The Farmer's Clock

The argument for daylight saving has always been made in someone else's name. The Standard Time Act of 1918 installed the hour as a wartime measure, and farmers objected immediately. Farm work answers to sunrise, dew, livestock and shipping schedules. None of those consult a clock face.

The mechanism is dull and decisive. Hay cannot be cut until the dew has burned off, and the dew does not care what the dial says. Cows are milked on their own bodies' schedule, and the trains and creameries taking the milk kept their old hours. Hired hands quit for dinner at the same clock time, one hour earlier in the field.

So the farm lobby went to Congress and won. In 1919 the repeal passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto, 223 to 101 in the House on August 19 and 57 to 19 in the Senate the following day. Wilson had argued the hour was worth keeping. The legislators counted their rural districts instead.

The sustained pressure in favor came from chambers of commerce and department stores, who understood that an extra lit hour after work is an extra hour of shopping. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 was largely their achievement. Political scientists later measured the pattern in the roll calls: the more farmers in a district, the less its representative supported extending daylight saving.

Then came the energy crisis experiment. Year-round daylight saving began on January 6, 1974, and eight Florida schoolchildren were reported killed in traffic by the end of that month, a contested attribution that moved Congress anyway. Ford signed the amendment in October and standard time returned on the 27th. The hour survived, gutted within ten months, still traveling under a farmer's name.