An old adage says, “The best time to fix the hole in the roof against rain is when the sun is shining.”
Fifty-two years ago, that wisdom was quoted by Pennsylvania’s Republican Rep. George A. Goodling. It was late June of 1974, only a few months after the last time Congress and the president decided to make daylight saving time permanent.
I’ll explain how the analogy applies in a minute. For now, it’s important to understand that the United States already experimented with year-round daylight saving time. The current effort in Washington is not plowing new ground.
Public disagreements
What we learned back then applies today. Most people would prefer to not change their clocks twice a year, but people can’t agree on whether falling back or jumping forward should be the permanent solution, and they have strong feelings about it.
Daylight saving time gives us long, sunny evenings in the summer, but imposing it year-round would force children to walk to school in the dark much of the year. Standard time makes summer evenings shorter, which could cost retailers and the tourist and recreation industries.
Constantly changing the time, meanwhile, is horrible for the parents of severely autistic or otherwise challenged children who don’t deal well with change or disruptions in medication schedules. It also leads to many drowsy drivers.
Kind of makes you sorry the government decided to monkey with clocks in the first place during World War I, doesn’t it?
And here we are, perhaps on the verge of monkeying again.
A new attempt
Earlier this week, the House voted once again to make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, unless states decide to opt out before the bill becomes law. Why daylight saving and not standard time? Who knows?
It isn’t because of a clear preference. A 2022 poll by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, conducted by HarrisX, found Utahns divided, with 41% preferring permanent daylight saving time, 30% preferring permanent standard time and 24% preferring things remain as they are. The other 5% didn’t know.
The Senate still has to weigh in, and its support is uncertain. But the bill’s strong support from President Donald Trump has given it a bit of momentum.
Condemned to repeat history?
In the spirit of philosopher George Santayana’s famous warning that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” it’s well worth looking back to the mid-’70s. Permanent daylight saving time started in January of 1974 as an answer to the energy crisis. Congress, tired of hearing from angry constituents, ended it hastily in the fall of that year.
Opinion polls showed that public support, initially strong at 79%, fell dramatically to 42% in only a few weeks as kids walked to school in the dark and a number of tragic and well-publicized accidents occurred.
I used newspapers.com to get a glimpse into what people were thinking.
As I reported in an earlier column, the Dayton, Ohio, Daily News set up a phone line for a limited time to let people vent about the new permanent status. It got 283 calls. Four of every five callers were against it.
“If sheer stupidity were a valid basis for impeachment,” one person said, “yearlong daylight saving time would do it for me.”
But there were angry people on the other side, too. One letter published in Troy, New York, blamed schools for not moving start times ahead an hour. “I am disgusted by the seeming self-serving, insensitive failure of school systems to make one single alteration to their present class schedules, advancing all activities one hour.” This, he said, would eliminate the “one sorry point of opposition” to year-round daylight saving.
The hole in the roof
Now back to Rep. Goodling’s statement, written in a letter to the Foreign Commerce Committee and quoted at the beginning of this column. After referring to the hole in the roof, he said, “In a like manner, the best time to deal with the issue of permanent daylight saving time is during the school recess period, which is now upon us.”
He wanted to get rid of the law before the days got shorter and the mornings darker again. He wasn’t alone. Utah Rep. Gunn McKay called the law an “obvious mistake.”
Today it’s doubtful Americans could agree on whether the roof has a hole, or even if it’s raining.
Utah law, meanwhile, already requires the state to move to yearlong daylight saving time if Congress passes a law allowing it (currently, states are free only to adopt year-round standard time) and if at least four other Western states also change.
I have my own preference on this question, as I’m sure you do. I’m sorry most of the world got itself into this strange habit a century ago, but I’m convinced that the best time to permanently fix this hole in the roof may never come.