Tommy Denton

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If the $14 billion spent to honor Mom in 2006 was any indication, this year should be stunning.

Such material largess also would flout the intent of those women whose original conception of Mother's Day arose from far nobler and more sobering impulses than a romantic, commercially lucrative annual celebration.

When Julia Ward Howe, author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," penned her Mother's Day Proclamation of 1870, she issued one of history's most stirring anti-war exhortations:

Arise then, women of this day!

Arise, all women who have hearts!

Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

"We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,

Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,

For caresses and applause,

Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn

All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.

We, the women of one country,

Will be too tender of those of another country

To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

Not only had Howe witnessed the carnage of the American Civil War, working herself with widows and orphans of both Union and Confederate soldiers, but she also abhorred the slaughter then unfolding in the Franco-Prussian War.

Despite her proclamation, Howe failed to obtain formal recognition of Mother's Day. Yet the woman who inspired her, Appalachian homemaker Anna Jarvis, persisted without the same notoriety of the famed author.

In 1858, Jarvis had begun a one-woman campaign to improve sanitation through what she called Mothers' Work Days. She organized women throughout the Civil War to work for improved sanitary conditions for both sides.

When Jarvis died, her daughter of the same name succeeded her mother in a crusade to establish a memorial day for women, in remembrance of her mother and in honor of peace. She prevailed on her neighbors to celebrate the first Mother's Day on Oct. 10, 1908, at Andrew's Methodist Church in Grafton, W.Va., where her mother had taught Sunday school, and also at a church in Philadelphia.

President Woodrow Wilson, after some congressional resistance, declared the first national Mother's Day in 1914.

From the beginning, the holiday flourished, much to the delight of the florists of the nation. In the 1920s, the business journal Florists Review declared that this "was a holiday that could be exploited."

Anna Jarvis considered such rank commercialization an abuse of the cause to which she and her mother had devoted themselves. In 1923, she sued to halt one Mother's Day event, and she was arrested in the 1930s for disturbing the peace as she protested the sale of flowers at an assembly of the American War Mothers.

She protested the flower industry's exploitation of the holiday, writing: "What will you do to rout charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and other termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations?"

She had spunk, and she believed passionately in the purity of her cause for its own sake, even if she was arrayed against the irresistible force of the profit motive.

Just as the first official U.S. declaration of Mother's Day in 1914 ironically was issued in the same year as the start of World War I -- suggesting the naïveté of Julia Ward Howe's idealistic proclamation and its earnest advocacy of peace -- so, too, Anna Jarvis was never able to square her life of idealistic struggle against the commercialism she detested.

The irony in her frustrating, and frustrated, campaign against the flower industry came in the waning years of her life, according to the Web site mothersdaycentral.com. Exhausted, blind, poor and childless, Jarvis died in 1948. She never knew that in those final days of her life, the Florist's Exchange had anonymously paid the bills for the care she received in a nursing home.

Today, moms all across the land will receive flowers, jewelry, gift certificates for massages and make-overs, brunches and maybe even romantic getaways.

In the midst of such generous gestures of affection, moms and those who honor them should at least briefly ponder, as a war consumes the sons and daughters of mothers, the original intent of the women who conceived today's celebration.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.