[3][4] Her father, the Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six children there.

[3] After hearing a sermon about Anna Jarvis' Mother's Day at Central Methodist Episcopal Church in 1909, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them.

In the 1920s, Dodd stopped promoting the celebration because she was studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, and it faded into relative obscurity, even in Spokane.

[9] She had the help of those trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday, for example the manufacturers of ties, tobacco pipes, and any traditional presents to fathers.

[10] Since 1938, she had the help of the Father's Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men's Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion.

[11] Americans resisted the holiday at first, perceiving it as just an attempt by merchants to replicate the commercial success of Mother's Day, and newspapers frequently featured cynical and sarcastic attacks and jokes.

[15] In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson went to Spokane to speak at a Father's Day celebration[16] and wanted to make it official, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialized.

[16][18] In 1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years while honoring mothers, thus "[singling] out just one of our two parents".

[17] Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law on April 24, 1972.