It’s About Time
EASTERN ELBOW TIME - If history is any guide, soon a politician in California, with it still fresh in his mind, will introduce legislation making daylight saving time year-round. This will immediately be followed by a politician in Maine, claiming she speaks for farmers and children, who will introduce a bill making standard time permanent. Both bills will have initial strong support, but both will fail by a slim margin.
For the last hundred years or so, few topics have been so debated, so enacted, and so retracted as daylight saving time. As late as 2022, something called the Sunshine Protection Act passed unanimously in the senate making daylight saving time permanent, like it or not.
Americans can’t decide if we like it, or not. We never could. When the first daylight saving time was enacted in 1918, we saw it as supporting the war effort, kept quiet and saluted. But the nation in those days was still agrarian, and farmers loathed DST. Only weeks after the armistice was signed, we decided the federal government shouldn’t set our clock, and punted it back to the states.
This created a mare’s nest. New York and New Jersey stayed on daylight saving time, Illinois, then Florida, then Massachusetts tried it for a while. Briefly, Iowa, attempting to cut the baby in half, simply added a half an hour to standard time. The rest of the nation stood pat and the fledgling radio and aviation industries went nuts.
In 1942, FDR re-enacted daylight saving time, but he was savvy enough to call it War Time. Nevertheless, a couple of months after V-J Day, we consigned daylight saving time to the bone yard.
Finally in 1967, in an effort that pleased no one, but pissed off even fewer, the Unified Time Act became law, with seven months of daylight saving time, five months of standard time and a legion of salons itching to extend or retract the allotted time. Which they did in 1973, 1975, 2005 and 2016.
We may not be through kicking time around yet. In November 2024 California state senator Roger Niello introduced a bill to put the state on year-round standard time. The bill didn’t get out of committee last year, but Niello is still around and so is his bill. Stay tuned.
At least the burgeoning atomic clock industry is making moot one of our “standard-daylight” complaints. Now a giant atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado automatically changes the clock of every cell phone, every computer and most microwaves, ovens and coffee makers. Soon, we may have to find something even more trivial to argue about.
(Jack Shakely is president emeritus of the California Community Foundation in Los Angeles. He does not own a watch, even a smart one.)
