When we set back our clocks this fall, some may have considered it an annoyance or a convenience or wondered how the custom got started, but it’s a safe bet few thought of daylight saving time as a political issue. Yet in 1919 its continuation–it had been instituted the previous year as a wartime measure–touched off an acrimonious congressional debate.
O’Malley’s treatment of the conflict over daylight saving time exemplifies his approach. It would have been easy to ridicule those who objected to the measure as ignorant obstructionists, and many did so at the time. But as O’Malley points out, the change did create real hardships for farmers, and probably for the less affluent members of the working class. City dwellers laughed at the farmer’s complaint that he couldn’t change the time when his cows gave milk. Why couldn’t he simply milk the cows at six o’clock daylight saving time instead of five o’clock standard time? Since the two clock times are the same sun time, this would preserve the cow’s sense of time. The problem is that the farmer may have set his milking time according to when the milk train leaves the local depot. If the train leaves at seven, then milking the cows at six doesn’t leave sufficient time to get to the depot. But if you try to milk the cows at five, daylight saving time, they won’t be ready to let down their milk, since then it’s only four standard time.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The Yale clock was a rather unusual instrument, constructed to reproduce solar time, in which noon is calculated to occur at the moment when the center of the sun is directly over the observer’s longitudinal meridian. But solar time is not constant; the length of the solar day (noon to noon) varies throughout the year, both because the earth moves with varying speeds in its orbit and because it tilts on its axis. It’s very easy, of course, to show solar time on a sundial (in fact it’s impossible not to show it), but it’s a complex procedure to make a mechanical clock reproduce these variations. So clocks have almost always been made to run at a constant rate that shows, as Terry’s clock did, the mean or average time–a time that coincides with the solar time only four days a year, otherwise running up to 16 minutes behind or 14 minutes ahead of sun time.
O’Malley claims that the idea of standardizing time “epitomized new ideas about time’s nature, ideas that in turn contributed to a major reorganization of work, leisure, and the individual’s relation to society.” The new consciousness of time manifested itself in a new emphasis on strict punctuality, with promptness becoming a paramount virtue not only at work but in private life and at public events. Between 1870 and the early decades of the 20th century, as Americans bought huge numbers of clocks and watches and tardiness became a sin (at least among the middle class), program clocks, which would synchronize all the clocks in a building and ring bells or trigger machines at certain intervals, came into widespread use in schools and factories, along with workplace time clocks. (IBM’s monopoly on these devices gave the company its start.)
O’Malley does recognize, at times, that the old rural order was not some leisurely utopia. “Farm and house work,” he points out, “spurred by Protestant theology and Biblical warnings against idle hands, demanded constant effort. Simply because no mechanical clocks oversaw their activities does not mean that Americans ignored time’s passage; in fact, time often presented itself in terms of a sacred duty.” Likewise he notes that “standardized time marked no advance or decline in the extent of freedom or individuality.” Rather than an imposition of authority, “it represented a reconstruction of governing authority.” Those are true and important points–but much of the time O’Malley seems to forget them in his eagerness to endorse protests against the domination of life by corporations and commercialism.
