Alan Derickson - Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness

Sleep is an absurdity, a bad habit. We can't suddenly throw off the thraldom of the habit, but we shall throw it off.

Thomas Edison, 1914

Sleep is for sissies!

Shelley Ross, ca. 2005

Denigration of the critical need for rest has deep roots in American culture. For more than two centuries, a chorus of influential voices, virtually all male, has proclaimed sleep a vice and sleep deprivation a virtue. This attitude has remained both prevalent and relatively constant up to the very recent past. To be sure, some in elite circles have contested this dismissive stance and defended moderation. But on balance, potent promoters of sleep deprivation have done more to shape values and assumptions. The resulting habitus has governed thinking on sleeping time for the American workforce in the modern age.

Americans have long striven to emulate those who have won (or at least appear to be winning) the race of life. Even in the preindustrial era, important figures in the business community decried the amount of time squandered at rest. With the onset of industrialization, time discipline tightened, and allocating scarce time to dozing came under tougher criticism. As Max Weber observed, by the early twentieth century the business corporation had displaced the military as the preeminent institution instilling discipline in modern society. Accordingly, throughout the past century, corporate leaders occupied a highly privileged position in setting norms for rest, mainly through self-reports on their own behavior. Luminaries in other major realms of endeavor joined captains of industry in casting aspersions on those who lay unconscious when they could be up and doing. The pronouncements and practices of the successful received extensive and usually adoring attention from the mass media. A recurrent theme in this discourse of heroic wakefulness has been the unmanly weakness associated with indulging in a reasonable amount of sleep.

During the preindustrial and industrializing eras, moral opposition to any idleness informed a Protestant work ethic that celebrated perseverance at one's vocational calling and implicitly denigrated sleep as a form of idleness. As anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer has observed, influential Puritan cleric Cotton Mather equate[d] sleep with the avoidance of divine service and a lack of consciousness of one's earthly obligations. Protestant values and the ready availability of opportunities for white men drove the strenuous pursuit of social and economic advancement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many advanced, and some of the biggest winners and those who closely studied their habits were happy to share the secrets of success. In explaining the rags-to-riches formula, business leaders and their admirers repeatedly commended sleep deprivation as a significant asset in personal strategies of upward mobility. These narratives spoke of male experience to a male audience, capitalizing on opportunities to portray sleep as an effeminate indulgence.

Probably the most famous American of the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin, was a wealthy publisher and popular author before he became an inventor and Founding Father. His Poor Richard's Almanack was a huge best seller in annual editions from the 1730s through the 1750s, outselling the Bible and eventually appearing in over a hundred reprint editions in seven languages. The almanac's maxims constituted a compendium of instructions on the way to get ahead, predicated on the fundamental assumption that qualities of personal characterintegrity, diligence, thrift, industry, and the likewere the main determinants of upward mobility. Franklin's wide-ranging advice on self-discipline naturally extended to rest and wakefulness. The most famous piece of advice, of course, was this 1735 contribution: Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Reinforcement of the first part of that recommendation came seven years later: He that riseth late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night. In his own life, Franklin from early young adulthood embraced not extreme sleeplessness but rather moderation. In the 1730s he followed a schedule that called for sleeping from ten P.M. to five A.M. as part of a comprehensive plan for every hour of the day. This plan and its rationale were set forth in an autobiography that went through fifty-five editions between 1794 and 1833 and reached a wide audience of young working-class men, among others. While residing in France in the 1780s, the whimsical old statesman amused himself and readers of the