Author Christopher Klein’s E-Newsletter: The Throwback March 2023

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Hello Fellow History Buffs,

Welcome to the March edition of The Throwback, my history-themed e-mail newsletter. If you are receiving this e-mail, you have signed up on my website or at one of my lectures or author events.

I hope everyone remembered to spring forward! I'll enjoy the extra hour of sunlight in the evening, but losing an hour of sleep? Not gonna lie. That was a little painful.

So what's the history behind daylight saving time (not daylight savings time)? Was it to help farmers have an extra hour of sunlight to till their fields? Nope. Did Benjamin Franklin come up with the idea? Again, no.

While Franklin was an envoy in Paris in 1784, he was unpleasantly awakened one morning at 6 AM by the summer sun. He then penned a satirical essay in which he calculated that Parisians, simply by waking up at dawn, could save the modern-day equivalent of $200 million through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles.” As a result of this essay, Franklin is often erroneously given the honor of “inventing” daylight saving time, but he only proposed a change in sleep schedules—not the time itself.

It was Englishman William Willett who led the first campaign to implement daylight saving time. While on an early-morning horseback ride around the desolate outskirts of London in 1905, Willett had an epiphany that the United Kingdom should move its clocks forward by 80 minutes between April and October so that more people could enjoy the plentiful sunlight. The Englishman published the 1907 brochure “The Waste of Daylight” and spent much of his personal fortune evangelizing with missionary zeal for the adoption of “summer time.”

However, Willett died in 1915 at age 58 without ever seeing his idea come to fruition. The following year, it was Britain's World War I adversary Germany that became the first country to enact daylight saving time as a wartime measure to conserve electricity.

Daylight saving first came to the United States in 1918. Contrary to popular belief, American farmers did not lobby for daylight saving to have more time to work in the fields; in fact, the agriculture industry was deeply opposed to the time switch.

The sun, not the clock, dictated farmers’ schedules, so daylight saving was very disruptive. Farmers had to wait an extra hour for dew to evaporate to harvest hay, hired hands worked less since they still left at the same time for dinner and cows weren’t ready to be milked an hour earlier to meet shipping schedules. Agrarian interests led the fight for the 1919 repeal of national daylight saving time, which passed after Congress voted to override President Woodrow Wilson’s veto.

Rather than rural interests, it has been urban entities such as retail outlets and recreational businesses that have championed daylight saving over the decades. After the national repeal in 1919, some states and cities, including New York City and Chicago, continued to shift their clocks. National daylight saving time returned during World War II, but after its repeal three weeks after war’s end the confusing hodgepodge resumed.

States and localities could start and end daylight saving whenever they pleased, a system that Time magazine (an aptly named source) described in 1963 as “a chaos of clocks.” In 1965 there were 23 different pairs of start and end dates in Iowa alone, and St. Paul, Minnesota, even began daylight saving two weeks before its twin city, Minneapolis. Passengers on a 35-mile bus ride from Steubenville, Ohio, to Moundsville, West Virginia, passed through seven time changes.

Order finally came in 1966 with the enactment of the Uniform Time Act, which standardized daylight saving time, although states had the option of remaining on standard time year-round.

Photo at top by Federico Respini on Unsplash

WHAT I'M WATCHING: I was eagerly awaiting a chance to watch the documentary Turn Every Page, and it finally appeared at a nearby theater so I got a chance to watch it yesterday and really enjoyed it. The documentary chronicles one of the great literary partnerships of our times--author Robert Caro and editor Robert Gottlieb. Any history lover, even those who never read Caro's books, will enjoy this. Caro explains his famously in-depth research process--which included moving to the Hill Country in Texas to understand the poverty in which Lyndon Johnson grew up--and talks about how his doggedness unearthed proof that Lyndon Johnson captured his Senate seat through electoral fraud. And if you love reading and writing, you'll get a kick about hearing of the pair's bitter arguments over semicolon usage and how Caro, who writes on a typewriter, stores the only duplicates of his pages in a cabinet above his refrigerator. Definitely Old School!

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Keep reading!

Christopher Klein