Most Americans today picture Black Friday as bargain-hunting chaos: elbows, early-morning lines and corporate sales pitches. But the term “Black Friday” actually has a much darker, older pedigree — it was first used to describe a catastrophic financial collapse when speculators Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the gold market in 1869 and set off a panic that wiped out fortunes and shook the nation.
Decades later the label resurfaced for a very different kind of chaos: in the 1950s Philadelphia police and transit workers used “Black Friday” to grumble about the lawlessness and traffic nightmares that accompanied the day after Thanksgiving. What started as a candid description of disorder was never meant to celebrate consumerism; it was a warning about civilization fraying under the weight of reckless commerce and crowded streets.
Then came the real Washington intervention: in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt unilaterally shifted the Thanksgiving date forward by a week, a move urged on him by big retailers eager for more shopping days before Christmas. That change, mockingly dubbed “Franksgiving,” split states and families and handed the culture over to the calendar of merchants, not the rhythms of American life.
The backlash was predictable. Many states refused to go along, calling the early holiday a partisan gimmick, and it took congressional action in 1941 to settle the matter by fixing Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. Nobody asked Main Street if they wanted their sacred day reshuffled for corporate profit, and yet Washington and big business charged ahead anyway.
By the 1980s the retail industry had finished recasting Black Friday from a day of trouble into a marketing triumph — the moment stores finally move their books “into the black.” The PR rewrite sanitized real costs: the erosion of family rituals, the normalization of retail-driven holidays, and the toleration of dangerous stampedes in the name of a sale.
Patriots ought to be frank about what this history shows: when government and corporate interests team up, the little guy loses. A sacred day meant for gratitude and family was repurposed to fatten the tills of department-store barons and to give politicians a feel-good story about economic recovery while ordinary Americans were asked to bend their traditions to quarterly receipts.
If we care about preserving what remains of American character, we should refuse to let the calendar be dictated by the profit motives of elites. Celebrate Thanksgiving as it was intended — protect family time, support small businesses on Saturday, and resist the absurd spectacle that turns gratitude into a shopping frenzy. America is stronger when we put people above promotions and faith above foot traffic.
