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Black Friday hasn’t always been a feel-good retail ritual; it started as a real financial catastrophe. The name “Black Friday” was used to describe the Wall Street gold panic of September 24, 1869, when greedy financiers tried to corner the gold market and ordinary Americans paid the price when markets crashed. That bit of ugly history is a reminder that “black” days in our past were often born of market manipulation and consequence, not cheerful discounting.
Then came a different kind of government meddling: in 1939 President Franklin D. Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week at the urging of department-store interests so merchants could squeeze in more Christmas shopping. The move—mocked at the time as “Franksgiving”—split states, upset American routines, and showed how Washington can be lobbied into reshaping our calendar to serve corporate profits rather than family traditions. That experiment didn’t stick; Congress stepped in and fixed Thanksgiving by law in 1941, but the damage to the sacred rhythm of the season had been done.
Long before the glossy ads and social-media hype, the phrase “Black Friday” was revived in the mid-20th century by Philadelphia police describing the chaos of crowds, traffic, and shoplifting when throngs descended on the city after Thanksgiving. It wasn’t a celebration; it was a warning from the men and women keeping the peace about how fragile civic order can become under the crush of overconsumption. The origin matters because it shows that what we now celebrate as a consumer holiday grew out of civic strain, not communal thanksgiving.
By the 1980s, savvy retailers repackaged the story and turned “Black Friday” into a marketing triumph—spinning the time-honored accounting phrase “in the black” to sell frenzy as prosperity. The retail industry’s happy-sounding origin story conveniently erased the inconvenient facts about panic, manipulation, and civic chaos, proving once again that narratives can be rewritten when profit is on the line. That corporate spin soft-pedaled the harm and recast an unruly, dangerous day as a patriotic act of consumption.
Today the hulking spectacle that started with a financial crash and a presidential date-change has metastasized into “Black November” and nonstop promotions designed to hollow out families and communities while padding corporate balance sheets. Online giants and national chains have stretched the season into a month-long feeding frenzy, pushing smaller retailers and the moral rhythms of the holiday to the margins. If you think the Thanksgiving you remember is safe, look at the calendar: Washington and big business have already pilfered pieces of it and turned gratitude into another sales metric.
Hardworking Americans shouldn’t let tradition be bought and sold without a fight. Reclaim your Thanksgiving by putting family first, shopping small when you can, and refusing to let corporate narratives tell you what gratitude is supposed to look like. Patriots know that some things—family, faith, and freedom from government-and-corporate overreach—are worth defending even on the busiest shopping day of the year.
