Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness by Alan Derickson, and: Meet Joe Copper: Masculinity and Race on Montana’s World War II Home Front by Matthew L. Basso (review)

Having grown up in Silicon Valley during the 1970s, I remember that many houses in our neighborhood had one window covered in aluminum foil. This blocked the sunlight so that people like my father, an aircraft engine mechanic, could sleep through the day after working the graveyard shift. As my dad drove home from San Francisco International Airport along the Bayshore Freeway, he had only the “Botts’ dots” raised pavement markers to jolt him back to alertness when he would doze off and drift into the next lane of traffic. My stepmom, who worked on the line in the semiconductor industry, worked days but often could not get home until late, so it was my job after school to get dinner prepped; it is how I first learned to cook. Everyone in the house had to adjust to my father’s shift work, especially by keeping quiet—not easy for four kids. There were rewards: a leftover Twinkie or pudding cup pilfered from my father’s gray lunchbox, with its jumble of spaghetti- sauce-stained Tupperware and its International Association of Machinists and Areospace Workers (IAMAW) decal.

My father’s close calls in commuting and the way shift work shaped our family life could be, were it not such recent history, a vignette in Dangerously Sleepy, Alan Derickson’s smoothly written study of overwork and sleeplessness among steelworkers, sleeping-car porters, and long-haul truck drivers from the Gilded Age to the mid-twentieth century. Steel-workers, exhausted by “the long turn”—a brutal twenty-four-hour double shift bridging the switch from days to nights in work weeks of eighty-four hours—rarely got sufficient sleep in homes “with crying babies, squabbling children, drunken roommates, and other sources of daytime commotion” (63). This forced men to work while tired or to sleep on the job, setting the stage for discipline, accidents, and sometimes deaths. At one point in Meet Joe Copper, Matthew L. Basso’s empirically deep study of Montana miners during World War II, he notes that the city of Butte applied for Lanham Act day-care subsidies, not to facilitate women’s entry into the workforce but, according to officials, because of the “over crowded conditions in homes, where fathers cannot have proper rest, thereby causing poor health conditions [and] unnecessary mine accidents” (150). This would be about the only place Derickson’s and Basso’s books explicitly overlap. Published within a year of each other, these two new studies of working-class masculinity could not be more different.

Derickson begins by tracing the elite origins of the cult of manly wakefulness, starting with Benjamin Franklin’s proverb, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” To my ear, Franklin’s early rising sounds more like an ode to industry and initiative than to manliness per se (Franklin also said “the early morning has gold in its mouth”). Nineteenth-century robber barons invoked manly wakefulness in their self-serving tales of toil and sleepless nights as the source of their success and wealth. Never mind that Andrew Carnegie’s tossing and turning transpired in a plush bed in his sixty-four-room mansion on Fifth Avenue while his steelworkers endured the “hotbed”—the sequential use of the same bed by different men according to their shifts—in overcrowded boardinghouses. How did the cult of manly wakefulness trickle down to workers? How did workers internalize the duty to rise early and stay awake long hours as part of their masculine self-conception? It is difficult to judge, for masculinity in Derickson’s study tends to be more...