In case you were wondering, and maybe in a pandemic it seems as if every day is the same as the next, this Sunday at 2 a.m., most of the country shifts to Daylight Saving Time.
Perhaps you’re curious about how this bi-annual shift began, why it remains, and whether people think it should or shouldn’t even exist.
According to reporting by Olivia B. Wasman for TIME magazine, the first U.S. law on Daylight Saving Time went into effect on March 19, 1918, about a year after the country entered World War I. Officially, the reason was to save fuel.
But, Michael Downing, author of “Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time” argues that the real reason was because the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thought that Americans getting off work while it was still light outside might mean they would get out and shop more.
Then sports and recreation industries jumped in, wanting to capitalize on the extra daylight.
“Golf ball sales skyrocketed during Daylight Saving Time,” according to Downing. “Baseball is a huge early supporter, too, because there’s no artificial illumination of parks, so to get school kids and workers to ball games with the extended daylight, they have a later start time.”
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It all sounds good and seems to make sense, except there were a couple of very powerful and loud voices in opposition to the policy -- the movie industry and the farming industry.
“The movie industry hated Daylight Saving Time because people were much less likely to go into dark theaters when it was bright outside,” Downing says. He adds that it's a myth that farmers wanted Daylight Saving, in fact, it was quiet the contrary. The new policy interrupted their ability to milk the cows and harvest crops, because they simply had less light in the day to see -- not to mention, Downing says, it meant, “taking us off God’s time.”
“It’s so unpopular when we experiment with Daylight Saving Time during World War I that before the Versailles Treaty is signed [at the end of the war], Congress is forced to sign a repeal to quell the revolt from the farm lobby, it’s that potent a lobby,” Downing tells TIME.
For decades Daylight Savings Time has been fraught with controversy.
It returned in 1942, during World War II. But it would only continue in the cities, and rural areas wouldn't observe it.
Until 1966, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Uniform Time Act, mandating that the United States policy observe six months of Daylight Saving Time and six months of Standard Time. In 1973, President Richard Nixon called for year-round Daylight Saving Time. In 1986, the U.S. started observing seven months of it, and since 2005, the U.S. has been observing eight months of Daylight Saving Time.
Today, the sentiment remains fairly negative about the policy.
A poll in 2019 by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 7 in 10 Americans preferred not to switch back and forth to mark Daylight Saving Time. But there was no agreement on which time clocks ought to follow.
And… just for the record… there’s no time change observed in Hawaii, most of Arizona, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Marianas… in case you were wondering.
Don't forget to set your clocks an hour ahead, usually before bed Saturday night, to avoid being late for Sunday morning activities.
Standard time returns Nov. 7.
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