Year-round Daylight Saving Time is not some new idea. America already tried it in 1974. It was an unmitigated disaster.
It was sold as an energy-saving emergency measure during the oil crisis. Congress put the nation on permanent DST starting January 6, 1974. But within weeks, the dark winter mornings produced exactly the kind of problems critics warned about: children going to school and waiting for buses in predawn darkness. Congress reversed course that same year and restored standard time for the winter beginning October 27, 1974.
The contemporaneous coverage is striking.
On January 24, 1974, the Miami Herald ran: “3 Children Killed, Four Are Injured on Dark Mornings.”
On January 29, 1974, the Sentinel Star in Florida said the legislature was meeting in special session because of “seven children killed while walking to school in pre-dawn darkness.”
The Congressional Record was already referring to children waiting at bus stops in the cold dark, and even citing headlines about children killed in the early morning while waiting for the bus.
By February 14, 1974, one paper was calling it “Daylight Disaster Time.”
Public opinion collapsed. What began with broad support quickly turned into a backlash once people actually experienced winter mornings under permanent DST. One later account, citing contemporaneous reporting, notes support fell from 79% to 42% in roughly three months.
This is the lesson from 1974:
People like brighter evenings in theory.
They like dark winter mornings a lot less in real life.
And when children have to walk to school in darkness, the politics change very fast.