Father’s Day can sometimes seem like an afterthought in the late-spring holiday lineup: third place behind Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, a mere warm-up barbecue before the Fourth of July. But the occasion wasn’t invented merely to sell greeting cards, coffee mugs, and last-minute neckties. On the contrary, when Father’s Day became a national holiday in 1972, it was intended—though, badly—to address the most contentious and persistent issues in American history and politics. Its origins lie in the social movements of the 1960s, in stunted efforts to fight deep inequalities of race and class, and in a previous generation’s attempt to solve a perceived crisis of masculinity and fatherhood through ambitious, though ultimately unrealized policies to support families.

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This story starts in the fall of 1964, when a middle-aged father and mid-level federal appointee named Daniel Patrick Moynihan hit on what he believed to be the solution to America’s racial conflict in his sleep. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in July, many of the bill’s champions, including Martin Luther King Jr., argued that new laws weren’t enough to end centuries of discrimination. Something more substantive was needed. That November, Moynihan, then an ambitious Assistant Security in the Labor Department with three young children of his own, woke up at 4 a.m. certain that the key to avoiding more racial unrest, and even revolution, was to help Black fathers stay with their families.

Moynihan spent much of the next year working on a study, published in the spring of 1965 under the title The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. Initially confidential and anonymous, the document quickly became indelibly identified with its author: The Moynihan Report.

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In the six decades since its publication, the Moynihan Report has come to symbolize how assumptions of racial difference have skewed even liberal policies aiming for social equality. Fair as these charges are, Moynihan’s initial thinking was as much about biased views on masculinity and Freudian psychology as it was about race, and it was shaped by his own experiences with fatherhood.

Born in 1927, Moynihan had grown up in New York City during the Depression, the eldest child of a struggling Irish-American family. When Moynihan was 10, his father, an alcoholic, abandoned them to move to California. Moynihan, his siblings, and his mother were left to scramble for food, work, and shelter. Sometimes they stayed in an apartment for only a month before moving on.

Read More: What It Means to Be a ‘Good’ Father in America Has Changed. Here’s........

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