Daylight savings time was controversial years ago
Political issues come, political issues go. What’s controversial one moment can, in a flash, become the most banal thing imaginable.
Take daylight savings time. Yep, daylight savings time!
Once upon a time DST shared the political spotlight with world peace — debated, dissected, and discussed in the halls of Congress and by local elected officials. Uniontown City Council was one of the venues where the DST controversy swirled.
To explain:
The awful blood-letting of World War I came to a halt in November 1918. While the war raged, the federal government, under the guidance of Woodrow Wilson, imposed a series of measures to stretch out the nation’s resources for the fight against Germany.
One such measure was daylight savings time, intended to reduce energy consumption. DST literally saved millions of tons of coal. Instead of coal to light homes and retail businesses through spring and summer nights, more of the metal, so abundant in western Pennsylvania, was put aside to power industry.
As the war ended, there arose a demand that the country return to pre-war days. This meant, most prominently, the return of our boys from the battlefields of Europe and the end of price-controls and rationing, both for food and fuel.
The silencing of the guns also marked a pronounced uptick in political sniping: this was a highly partisan period; the fight over the Wilson peace plan — the League of Nations — was one of the most searing debates in all of American history.
So it probably wasn’t much of a surprise that when the administration expressed itself in favor of continuing DST in the balmy days of peace, adherents and opponents of the idea should retreat into partisan rabbit holes.
Thus, the local Republican congressman, Samuel Kendall, voted with his House GOP colleagues to override President Wilson’s veto of a bill containing a DST provision.
Democrats cried foul. The party’s local organ, the Uniontown Daily News Standard, declared that “the real reason” for Kendall’s vote “was a blind, insensate desire on the part of Republicans in Congress to (undo) all the good things done by the previous Democratic Congress” and President Wilson.
In an echo of today, the paper said, “It will … be a matter of lasting regret that the nation has on its hands in this critical hour a Congress which absolutely refuses to function with President Wilson.”
This was in July 1919. In the spring of 1922, the issue surfaced again, this time in Uniontown City Council.
At this point, two additional factors came into play.
The first of these sounds truly bizarre: the notion that communities might, on their own initiative, set clocks an hour behind/ahead of clocks in neighboring communities.
Second, the old divide between urban and rural America was still very much alive. Farm and city or town folks were divided on a host of issues.
By 1922, cities like New York and Pittsburgh had adopted DST. There was a health factor: summer sunshine, it was argued, was the perfect antidote to the many infectious (and fatal) diseases of the day.
In addition — and we can appreciate this — longer hours of daylight afforded greater recreational opportunities; more baseball and golf.
Farmers, on the other hand, hated the prospect of rising well before the sun was up to begin feeding and herding their cows and other animals.
The question for city council was: would it side with Pittsburgh, with its control of commerce and train schedules, or with the many farmers just outside the city limits?
The five-member all Republican Uniontown City Council voted 3-2 to “request” city residents adopt DST hours.
Council erupted “in a riot of argument” over the matter. Mayor William Smart, a DST opponent, said he would refuse to issue a proclamation in support of the council resolution.
Councilman Frank Hess said city merchants would lose customers who were farmers to retailers in other communities, if the DST measure was adopted. Mothers hated the idea, for it meant putting their toddlers to bed while the sun still shined.
Councilman James Gainer said perhaps farmers disliked daylight savings time, but he represented the interests of city residents, and city residents were heartily in favor. Besides, Mrs. Gainer loved the idea.
All of this is very quaint, of course. But no snickering, please. Which of our many political controversies will have Americans in 90 or so years scratching their heads and wondering, what were those people in 2016 thinking?
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown and is the author of two books — “Grand Salute: Stories of the World War II Generation” and “Our People.” He can be reached at grandsalutebook@gmail.com.