Man, Beast & the Clock

Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed.

. . .--Joshua, X, 12-13.

To the long line of men who have tried, like Joshua, to stop the sun while work was toward, last week was added Franklin Roosevelt.* The President asked Congress to pass a bill authorizing him to establish year-round, nationwide Daylight Saving Time.

The President called for daylight saving as a national defense measure. A mighty man is Franklin Roosevelt, with many powers unknown to Joshua, but last week he bumped spang up against something Joshua didn't have to contend with: the psyche of the U.S. cow.

Among objections to his proposal that were voiced last week was the assertion that the cow is no dull creature of sodden disposition, but a delicately organized mass of nerves, easily wrought up to the point of not giving down; a sudden upset, such as an hour's change in the milking time, might make a cow tense, thereby impairing the flow of milk necessary for national defense. Cows do indeed take a few days to get used to such a change, but their discomfort is nowhere nearly so great or so enduring as that of farmers. In wintertime dairy farmers already rise while it is dark, and under daylight saving they will have to rise and begin their work still earlier, in the coldest part of the night.

Moreover the months when they have to rise in darkness will be greatly extended.

In summertime this discomfort is not present, but setting the clock ahead has no effect on drying the dew off the grass, and dew immemorially has dried off about 9 a.m. Not until 10 a.m. daylight time, therefore, can much field work begin, so that whether or not they have to rise earlier to tend dairy cattle, their quitting time will be an hour later by the clock.

The President was expected to win in Congress although he claimed that Daylight Saving Time would save only 736,282,000 kilowatt-hours of power for defense. This amount of power totals exactly five-tenths of 1% of U.S. power production, is only about enough to run the 2,500,000 new electric refrigerators sold to citizens in the first six months of 1941.

* William Willett, the sun-struck Briton who fathered daylight saving, died in 1915 as warring European nations adopted "summer time." Willett argued for an 80-minute setback. U.S. Daylight Saving Father is Robert Garland, 78, of Pittsburgh, who last week opposed the President's plan for year-round daylight saving, said it would work hardship in winter.

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