When first-term Representative Leon Sacks of Pennsylvania introduced H.R. 6546 on April 21, 1937, the Earth did not stop spinning. Time did not stand still.But it almost did.
Sacks’ bill, “To provide for daylight saving in the District of Columbia,” would have advanced clocks in the nation’s capital by one hour beginning on April 24, 1937. On the final Sunday in October, six months later, clocks in the District would be “returned to the mean astronomical time.” This meant that for the summer months, Washington, DC, would experience an extra hour of daylight.
Sacks had no formal scientific training. The 34-year-old former football player had degrees in economics and law from the University of Pennsylvania and had won his seat in the House after challenging a ward boss in his native Philadelphia. He was a New Deal Democrat to his core, and according to the Washington Post, believed “in distribution of wealth through agencies such as the WPA. Is for labor 100 per cent.” Sacks wanted to see the country adopt a 30-hour work week and sought to make it easier for immigrants to become citizens.
But his other policy interests aside, Sacks’ daylight-saving bill caused a stir and breathed new life into a long-simmering debate in America about time, productivity, and the power of the federal government. Thousands of letters—both for and against Sacks’ proposal—buried the offices of the House Committee on the District of Columbia as it debated whether to consider the bill.
More broadly, debates over daylight saving time (DST) in the first half of the twentieth century reflected a growing divide between America’s rural farming communities, which opposed the idea, and the country’s urban centers, which supported it. That philosophical difference extended to Congress where Members representing rural constituencies and those representing industrialized districts often heatedly disagreed on whether the government should be responsible for adjusting America’s clocks.
A Novel Concept
Sacks’ bill was simply the latest proposal in a DST debate which began more than a century before 1937 and persisted for nearly three decades after. Americans had entertained the idea as far back as the eighteenth century, when former Continental Congress Delegate Benjamin Franklin calculated that the city of Paris could save millions of pounds of candlewax every year if residents woke up early in the morning and went to bed early at night.
But the idea of DST evolved in fits and starts and didn’t see much federal action in the United States until the early twentieth century. One of the first nationwide DST bills, introduced in 1909 by Andrew Peters of Massachusetts, would have shifted the clock an hour and twenty minutes forward in the spring before reverting it back to standard time in the winter.