KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It’s hard to imagine how anyone could get riled up by a Hallmark card showing a serene mom clutching roses, but that’s only if you don’t know the story of Anna Jarvis.
She’s the person most credited with turning the second Sunday of May into Mother’s Day, which celebrates a milestone this year: 100 years.
But another person who helped launch the national holiday, with the stroke of a pen on a proclamation, was the U.S. president in 1914, Woodrow Wilson.
Jarvis was no fan of card makers. In her view, the holiday she crusaded for — a day she’d hoped would be reverential and contemplative — was ruined by commercialization as early as the 1920s.
By some accounts, she spent the rest of her life trying to take back, actually rescind, Mother’s Day.
See Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for the story.