The Insurgent History Calendar: May 1

Daylight Saving Time, “that puzzling ritual of mass clock-winding ill befitting freeborn Americans,” as Bill Kauffman described it in a 2005 Wall Street Journal review of Spring Forward, Michael Downing’s book on that pointless, aggravating, jet-lagging ritual, was first imposed on this day in 1916fuel-conserving measure during World War I, which the United States had not yet joined. It was “urban idea of a good idea, hatched in London and cultivated in the cities of Europe and the northern United States.” FDR, whose first-ever Fireside Chat is noted below (today is the anniversary), imposed it as a year-round measure and called it “war time,” befitting Americans’ closet-lust for all things martial (every American is a closet Spartan down to his sexual identity, but take him out of the closet at your own risk). There is, of course, no good sense in Daylight Saving Time anym ore. As Kauffman and Downing write: “Stripped of its bogus efficiency arguments, Daylight Saving Time amounts to an extra hour for shopping and golf. Middle-class consumers are pitted against farmers — and we know who has the numbers. By 2000, writes Mr. Downing, “the number of Americans living on farms was approximately equal to the number of Americans who were permanent residents of golf-course communities.””

The Insurgent Calendar