If DST was a partisan issue with one party composed of DST fanatics and the other of DST haters, then there’d at least be familiar talking points such at that year-round DST has already been tried and failed. Either Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow would be trumpeting the fact that Congress imposed year-round Daylight Saving Time in January 1974 in response to the 1973 Energy Crisis, but millions of people hated getting up in the dark in winter, and so Congress went back to the old system in the fall of 1974.
But due to the lack of partisan rancor over this issue, few remember this in any organized fashion, even though tens of millions of voters lived through this experiment. If Daylight Savings Time were a partisan and/or identity politics issue, the 1974 fiasco might be almost as famous as Emmett Till.
I remember the year-round DST experiment vividly because it was formative experience on my career. For some reason, as high school sophomores we got a free subscription to
Time magazine. When OPEC raised the price of oil in fall of 1973,
Time ran an editorial saying that one obvious no-brainer thing we could do in response is go to year round DST. That made sense to me.
But then, come January, it turned out to be that everybody hated it. So, a few months later,
Time ran another editorial denouncing the morons who had passed year-round DST without looking in the Farmer’s Almanac when the sun comes up in winter. A good point, but I could recall, unlike
Time’s editors, that
Time was one of those morons pushing year-round DST.
And remembering off-narrative facts has pretty much been what I’ve been doing ever since.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-horr...-1974-due-to-lack-of-partisan-fervor-over-it/
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