Religious objections to standard time masked anti-railroad populist protest
Evidence
For thirteen years the Dowd system was debated but never officially adopted by the General Time Convention. The railroads tried during that period to get Congress to adopt it as a uniform time system, but Congress would not and for an obvious reason: standard time offended people with deeply held religious sentiments. It violated the actual physical working of the natural order and denied the presence of a divinely ordained nature. But even here religious language was a vanishing mediator for political sentiments; standard time was widely known as Vanderbilt’s time, and protest against it was part of the populist protest against the banks, the telegraph, and the railroad. — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 851
Categorization
- DEFINE: “Vanishing mediator” — religious language channeling underlying political sentiments — is a reusable analytic concept.
- SEED: The vanishing-mediator idea could become an essay on how religious rhetoric encodes economic grievances in other debates.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — James W. Carey, Communication as Culture- Essays on…, 851
- XREF: connects to: Crisis-time scapegoating of religious out-groups masks political and economic causes