Last week I promised readers that I would address daylight saving time, and I have never broken a promise to my readers, with the exception of the column about the leaf blower, which I am told has been delayed by a leaf blower.
On Sunday, Nov. 1, at 2 a.m., the nation will turn its clocks back one hour. Millions of Americans will treat this as a mere inconvenience. I regard it as a question of principle, and when I face a question of principle, I do what any serious person does. I ask what the Founders would have said.
Let us begin with the facts. The Founders did not have daylight saving time. Federal law first put the nation’s clocks forward in 1918, which is 142 years after the Founders and, in my experience, a long time for a tradition to be a tradition. The Founders therefore did not have a position on turning the clocks back, because they never turned them forward, because they didn’t have clocks in the sense we mean, because the sun was the clock. A man who consulted the sun in 1776 did not “fall back” at 2 a.m. He fell back at dusk, and he did so without a newsletter.
From this it follows that the Founders opposed daylight saving time. A tradition that does not exist cannot be altered. Any man who suggested altering the sun would have been, in the Founders’ phrase, “not from here.”
But the Founders were also frugal men. They believed in saving candles, in saving wax, in saving daylight, and in saving it for later, as a man saves a coin for the harder winter. A system that moves an hour of daylight from the morning, where nobody wants it, to the evening, where a man could use it, is exactly the sort of arrangement they would have put on a tavern wall and signed. The Founders, therefore, supported daylight saving time.
I considered this for most of a Saturday, and I regret to inform my readers that the two positions do not reconcile.
What the logic of the Founders asks of us, then, is the only thing it has ever asked: to live in both. On Sunday morning I set every clock in my house to two times. The kitchen clock now shows 2:00 and 1:00 at once, with a small second hand for each. The grandfather clock in the hall, which has never in its life been asked to take a side, now strikes two at the hour and one a moment later, like a man correcting himself.
I should say that there is one hour in the calendar that already lives in both. When the clocks go back on Nov. 1, the hour between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. occurs twice. It happens once, and then, by the order of Congress, it happens again. Nothing else in the American year does this. It is the one hour that is both the old time and the new, and therefore the only hour the Founders could have unanimously approved.
I have gone into the hour that happens twice, and I intend to stay there. I will be at the kitchen table at 1:00 a.m. on Sunday, in a good blouse, with a candle, and I will remain there through the repeat, and the repeat of the repeat, for as long as the hour lets me. My sister-in-law has been asked to meet me there at 1:00, and again at 1:00. She has asked which of the two she should bring the casserole to. I told her both.
Some will say that the hour is only an hour, that it ends, that at 2 a.m. the clocks go on as they always do. I say that in the tradition of the Founders, a man does not accept the end of an hour. He sits in it.
Next week: what the Founders would have said about a ballroom, and why they would have wanted it to be bigger than the house.