Spring Forward, Argue Again

In March the sun arrives late and leaves late, and the country argues about which of those things is the true one. The change arrives on a Saturday night in the second week of the month, when the hour between two and three in the morning quietly fails to occur. Nobody witnesses it. The discovery comes the next day in the shape of the light — a morning still dark at the kitchen window, an evening holding on longer than it has any right to. The clocks did not move. The light moved. Or rather, the country reached up and moved the hands so the light would fall where the argument says it should.

The act of changing the clocks is itself a ritual. The automatic ones change on their own, in the night, and by morning the house is full of liars: the oven ahead, the car behind, the microwave blinking at a time that no longer exists anywhere. Somebody makes a round with a thumb on a button. In November, somebody will have to do it again.

By American standards it is a modest seasonal event. And no other single hour of the year gets argued about as long, as loudly, or by as many people. The fight over daylight saving time is older than anyone now fighting it. It has been settled by law many times and never settled in the mind. Every March the country springs forward, and the argument springs forward with it — the same charges, the same jokes about cows, the same letters about the children and the dark.

Fast time for a war

Daylight saving time was not invented for the people who go to bed at a reasonable hour. It was invented as a wartime expedient, and the suspicion never quite wore off. The story usually begins with Benjamin Franklin, who proposed in the eighteenth century, in a Parisian joke aimed at Parisians, that the city save candles by making its citizens get up with the sun. The essay was so thoroughly deadpan that it is still sometimes quoted as earnest advice. But the joke stayed a joke for more than a hundred years. The hour became policy only when there was a war to support it.

In the spring of 1918, with American troops already in France, Congress adopted standard time zones and, alongside them, a scheme of daylight saving, which it called “fast time.” The country would push its clocks ahead from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October, to stretch the workday into the evening, save coal, and turn out more war production. The first spring-forward happened in March of that year, which makes March the original battle month. The country produced more. It also produced a furious argument.

The farmers are usually blamed for the whole business, which is one of the more durable slanders in American public life. Farmers were among the first to object. Cows keep their own hours; the morning milking waits for no act of Congress; an extra hour of evening sun meant another hour of heat in the hayfield and a later supper in the kitchen. The true supporters of fast time were the city workers, the shopkeepers, the factory managers, and the men who liked an evening round of golf. The countryside fought it, the cities kept it, and that split has never gone away.

No war, no daylight saving. When the war ended, Congress voted to repeal the whole arrangement over the veto of President Woodrow Wilson. The country returned to standard time — for a while. The Second World War brought the hour back, this time applied year-round, under the plain name War Time. Between 1942 and 1945 the country did not change its clocks at all; it simply lived an hour ahead, winter and summer, and a great many people appear to have enjoyed it. Then the war ended, and Congress, in its wisdom, declined to say what the clocks should do. That is how the chaos began.

Thirty-five miles, seven clocks

For twenty years after the Second World War, the United States had no law of time. The federal government had fixed the zones in 1918 but left the daylight part to whoever felt like observing it. States observed it or did not. Cities observed it or did not, sometimes in the same state at the same time. A traveler could lose an hour without crossing a border, or cross a border and lose nothing. Everybody hated it, and everybody wanted it to be somebody else’s problem.

The example that came up again and again in the hearings was a bus route down the Ohio River: thirty-five miles between Steubenville, Ohio, and Moundsville, West Virginia, through a stretch of valley where local clock-setting had piled up on itself. The man who rode that bus past seven changes of time in a single afternoon needed a watch, a schedule, and a willingness to forgive both. The railroads, which run on schedules and nothing else, were loudest in their fury. Broadcasters kept charts. The public kept asking what, in the name of the sun, was going on.

Congress answered in 1966 with the Uniform Time Act. It set a national daylight time on a fixed schedule — the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October — and allowed any state to exempt itself by passing a law. Two states took the door early. Hawaii never bothered with daylight time at all, at a latitude where the sun sets early year-round and nobody sees the point in arguing. Arizona gave it a year and then quit, because an extra hour of evening sun in Phoenix is not a gift but an electric bill. The Navajo Nation, which holds land in three states, observes daylight time even inside Arizona, so that its communities keep the same hour across the reservation line. The map of American time is still an argument drawn in ink.

The 1966 law was supposed to end the discussion. It barely began it.

The winter experiment

The closest the country has ever come to quitting the whole business of changing the clocks happened not because the reformers won but because the keepers of the hour lost their nerve. In 1973, with the oil embargo squeezing the country’s fuel, Congress ordered an experiment: daylight time all year round. The clocks went ahead in the first days of January 1974, in the dead of an American winter, and for a few weeks it seemed the country might learn to live with it. Then the mornings arrived.

It is one thing to send children to school in the light of a June morning. It is another to put them at a bus stop in January, in a dark that has not yet decided to lift. In Florida that winter, several children were struck and killed in the morning black on their way to school, and the deaths were hung around the experiment’s neck. Congress turned the clocks back in October and never again tried daylight time in the dark months. The country had been told the hour would save it. It turned out the hour had a price, and the price was collected at sunrise.

Nothing in American life is more stubborn than a clock. The 1966 schedule held, with one small nudge forward in the 1980s, into the new century. Then in 2005 Congress extended daylight time again, partly on energy grounds and partly at the urging of the candy companies, who liked the idea of Halloween falling inside the long evening. Since 2007 the clocks have gone forward on the second Sunday in March and back on the first Sunday in November. March has been a battle month ever since.

The argument, these days, has turned itself inside out. The old fight was between the people who wanted daylight time and the people who did not. The new fight is between the people who want it all year and the people who want standard time all year — between the long summer evening and the school morning. State legislatures, which have no power to change the federal law, do what legislatures do: they pass bills that would take effect if Congress ever lets them, and they send them to Washington, where the bills go to sleep. Scores of states have weighed in. Nothing has changed the clock.

In March of 2022 the United States Senate passed a bill to make daylight time permanent. It passed by unanimous consent, on a voice vote so quick that much of the Senate was not even in the chamber, and the country woke up to the news that it had almost lost the spring change forever. The House let the bill die. The Congress that passed it ended, and the bill ended with it, like an hour that never occurred. And the spring came anyway, on its appointed Sunday, and the clocks jumped forward, and the argument — which has been running since 1918 and will outrun everyone alive today — picked up where it left off.

The sun does not care. It rises when it rises, darkens when it darkens, and takes no position on the question. The country only decides what to call the hour. Every March it decides again, and by the time anyone has a firm opinion, the hour is already gone.