The Dark Money Behind Mother's Day
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Pushkin. The Grand Crystal Tea Room, on the eighth floor of Wanamaker's department store in Philadelphia, was a local institution in the 1920s and 30s, with its fine dining and spectacular chandeliers. On this particular day, the tea room was receiving another local institution, Miss Anna Marie Jarvis, one of Philadelphia's most famous citizens. She was friends with the owner himself, John Wanamaker.

The server may well have recognised her as they nervously approached her table. And what can I bring you, Miss Jarvis? I notice you have a special Mother's Day salad. Er, yes indeed, Miss Jarvis. You may bring me that. Of course, Miss Jarvis. A Mother's Day salad. The perfect way to celebrate the second Sunday in May. No doubt when treating one's beloved mother to a fine luncheon at the Grand Crystal Tea Room.

The elegantly presented salad was brought out and set in front of Miss Jarvis. With an icy calm, she rose to her feet, picked up the plate and dumped the salad on the tea room floor. She then took out her purse, left payment on the table and swept out across the opulent dining room.

Every Mother's Day lunch would have stopped. Forks paused midway to mouths. Every eye in the grand crystal tea room would have been following her as she left. Well, there goes Miss Anna-Marie Jarvis, the founder of Mother's Day. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. MUSIC PLAYS

It's never easy to be a mother, but for 19th century mothers, it was brutal. Anna Marie Jarvis was one of 13 children, but only three of her siblings survived to adulthood. Their mother was Anne Reeves Jarvis, born in Virginia in 1832. Before Anna Marie was even conceived, her mother had set up a community organisation to improve the health of other mothers, and she was a mother of three.

teaching them about hygiene measures such as boiling drinking water. She was pregnant with her sixth child at the time. But such measures only went so far in a world that was perilous for children. Before daughter Anna-Marie was born, her mother had buried seven of her children, several killed by measles. Before Anna-Marie was old enough to walk, her mother had organised medical treatment for the wounded men on both sides of the Civil War,

Anne Reeves Jarvis lived a life full of suffering and of service. When Anna Marie was 12, she went to a Sunday school class led by her mother, who offered these words as a closing prayer. I hope and pray that someone, sometime, will found a Memorial Mother's Day commemorating her for the matchless service she renders to humanity in every field of life. She is entitled to it.

Anna Marie Jarvis did not forget. Anna Marie was fiercely admiring of her mother and protective of her too. She was acutely aware of her mother's grief. Ann Reeves Jarvis would tell her daughter about the dreams she had. In one dream, she walked barefoot, carrying her young child to a biblical mountaintop.

I had to pass through a field of stubble, burdened by the weight of my child, whom I was carrying to protect her little feet from the roughness of the ground. I climbed the hill in the greatest agony and could see the tracks of blood I left behind at the stubble, pierced by aching feet. It was a vision of the death of a child, and a sign that no pain, no sacrifice from the mother could protect her daughter. From a mother who lost nine children...

The subtext needs no explanation. And perhaps it's not surprising that Anna-Marie seemed tied to her mother's apron strings for many years. Only in her late 20s did she finally move out from the family home in rural West Virginia to the city of Chattanooga and then to Philadelphia. She sent letters home every few days. I think I love you more and more each day. Her father was always a distant figure and a heavy drinker.

When he died, she wrote, You are more to us now than ever, and we all want to take care of you, so we can have you with us a long time, for you are such a dear, good mother. In fact, they had her with them for just a couple more years. On the 9th of May, 1905, old Mrs Jarvis died, surrounded by her surviving children. But her last words were breathed to Anna Marie alone.

And Anna-Marie, it seems, had remembered her mother's prayer of nearly three decades earlier. At her grave, she vowed, She began a campaign of letter writing to influential figures, from local businessman John Wanamaker, the owner of Wanamaker's department store, to the president himself, Theodore Roosevelt. She wrote to Mark Twain...

And she wrote to Edward Bock, the editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Loyal listeners of this show may remember Edward Bock. He proudly boasted of having no interest in understanding women. But even Bock seemed content to support the idea of motherhood. Whether it was because Anna-Marie's letters were so persuasive, or because her cause had such universal appeal, her campaign to create an official Mother's Day rapidly gathered momentum.

On May 10th, 1908, the first official observances of her mother's day took place, one in Grafton, West Virginia, and one in Philadelphia. Anna Marie had chosen the date, the second Sunday of May, to be close to the anniversary of her mother's death. In the morning, a congregation gathered at the Methodist Church in Grafton, which her mother had attended for many years.

Anna Marie intended Mother's Day as close to a religious celebration. She paid for 500 white carnations to be handed to the congregation and sent a telegram to be read at the service, declaring that the purpose of the day was to revive the dormant love and final gratitude we owe to those who gave us birth.

That afternoon, over in Philadelphia, 15,000 people tried to get into the Wanamaker store auditorium. Anna Marie Jarvis spoke for over an hour on the power of motherly love. It was a good start.

But Anna-Marie wanted more for Mother's Day. So she quit her job, set up the Mother's Day International Association and toured Europe in 1913 to promote her idea, funded in part by donations and in part by her brother, who was a successful businessman.

In 1914, she was present in the gallery when the US Congress granted its official approval, putting Mother's Day on the national calendar. Anna Marie had been true to her promise, and her mother's prayer had been answered. That's the conventional story about Mother's Day. But from here, on the other side of the Atlantic, the story seems strange.

In the UK, we don't celebrate Mother's Day on the second Sunday in May. We celebrate Mothering Sunday on the fourth Sunday in Lent, which is usually in March. You'd return to your mother church on Mothering Sunday and pay respects to the Virgin Mary, although you might also take the opportunity to visit your own mother too. That tradition is centuries old, much older than the United States itself.

As the author of The Definitive History of Mother's Day, Catherine Lane Antolini, points out, it's not just the British who had much older Mother's Day traditions. The Greeks and the Romans celebrated mother goddesses, as did early Christians. And in 19th century America, there were others who publicly promoted the idea of Mother's Day before Anna Marie Jarvis. Her own mother was one of them.

But so were well-connected Bostonian abolitionist Julia Ward Howe and Juliet Calhoun Blakely, a leader of the Temperance Movement from Michigan. So was Mary Towles Sassine, who came from a wealthy family in Henderson, Kentucky. She had written a pamphlet in 1893 proposing a Mother's Day celebration. The following year, she managed to get the state to recognise April the 20th as Mother's Day. It was her own mother's birthday.

But in a bitter irony, Mary Sassine had died in childbirth, and the idea had stayed local to Kentucky and Ohio. There were others still. It's a crowded field. So who really deserves the credit? One writer, a pining in 1913, just before Mother's Day became a national holiday, and only a few years after Jarvis' church service in West Virginia, knew exactly who to thank.

For the success of the day, we are to credit ourselves. Us. We. The members of the trade who are sufficiently progressive to push it along. Mother's Day is ours. We made it. We made it practically unaided and alone. Who was the we? The abolitionists? The temperance movement? The Methodists? Well, none of them, of course. The answer is far more intriguing.

Cautionary Tales will be back in a moment.

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Mother's Day is ours. We made it. We made it practically unaided and alone. These confident claims were published in the Florist's Review, a trade magazine written by florists for florists. Right from the start, Anna Marie Jarvis' Mother's Day had been bound up with the idea of flowers.

She spent $700 giving away white carnations in the first five years of the service. Relative to the wages of the day, that would be about $100,000 now. Philadelphia was drenched in flowers. The city's rapid transit company had given 10,000 white carnations to its workers and its passengers in 1910.

In 1913, Wanamaker's department store gave away 49,000 flowers to customers to celebrate the new Mother's Day holiday. Jarvis, remember, had approached the owner, John Wanamaker, for support early on. None of this would have been possible without the active support of florists, who had plenty of cheap flowers available in May and were looking for an opportunity to stoke demand. And it worked.

Soon enough, the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that you couldn't beg, borrow or steal a carnation on Mother's Day. Which may have been true, although I'm sure Philadelphia's estimable florists would have found a way to sell you one for a price. The price of carnations around Mother's Day increased 30 times over, from half a cent to 15 cents in just five years.

Jarvis wasn't impressed. She had originally chosen the white carnation as an inexpensive flower that anyone could afford. Soon some genius suggested wearing a white carnation if your mother was dead, and a red carnation if she was alive, thus dramatically expanding the supply. Jarvis wasn't impressed with that either. She complained that she never meant the badge of honour to become a badge of mourning.

The florists, meanwhile, were at pains to point out that neither the red nor the white carnation that one might wear could be a substitute for the bouquet of flowers one would buy for one's mother. Despite their disagreement over the red carnation, the florists loved Jarvis' vision of a Mother's Day that was personal, not political. Anna-Marie Jarvis used the slogan, "'For the best mother in the world, your mother.'"

To her, Mother's Day was about the closest of all family relationships between a mother and her child. That seems obvious and inevitable now, but it wasn't at the time. Even Anna-Marie's own mother had a very different vision for a Mother's Day. Her Sunday school prayer, the one that Anna-Marie had witnessed as a child, hoped for a memorial Mother's Day.

that would recognise her "service to humanity in every field of life". She had in mind a grander canvas and thought a Mother's Day would be an opportunity for reconciliation after the bitterness of the Civil War. She imagined Mother's Day picnics in which mothers of veterans from both sides would get together and talk. Many other Mother's Day proponents had similarly political ideas.

Juliet Calhoun Blakely was an advocate for the temperance movement, while Julia Ward Howe had proposed a Mother's Peace Day on the 2nd of June, on which mothers around the world would work together to put an end to war. A lovely sentiment, but not one that's likely to sell a lot of flowers and candy.

Anna-Marie didn't want to help mothers in general to organise for peace or temperance. She wanted you to celebrate your mother. No wonder Anna-Marie Jarvis' sentimental vision was the one which got so much support behind the scenes from the florists. It was the very simplicity and universality of her idea, let's all say thank you to mum, that made it so ubiquitous and therefore so lucrative.

Other women had tried to promote a Mother's Day before her, but Anna-Marie Jarvis had sealed the deal. And she had the florists to thank for that. They had pushed the idea, advertised it, and made it feel like an occasion only a scoundrel would forget. But the florists didn't want to be seen as the driving force behind Mother's Day. That would be crass.

So they quietly sponsored newspaper columns telling the story of Anne Reeves Jarvis's wish for a Mother's Day and her daughter Anna Marie's determined campaign to see her late mother's wish become a reality. Much better that she, rather than they, were seen as the creators of Mother's Day. At first, Jarvis had been happy to get the support of the floral industry. She'd even provided special Mother's Day signs which any florist could display next to their wares.

It was fine, as long as things didn't go too far. But when commerce meets the calendar, things usually do go too far. Around the same time as Anna Marie's campaign, the raisin growers of California started promoting national raisin beds.

They advertised, sent out flyers with recipes. And it worked. On April 30th, 1909, the restaurants of America were outdoing each other in their efforts to offer dishes based on dried fruit.

and by the following year the newspapers were complaining about it. The Planet Money podcast has coined a delightful phrase for an irritating practice: the Holiday Industrial Complex. The Holiday Industrial Complex will use any means necessary to get commercially lucrative days onto the calendar, often with the help of the US Congress, which approved Mother's Day back in 1914.

By the mid-1980s, Congress could do little else but introduce more commemorations, no doubt thanks to vigorous lobbying. In 1985 and 1986, one-third of all laws passed by Congress recognised a special commemorative period, such as National Air Traffic Control Day or National Birds of Prey Month. 227 were introduced in just those two years.

But the holiday industrial complex doesn't need Congress to create these special days. There are plenty of others who'll do that. The 6th of February, for example, has been designated the national day for the Sami people of Scandinavia.

and the United Nations Day for zero tolerance to female genital mutilation. Unfortunately, it's also National Frozen Yoghurt Day and National Lame Duck Day in the US. While in the UK, it's Ice Cream for Breakfast Day and National Sickie Day. What's going on to produce such jarring conjunctions? It's partly that these special days provide a way for the producers of raisins to coordinate with each other.

It's the same for the producers of ice cream, or for the campaigners and the NGOs raising awareness of female genital mutilation. When it might be hopeless for one of them alone to get people excited about their cause, whether it's something serious like protecting girls from harm, or something silly like selling oatmeal and raisin cookies, if they all get together, that might be enough to get noticed, at least for one day.

And there are a lot of people out there looking for something to talk about. From radio hosts to social media influencers.

The void must be filled. And on a slow news day, why not talk about lame ducks or ice cream for breakfast? Even serious issues such as female genital mutilation can't easily be discussed without some sort of excuse. There needs to be a peg onto which to hang the news story or the Facebook post. And if that makes you think about how shallow our media discourse can be, don't let yourself feel too superior.

Anyone who's used Christmas cards as an excuse to revive a long-withered friendship, or who can't quite organise a romantic candlelit dinner without Valentine's Day as a prompt,

knows that sometimes even crass commercial traditions can be better than nothing. Anna-Marie Jarvis seems to have understood this. She'd written to her own mother incessantly, to the point where, when more than a week went by without a letter from Anna-Marie, old Mrs Jarvis wrote to ask what was wrong. A single letter on Mother's Day seems such a thin substitute for an ongoing correspondence between mother and daughter.

But Anna-Marie urged people to write to their mothers on Mother's Day because she knew that otherwise they might not write to their mothers at all. To compare Mother's Day to National Raisin Day does Mother's Day a disservice.

Financially speaking, National Raisin Day is a shrug, while Mother's Day is big business. I suspect that even raisin growers don't get too excited about National Raisin Day. But there's an entire floral and greeting card industry orbiting around each Mother's Day for weeks.

Industry associations have estimated that a third of Americans dine out on Mother's Day, and that the average person spends over $200 on Mother's Day gifts, such as special days out, cards, and flowers. Nobody spends $200 on raisins. But that's not the only reason that Mother's Day is noteworthy. Lee Eric Schmidt, a historian, examines the commercialization of holidays in his book Consumer Rights.

He argues that Mother's Day really is different because it became the template for the creation and marketisation of the commemorative days that came later. It's unclear if the raisin growers were directly inspired by the florists, but entrepreneurs certainly noticed that Mother's Day was good business and promptly proposed a Father's Day.

Father's Day got off to a slow start. What next? Said the New York Times in 1914. Maiden Auntie's Day? Household Pet Day? What a joke. But the New York Times had no idea. Father's Day also struck many commentators as absurd, on the grounds that fathers are providers for the family. They give gifts rather than receiving them.

One two-panel cartoon from 1911 showed a grateful gentleman being presented with gifts from his family on Father's Day, then the day after, facing a crowd of retailers, each presenting him with a hefty bill for the previous day's indulgences. Bring out the tiny violins for Dad. And yet, slowly, Father's Day caught on, even if it was always a fainter echo of Mother's Day.

And perhaps it would not have caught on had it not been for years of diligent work by a trade body, Associated Menswear Retailers, followed by a 1938 alliance with the National Retail Dry Goods Association, the National Association of Retail Clothiers and Furnishers, and the National Association of Tobacco Distributors, who together established the National Council for the Promotion of Father's Day.

Not every such effort was successful. Children's Day, Friendship Day and Candy Day were all launched and never enjoyed anything like the success of Mother's Day. Yet Mother's Day had established the principle, wherever there's a sentiment, there's an opportunity to cash in. It's frustrating to contemplate how much money we spend on crass or superficial gestures at the urging of nakedly commercial interests.

We've touched on this problem before in our story, The Company That Cancelled Christmas, when we discussed the collapse of Fairpack and the suffering of families who felt under huge pressure to spend money they didn't have in order to join in with Christmas. We all know that the money isn't the point, yet we can't find a way to stop spending. So it's worth being thoughtful about how much we spend on these festivals. Is this really the best way to mark the day?

Have I talked to the person I'm supposed to buy gifts for and checked that that's really what they want? It's hard to ignore the social pressure. But we can at least show some resistance. At the same time, you have to choose your battles. Which is perhaps why Anna-Marie Jarvis is not really remembered now as the creator of Mother's Day. She's remembered instead, if she's remembered at all, as the person who tried to cancel it.

Cautionary Tales will return in a moment.

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Just four years after that first Mother's Day celebration in 1908, Anna Marie was taking steps to defend her turf. She registered the Mother's Day International Association and copyrighted a white carnation emblem and the phrases Mother's Day and Second Sunday in May and, tellingly, her own photograph. Then she started to issue statements.

Any charity, institution, hospital, organization or business using Mother's Day names, work, emblem or celebration for getting money, making sales or on printed forms should be held as imposters by proper authorities and reported to this association. It was the moment when President Woodrow Wilson was about to proclaim Mother's Day a public holiday.

Yet, Annamarie Jarvis was trying to ensure that it was her personal property. At first, her target was rival Mother's Day campaigns. She was implacably hostile towards them. Remember, for example, Mary Towles Sassine of Henderson, Kentucky? Long before Annamarie Jarvis' letter-writing campaign, Sassine had persuaded Kentucky's legislature to recognise April 20th as Mother's Day.

And the good folk of Henderson, Kentucky wanted some recognition for their local woman's achievement. Anna Marie Jarvis was having none of it. Here's a friendly telegram from Jarvis to the Henderson, Kentucky Chamber of Commerce. Why don't you stop fraud against Mother's Day through misrepresentation about founder?

This is grossly unfair. Sassine had pushed the idea of Mother's Day long before Jarvis.

To be sure, neither the Henderson, Kentucky Chamber of Commerce nor the long-dead Sassine had contributed to the costs of showering carnations on Jarvis' events in May. But why would they? Yet the florists had. For a few years, the florists were the perfect allies for Anna Marie Jarvis. She wanted to be recognised as the sole creator of Mother's Day. They wanted that too, no matter what they might boast in their own trade journals.

They knew nobody was going to celebrate a Mother's Day transparently created by florists and confectioners. Much better to have Jarvis as their figurehead, with her own tale to tell of a daughter's love for her long-suffering mother. But relations between Jarvis and the florists didn't stay rosy for long. Around 1920, Jarvis started to make a nuisance of herself.

She seems to have feared losing control of the central project of her life. It is not for strangers to meddle with. Perhaps she also felt resentful that she and her story had been exploited and grew tired of being an unpaid saleswoman for the florists.

Having showered carnations on the first few Mother's Day celebrations, she announced, We are opposed to the great waste of money for flowers for funerals, holidays, Mother's Day and similar occasions. We do not wish Mother's Day to have any responsibility for such waste. She created special badges with a Mother's Day design in the hope that people would buy and wear them instead of carnations.

The badges showed a white carnation, the words Mother's Day, and then in smaller type, Anna Jarvis, founder, Philadelphia. Understandably, the florists were not happy. But using her copyrights, she repeatedly sued or threatened to sue people who designed their own celebrations of Mother's Day. At one stage, she had more than 30 lawsuits pending, although with little success.

And she took action outside the courts too. She issued strident press releases. What will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations? And she staged protests. For example, that day when she walked into her old friend John Wanamaker's opulent tea room,

and dumped a Mother's Day salad on the floor. It was a poignant protest against the commercialisation of the day, and it can't possibly have achieved anything. Because this is a hopeless quest. Inventing Mother's Day and hoping it won't be commercialised is like inventing beer and hoping people won't get drunk. It's an exercise in futility. Mother's Day grew and grew as a festival of spending.

leaving behind Anna-Marie's vision of a day of devotion and gratitude, involving the writing of grateful letters and some prayers in church. Some florists found her complaints embarrassing and were relieved when in 1922, Florists Review declared that the Jarvis campaign had been completely squelched. Others enjoyed the controversy on the principle that there was no such thing as bad publicity.

When her public eruptions achieve little, and her legal actions proved as fruitless as they were expensive, Anna-Marie appealed to a higher power. She wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, requesting that he turn aside from ending the Great Depression for a moment and focus on imposing legal penalties for florists, confectioners and greetings card companies who used her copyrighted phrase, Mother's Day.

It was one of many letters she sent to the White House, but she got nowhere. Her biographer, Catherine Lane Antolini, argues that this dispute was about more than the commercialisation of Mother's Day. It was about recognition. Antolini told me that Jarvis could not stand the thought of someone else getting credit for all her work and sacrifice. And so Jarvis took the ultimate step. She announced...

that she was abolishing Mother's Day. Few people seem to have noticed. Some sources claim that she went door to door, collecting signatures for a petition to get Congress to abolish the holiday it had recognised many years before. If that's true, she didn't succeed. But even an act of Congress would have changed little.

Nobody really cares what Congress says about commercialised holidays anymore. In the 1990s, the House of Representatives passed a rule forbidding itself from dignifying any further silly commemorative days. Did you notice? No. The holiday industrial complex has rolled on with the help of marketing campaigns and a compliant media.

Once Anna Marie Jarvis, with the help of the florists, had managed to establish Mother's Day in the public consciousness, something irreversible had been set in motion. Neither she nor Congress had the power to close that Pandora's box of carnations and candy and Mother's Day salads. One power she hadn't lost was the power to command the attention of the media, even if it was not the kind of attention she wanted.

In 1938, Time magazine published a short article about Anna Marie Jarvis. Anna Jarvis is the 60-year-old Philadelphia spinster who invented Mother's Day. She was 74, so that's not a good start. Whenever she thinks of what the flower shops, the candy stores, the telegraph companies have done with her idea, she is disgusted. Time went on to explain her record of troublemaking.

As part of what the magazine described as...

The magazine went on to explain that the old Philadelphia busybody was now a recluse, using a periscope to observe her front door without having to show her face at the window, and instructing her maid only to answer to a coded knock. Time added that she wrote violent telegrams to the president.

walked around carrying a satchel full of press releases and old publicity photographs, and had arranged her home as a kind of shrine to her own dead mother, where she sat alone, listening to the radio, and hoping to hear her late mother's voice come to her from another place.

Anna Marie Jarvis did exactly what you'd expect. She published a press release, declaring that the Time article was libelous and rebutting each allegation in painful detail. It's not clear how many of the claims in Time were true. Given that they got her age wrong, one has to wonder. But it is clear that the ageing Jarvis was frustrated and isolated.

And from time to time, other newspapers published stories describing her as a bitter, tragic figure. A few weeks before Christmas in 1943, she sought help at a hospital in Philadelphia and was moved into a nursing home, where she spent the last four years of her life, blind and nearly deaf. Yet, to the end of her days, she still had many admirers.

In the last year of her life, she received more than a thousand letters from well-wishers. Everyone from President Truman down to a little boy who'd heard the sad tales the newspapers liked to tell. He sent her his savings, a dollar bill and a note. I am six years old and I love my mother very much. I'm sending you this because you started Mother's Day. She treasured that. Anna-Marie Jarvis never had children.

She always experienced Mother's Day not as a mother herself, but as a devoted daughter. One of the few in her family who survived to adulthood. Although perhaps that's not quite right. She was the proud and perhaps over-controlling mother of Mother's Day itself. But as any mother can tell you, children have minds of their own.

It's quite an achievement to create something with its own life, something bigger than oneself. Perhaps it's too much to expect to be able to control it too. We need to be able to let go. Anna Marie Jarvis couldn't. This is the paradox of my life, she told one interviewer. My greatest success is also my greatest defeat. Anna Marie Jarvis died in 1948.

Her money was eaten up by lawsuits. So who paid for her funeral? The newspapers had an answer. Apparently, it was paid for by the florists. Catherine Lane Antolini's book is titled Memorialising Motherhood, Anna Jarvis and the Struggle for Control of Mother's Day. For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes, with support from Edith Russelo. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lital Millard, John Schnarz, Carly Migliore, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano, and Morgan Ratner.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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