Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness by Alan Derickson (review)

In Dangerously Sleepy, Derickson provides a guide to decades of insufficient sleep among American men across three industries—steel, railroads, and long-haul trucking. Although certain notable elite males—including Thomas Edison and Charles Lindbergh—highlighted in the first chapter were promoters of their own superiority as short sleepers, working-class men have at best been kidnapped into this “cult of manly wakefulness.” In comprehensive and exhaustively referenced chapters drawing from a broad range of sources—conference and convention minutes, hearing transcripts, judicial opinions, government reports, union records, books and memoirs, and even a vintage movie—Derickson repeatedly demonstrates that when no risks to the public health could be claimed, concern for the health and safety of individual workers was dismissed.

Steel workers and Pullman porters were completely at the mercy of the work hours and sleep conditions that management mandated for them, and independent truckers were pushed by economic realities to stretch well beyond safe driving limits, often working interminably long hours to pay for their own rigs. Providing decades of historical context, Derickson reveals stunning daily and weekly work-hour requirements, forced overtime, rotation transitions with double shifts, and inadequate rest periods too often interrupted. Not only was the time allotted for sleep dramatically insufficient and frequently ill-timed for these workers, resulting in shift-work sleep disorders, but sleep environments, when available, were appalling. The Pullman porters, nearly all of them black, slept in “hot beds”—beds shared by more than one person on a rotating basis according to their work shifts. Long-haul truckers regularly resorted to strong stimulants called “road aspirin” to stay awake, usually sleeping in their truck cabins as time permitted.

Derickson’s most salient message is that even though the nowconfirmed health and safety risks of limited sleep were suspected for a long time, the government long failed to impose work-hour restrictions on employers. Although regulations covering duty hours in some industries—trucking, for one—eventually improved, Americans in general have not made progress in protecting sleep. Notwithstanding the contract concessions that unions have managed to win, survey data from The National Sleep Foundation indicates that by the turn of the millennium, Americans were sleeping a mean of seven hours, 1.5 hours less than they did in 1960.¹

Given his stated emphasis on manly wakefulness, Derickson does not aim to describe the work lives of women during these same decades—for example, as garment makers or factory workers during World War II. He does say, however, that women were excluded from certain industries based on the idea that their stamina had to be preserved for reproduction, which was perceived as their primary social occupation. He also remarks that companionship and shared parenting were hardly possible when husbands and fathers were continually absent or exhausted.

In his concluding chapter, Derickson describes the modern “flexibility” regime, the ambiguity of which is emblematic of the blurred line between hours spent working and hours spent not working. Today’s well-paid knowledge workers often suffer from a lack of sleep despite resulting decrements in creativity and productivity, amid such other negative impacts as obesity, hypertension, and cardiovascular disorders. Thankfully, napping, an option mentioned with regard to the American military, has become increasingly welcomed in forward-looking work environments. The time has come for “sleeping on the job” to be viewed as a salutary activity rather than as a trigger for disciplinary action.

Derickson does a laudable service in writing this history of sleep deprivation among male workers in the steel, railroad, and trucking industries. Future work in this arena would do well to apply these rigorous methods to other industries, including health care. Historical context for the sleep heroics required of physicians in training and nurses, the majority of whom work shifts of twelve hours or more, is desperately needed. In his venture into the domain of sleep medicine, Derickson could have been more accurate regarding...