Sunday Marks Beginning of Daylight Saving Time
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Saturday night, millions of Americans will perform a small, familiar act of temporal disobedience: they will walk through darkened houses, find the clocks that still require human intervention, and push them one hour into the future. Long before anybody mentions daylight saving time, the body notices it — the way Sunday morning feels slightly off-kilter, as if the day has arrived before you were quite done with the last one.
The ritual is more than a century old and, like many American habits, began as a wartime experiment. In 1918, two years after Germany and other European nations began advancing their clocks to conserve coal during the First World War, the United States adopted daylight saving time as part of an “Act to preserve daylight and provide standard time,” a bureaucratic title for a simple idea: get people to use more evening light and less artificial illumination. The experiment was brief. The war ended, farmers complained, and Congress abolished the national requirement a year later, leaving localities to improvise, and trains and broadcasters to navigate the resulting confusion.
Franklin D. Roosevelt tried again. From 1942 to 1945, in the middle of a different world war, the country lived on what was called “War Time,” essentially year-round daylight saving, a continuous summer on the clock face that did little to make the winters feel shorter. After the war, the nation returned to a patchwork of observance until the Uniform Time Act of 1966 made the dates consistent, if not universally beloved, and Congress proceeded to adjust the schedule repeatedly, extending or contracting the brighter evenings in response to energy crises, oil embargoes, and the perennial hope that people might use less electricity if the sun appeared to linger.
The deepest flirtation with permanent daylight saving came during the energy crisis of the mid-1970s, when the country moved its clocks forward in January 1974 and, for a time, simply left them there. The dark winter mornings that followed were not the stuff of nostalgia. Children waited for school buses in what felt like the middle of the night; parents and commuters bristled. By October 1975, the country was back to the familiar seesaw between summer’s borrowed light and winter’s reversion to standard time.
The current arrangement, in place since 2007 under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, is a compromise that has begun to feel, to many, like an arbitrary imposition. Daylight saving time now begins on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November, stretching the definition of “summer” well into football season. Hawaii and most of Arizona abstain altogether — an archipelago and a desert opting out of the national chronometric mood swing— joining the territories that never changed their clocks in the first place.
The arguments for and against this choreography of sleep and sunlight have grown more physiological over time. Critics of the biannual shift point to studies suggesting that the abrupt one-hour loss in spring may be associated with modest upticks in car crashes and cardiovascular events, at least in the days immediately after the change. The mechanism is intuitive: disrupt circadian rhythms, and the body protests. Advocates of a permanent time — usually year-round daylight saving — counter that eliminating the switch would spare people the twice-yearly jolt and, by extending evening light in winter, encourage more outdoor exercise after work and bolster local economies that benefit from customers who are willing to linger in the lit hours of the day.
The data, like the clocks, can be read in different ways. Some recent research has downplayed the magnitude of the health risks, suggesting that while the spring transition may correlate with a small increase in adverse cardiovascular events, the absolute effect is probably minor, and that daylight saving, as practiced, is unlikely to “meaningfully impact” overall rates of heart attacks. Still, the notion that the government can reach into everyone’s bedroom twice a year and move the morning has proved an unusually resilient source of irritation — less a civil-liberties issue than a low-level affront to sleep.
In South Carolina, whose latitude offers generous light in summer and a more miserly allotment in January, the impatience has taken legislative form. In 2020, the state’s House of Representatives voted in favor of a measure — House Bill 3879 — that would stop the twice-yearly changing of clocks and make daylight saving time permanent, effectively locking the state into a forward-tilted version of Eastern time. The proposal, which resurfaced in subsequent sessions, reflects a broader national trend; dozens of states have passed or considered similar bills, all of them contingent on an authority they do not possess.
The United States Congress, which does have that authority, has been less decisive. Federal law allows states to opt out of daylight saving time and remain on standard time year-round, but not to leap permanently into the brighter half of the year without congressional approval. A state can choose to be perennially early, or to toggle back and forth with everyone else; it cannot, on its own, choose to be permanently late in the day.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the latest push for stability in the clock came after an especially long, dark winter defined not by war or oil but by a virus. In the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, as routines dissolved and the boundary between work and home blurred into the glow of laptop screens, the difference between five o’clock and six became less about the number of the hour than about whether there was any daylight left to stand in. The idea of more evening light — not in the abstract, but in the form of an actual walk outside — suddenly seemed less like a convenience and more like a public-health measure.
For now, though, the system endures in its current, slightly ungainly form. On Saturday night, the phones will take care of themselves, their internal clocks obedient to distant servers and statutes. The appliances, the microwaves and ovens and the digital thermostats with inscrutable menus, will require patience or neglect. Some people will set their alarms an hour ahead before bed; others will decide that Sunday can absorb the loss, that they can sleep until the body, rather than the state, decides it has had enough. It is, after all, the traditional day of rest, and there is something quietly subversive about greeting an artificially shortened morning by refusing to get up on time.
