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Long before bargain hunters and viral videos, the name “Black Friday” had a far darker birth. On September 24, 1869, a corrupt attempt to corner the gold market blew up in the faces of ordinary Americans, triggering a financial panic that wiped out fortunes and bankrupted firms — a true Black Friday that exposed the rot of Wall Street schemers.
Decades later the phrase resurfaced in a very different but familiar way: as a warning about chaos, not commerce. Philadelphia police in the mid-20th century used “Black Friday” to describe the traffic jams and bedlam that followed Thanksgiving as shoppers flooded the streets, an image of disorder that should have reminded us to value order and family over frenzy.
Then in 1939, amid the desperate days of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt bowed to pressure from retailers and moved Thanksgiving a week earlier to kick-start holiday buying; critics derisively called it “Franksgiving.” What began as a cynical nudge to cushion sales became a national controversy that pitted small-town traditions and common sense against the convenience of commercial interests.
The confusion proved so disruptive that Congress stepped in. In late 1941 lawmakers fixed Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday of November to end the chaos and restore predictability — a rare, overdue check on presidential overreach and corporate gamesmanship.
By the 1980s the retail lobby and marketing machine had finished the job: Black Friday was repackaged as a celebration of profits, the moment “in the black” when merchants finally stop losing money for the year. What was once a label for genuine economic disaster and civic disorder was sanitized and sold back to the public as an annual excuse to buy more than we need.
This history should make patriots uneasy — not proud. It’s a clear example of how government and big business can collude to reshape culture for commerce, turning a sacred pause for gratitude into a calendar-engineered sales bonanza. We should call out that alliance for what it is: an erosion of shared values dressed up in the language of progress and prosperity.
Hardworking Americans can reclaim Thanksgiving by refusing to let the marketplace dictate our rituals and our calendars. Choose family over late-night lines, support local merchants instead of feeding faceless corporate giants, and insist that Washington stop rearranging our lives to suit someone’s quarterly report. If we value gratitude and community, we’ll stop allowing the state and the boardroom to rewrite what matters most.
