most of the big rivals had long before scheduled their Thanksgiving games, and for many schools, the season ended entirely the Saturday following the holiday)? Perhaps that was part of it. But mostly, it was a shifting political ground that gave conservative opponents of the New Deal from both parties greater confidence to criticize and ridicule a widely popular president.

Until 1937, opponents of the New Deal constituted a small and divided minority of Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, patiently biding their time until FDR and his band of New Deal theorists left Washington. By and large, the president faced scant congressional opposition to the signature components of his legislative agenda.

Complicating any effort to create a united and vocal opposition were intra-party politics. Republicans remained divided between old-line conservatives who could reliably be counted on to oppose New Deal measures, and progressive heirs of Theodore Roosevelt—at any time, as much as a third of the party’s congressional caucus—who lent halting support to FDR’s legislative program. Democrats, on the other hand, were increasingly divided between a Southern and rural wing that until recently dominated the party, and an ascendant coalition of urban voters—Catholics, Jews, African Americans, union members—who supported a more activist state.

Not that there weren’t rumblings of discontent. Throughout the northeast and Midwest, traditional business Republicans reviled FDR’s economic reforms. Everywhere one looked, the New Deal seemed to be making dangerous incursions against private property rights: from the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), which placed limits on how much individual farmers could produce, and the Wagner Act, which established the right of workers to bargain collectively with their employers, to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which broke with decades of conventional wisdom about the individual’s right to contract. Everywhere one turned, the federal government seemed to be interfering where it had no authority to act.

For their part, many Southern Democratic politicians who initially welcomed federal dollars realized by mid-decade that the New Deal threatened to disrupt longstanding patterns of economic, social and political deference. The AAA, which was intended to prop up farm prices by paying white farmers to reduce productive acreage, had the unintended consequence of displacing millions of black tenant farmers. No longer tied to local planters and merchants by the cashless economy of the sharecropping system, uprooted black farmers found alternative employment with the federal government. Though local white officials who administered many of the so-called “alphabet soup” programs did their best to prevent African Americans from enjoying a proportionate share of jobs, the national leaders of such New Deal agencies as the Public Works Administration (PWA), Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA) were able to enforce a certain degree of equity. Consequently, many black Southerners their first non-plantation jobs and their first cash pay. The social implications of this shift were immediately clear, and would only intensify in the coming years, as African Americans found gainful employment in war production industries and the Armed Forces.

In Washington, progressives who ran New Deal agencies—including a core group of liberal Southerners—also began pushing the boundaries of Jim Crow. The Farm Security Administration (FSA), for example, went so far as to issue funds to tenant farmers, expressly so that they could pay their poll taxes and support New Deal candidates in local and federal elections. It was a move that enraged white officeholders.

On a more symbolic level, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes ordered federal parks de-segregated. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution barred black contralto Marian Anderson from performing at Constitution Hall. In response, Ickes arranged for a much larger concert at the Lincoln Memorial. Seated prominently in the audience were dozens of cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, congressmen, newspapermen and—most importantly—First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

It wasn’t simply that the New Deal threatened the economic and legal foundations of Jim Crow, or that the president’s inner circle mingled too easily with African Americans. The new electoral reality also boded poorly for Southern whites, who until very recently controlled the levers of power within the Democratic Party. As recently as 1928, Dixie accounted for 74 percent of the party’s Electoral College votes. By 1936, only 23 percent. In Congress, the Southern portion of Democratic seats fell from two-thirds to less than half. The future clearly lay with the swelling population of northern and Midwestern cities, where a rising coalition of white ethnic and black voters enjoyed increasing sway over politics.

To traditionalists, it was bad enough that Jewish unionists like Sidney Hillman and college professors like Felix Frankfurter had a free pass to the White House. The rising influence of African Americans (which conservatives consistently exaggerated) was of greater concern. “The doors of the white man’s party have been thrown open to snare the Negro vote in the North,” complained Sen. Carter Glass of Virginia. “Political equality means social equality, and social equality means intermarriage, and that means the mongrelizing of the American race.”

Josiah Bailey, a powerful senator from North Carolina, similarly worried that Roosevelt was “determined to get the Negro vote, and I do not have to tell you what this means.” It meant that the party of Woodrow Wilson was now “being taken away from us by John Lewis, Harold Ickes, Robert Vann [a prominent black newspaper editor], [Walter] White of the Society for the Advancement of Negroes [sic], Madame Perkins, Harry Hopkins, [Cochran] and Cohen.” Such a collection of Jews, unionists and African Americans would surely impose a “new Reconstruction” on Dixie, Bailey concluded.

***

Despite their shared animus for the New Deal, throughout Roosevelt’s first term, conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats found it all but impossible to cooperate with each other. They were cowed by the president’s enormous popularity and by the resounding margins that New Dealers racked up in the 1934 and 1936 election cycles. But that long grace period ended in 1937. Early in his second term, Roosevelt made three fatal miscalculations.

First, Roosevelt unsuccessfully sought to “pack” the Supreme Court with additional justices in an ill-conceived attempt to prevent the judiciary from striking down the Social Security and Wagner acts. The move did not sit well with many middle-class voters who had been willing to indulge some modicum of reform but who worried the president was trampling over the country’s traditions and institutions. Southern Democrats gave the court-packing plan their own spin. It was, said Sen. Walter George, a “second march through Georgia.” Sen. Carter Glass went a step further and suggested that what the New Dealers really intended was to create an interventionist court that would integrate public schools throughout Dixie.

Second, Roosevelt and his fellow New Dealers lent tacit support to organized labor, which staged a series of high-profile sit-down strikes in 1937. Middle-class voters who had been marginally supportive of collective bargaining bristled at the sight of unionists’ taking physical possession of private property. That the strikes were successful and led to the quick organization of other industrial sectors only created more resentment. “Come on down to Cape Cod for a real family vacation,” announced the Boston Evening Traveler, “where the CIO is unknown and over 90 percent are Republicans who respect the Supreme Court.”

Third, Roosevelt and his lieutenants made an ill-advised play to “purge” conservative Democrats in the 1938 primaries—a singularly unsuccessful maneuver that only served to embolden New Deal opponents in both parties. That fall, amid a crushing economic setback that critics dubbed the “Roosevelt Recession,” Republicans made sweeping gains in Congress, picking up 81 seats in the House (for a respectable minority stake of 169 seats) and seven in the Senate (for a not particularly impressive minority of 23 votes). That year saw a new crop of conservative Republicans emerge triumphant—men like Robert Taft and John Bricker—while more moderate and progressive Republicans like Philip La Follette of Wisconsin went down in defeat.

Going forward, Republicans and Southern Democrats together would command enough votes to slow and eventually stop the expansion of the New Deal state. Enjoying greater support from the farm belt and the urban and small-town middle class, they fashioned a common language of opposition that focused on the sanctity of political and economic institutions and the importance of individual enterprise and freedom.

Emboldened by their new flank of Southern Democratic supporters, Main Street Republicans rediscovered their voice. Visiting the small city of Muncie, Indiana (alias, Middletown), which they had studied on an ongoing basis since the mid-1920s, the sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd observed, “Middletown is overwhelmingly living by the values by which it lived in 1925.” Conservatism had not been vanquished. Only stifled, and temporarily so.

***

Shortly after FDR announced his plan to move Thanksgiving, a small-town real estate and insurance broker from South Dakota angrily reminded him, “We need a certain amount of idealism and sentiment to keep up the morale of our people, and you, would even take that from us. After all we want to make this country better for our posterity, and you must remember we are not running a Russia or communistic government. Between your ideas of running for a third term, and your changing dates of century old holidays, we believe you have practically lost your popularity and the goodwill of the people of the Northwest.”

Much like Barack Obama’s now-infamous “Starbucks salute,” or any other item in the long litany of conservative grievances against the president—most of which focus on his alleged disdain for tradition and his penchant for executive over-reach—FDR struck a raw nerve with his opponents when he attempted something so benign as extending the holiday shopping period by one week.

As is the case today, 75 years ago, America was undergoing profound changes that touched every part of everyday life. Demographic transformations were upsetting the longstanding distribution of power and privilege. The federal state was growing in ways that were both beneficial and unsettling to ordinary citizens. And a powerful executive branch was claiming broader authority to regulate and manage the economy.

What Atlantic City Mayor Thomas Taggart dubbed “Franksgiving” was the opening volley in a still vibrant—and sometimes exaggerated—debate over how Americans understand their political system and its proper limitations.