At some point in elementary school, many American children learn that Daylight Saving Time was originally intended to give farmers an extra hour of light to work the fields. But that’s not true.
The practice of changing clocks an hour forward in the spring and then back in the fall remains controversial to this day. The Senate in 2022 passed legislation to make Daylight Saving Time permanent and end the twice-annual clock-switching. But the House never took up the measure. Another push last to enact that bill, the Sunshine Protection Act, went nowhere.
Despite popular perception, farmers actually hated Daylight Saving Time when it first came into practice. That was because it cut an hour of daylight in the morning, leaving them with an hour less to get goods to market, according to Michael Downing, author of the book Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. In reality, the extra hour of evening daylight was good for one thing: selling products.
“[W]hen we have an hour of sunlight after work, Americans tend to go shopping,” Downing told NPR in 2007. “The first and most persistent lobby for daylight saving in this country was the Chamber of Commerce, because they understood that if their department stores were lit up, people would be tempted by them.”
Specifically, we have the candy lobby, the barbecue lobby, and the golf ball lobby to thank for modern American Daylight Saving Time. But we’ll get to that in a second.
The U.S. first enacted Daylight Saving Time during World War I, ostensibly to conserve energy by cutting down on the time people would light their homes. (Germany started the trend in 1916, with the U.S. and U.K. following suit). But before World War I had even ended, Congress repealed the practice, Downing said, “to quell the revolt from the farm lobby.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt enacted Daylight Saving Time again during World War II, but the farm lobby staved off any peacetime Daylight Saving until 1966. That’s when Congress passed the Uniform Time Act to solve the problem of a chaotic patchwork in which some regions continued to observe Daylight Saving Time after the wars, while others did not. Hawaii and Arizona continued to opt out, which they still do.
Daylight Saving Time is about business — barbecues, baseball, and golf
In the meantime, businesses jumped at the chance to sell more products.
Back when Daylight Saving Time was first enacted, Downing wrote, “golf ball sales skyrocketed.” And before floodlit playing fields, organized baseball was “a huge early supporter” of Daylight Saving Time.
Downing also says the energy lobby was a keen supporter of Daylight Saving Time, because it has known since 1930 that daylight saving makes people drive their cars more in the evening — so they use more gasoline.
In 1986, under president Ronald Reagan, the U.S. lengthened Daylight Saving Time from six months to seven. At Congressional hearings the year before, Downing says, the golf industry told lawmakers that the one additional month of daylight saving was “worth $200 million in additional sales of golf clubs and greens fees.”
“The barbecue industry said it was worth $100 million in additional sales of grills and charcoal briquettes,” Downing says.
Daylight Saving Time is good for Big Candy, too
Even though the 1986 switch lengthened Daylight Saving Time, it still didn’t encompass a very important date for another big industry: the candy lobby. Candy companies were convinced an extra hour of evening light on Halloween would give kids more time to collect more candy — and in turn get adults to buy more of it in anticipation. Candy lobbyists were so eager to get Halloween covered by Daylight Saving Time that they “put candy pumpkins on the seat of every senator, hoping to win a little favor” during the 1985 hearings as Big Golf and Big Barbecue made their case, according to Downing.
They didn’t win it that time. But in 2005, President George W. Bush signed a bill extending Daylight Saving Time to eight months in total, which is how Americans experience it now. Halloween, at last, was covered.
A version of this article originally appeared on Quartz in 2017.