The Time of Our Lives : KEEPING WATCH; A History of American Time <i> By Michael O’Malley (Viking Penguin: $19.95; 384 pp., illustrated; 0-670-82934-X) </i>

Ever since the 17th-Century Puritan fathers gave us the Protestant Work Ethic, Americans have been following the Gospel of Hard Work using the time given to us by God and Nature. Today we have time-saving gadgets, but these merely free us to perform further chores or take on additional tasks. They do not create leisure or recreational opportunities. Pressured and always in a hurry, if we do not manage our time, it manages us.

But just what is time, anyway? Is it some type of natural phenomenon based on traditions of agriculture and religion, or just an abstraction useful for social organization? First-time author Michael O’Malley endeavors to give us the answer in “Keeping Watch: A History of American Time.”

Until the 1840s, the New England village clock summoned Sunday worshipers, recollecting “the orderly, Godly life of the rural past.” The piety of the grandfather clock and Father Time connoted traditional paternal authority even in schoolchildren’s primers, while trusty almanacs and sage homilies like Franklin’s “Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” exhorted individuals to follow the sun.

Yet, by mid-century, mill owners had regulated labor time with factory clocks, astronomically and scientifically gauged. Telegraph, railroad, stagecoach and steamboat fostered interstate and interregional commerce, necessitating a uniform time standard. “These innovations,” claims O’Malley, “established new authorities for time and new models for self-government and social regulation.”

When the first nationally synchronized event, the driving in of the golden spike of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory, Utah, in 1869, proved a failure (in terms of coast-to-coast telegraphic coverage), the impetus for unified standard time was created. In 1883, William F. Allen, through a consortium of major United States railroad companies, imposed the four standard time zones familiar today. This was done, explains O’Malley, to minimize inconvenience to the railroads and to preclude Congressional or state-legislature interference with the railroads’ monopoly on time, telegraphically received from national and university observatories.

Not all localities wanted to set their clocks ahead or behind their local sun time simply for the convenience of the railroads. O’Malley cites the Indianapolis Sentinel, which “asked puckishly if on November 18 (1883, the date of the change to nationwide standard time) a man slipping on a banana peel would have sixteen minutes more time to fall before hitting the ground, and if in that time he might secure a mattress to cushion the impact.”

According to the author, “Two themes predominated as standardized clock time spread: on the one hand, outright resistance to clock time, or the desire to control it, and on the other, a peculiar concern with internalizing clock authority and finding one’s niche in the new framework of standardized time.”

Time clocks, timing-in systems, and punch-clocks forged new links between employer and employee. They gave rise to the International Time Recording Co. (later IBM) and time and efficiency experts, the best-known of whom was Frederick W. Taylor, whose stopwatch nervous employees likened to a whip over them. Incidentally, owning a fine watch or reliable clock was a way of gaining control over, rather than being controlled by, a master clock at school, office or factory.

In his most ambitious but also most abstruse chapter, O’Malley relates the history of film in the United States from the first efforts of Edison, Meleis and others to D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” a racist but technically creative multi-reel story that made the movie over from immigrant entertainment to middle-class art form. Says the author of “Keeping Watch”: “Movies represented a new way of thinking about narrative in time. In this, they seem to have echoed the central agenda of the Progressive era--the desire to create consensus, a unified public opinion and culture, from the diversity of American society.”

Having set out the above thesis, O’Malley adds his own caveat: “This last point may seem far-fetched. It would certainly be wrong to say that movies created Progressive politics, or that progressivism invented movie narrative.”

After a look at movies and World War I, we return to clocks. By the 1920s, American society was so clock-time oriented that the creation of new leisure time by way of daylight savings brought into play all the “conflicts of the period--tradition versus modernity, fundamentalism versus science, farming versus industry, the austerity of the Protestant Ethic versus leisure and consumerism--debates which had at their center conflicting beliefs about nature’s time and its use.” O’Malley characterizes this as a “contest between the golf stick and the hoe,” i.e., city versus farm.

The climax of this contest and of the century-long process of time standardization comes in the form of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in rural Dayton, Tenn.

This is more than the contest between trial lawyer Clarence Darrow and the Bible Belt’s champion William Jennings Bryan. Fundamentalists, suggests the author, were responding to “scientific management, factory labor and the decline of American farm culture.”

Evolution’s critics feared a society “governed by mechanical principles, by unmoral machines and heartless standards of efficiency.” From the 1930s, however, time was what the clock said it was, disassociated from Nature, God or the Bible and not dependent upon what man thought time should be.

O’Malley has given us an engaging and witty book that is a thorough piece of scholarship, amply documented, meticulously assembled and thought-provoking.

He convincingly demonstrates that time is a malleable measurement and ultimately a social creation.