Before it was the Eastman Plan, it was the International
Fixed Calendar. And if it was not precisely Auguste Comte’s 1849 Positivist
calendar, it derived from the same basic mathematical insight, the same fourth
grade calculation: 365 days divides beautifully into 7 day weeks—plus a
remainder of one little day. In fact, the division is so tidy that if you group
four weeks together as a month, you can fit exactly 13 months into that one
year. You still have that single remainder day hanging around, of course—that
one weekless, monthless day sequestered at the end of the year—but, heck, why
not give it a pardon and make it a holiday and call the whole thing done?
Moses B. Cotsworth presented just such a scheme in 1923 to
no less than the League of Nations’ Special Committee on calendar reform. It
was then sometimes known as the Cotsworth Plan, this system with every month
starting on Sunday the first, every month arranged like the one before, your
birthday always on Thursday if you were born on one. Think of it: that Twilight calendar you just got would be
endlessly accurate, its days arranged the same every year, and replaced only
because the images began to fade.
The benefits seemed obvious: there would be cost savings,
ease of scheduling, clarity and efficiency all around!
Perhaps it was the businessman in George Eastman that admired the 13-month
calendar. Perhaps this inventor of roll film held a special affinity for the
calendar’s smooth and regular progression of time. In any case, Eastman was so
taken by the notion that he didn’t just join Cotsworth’s International Fixed
Calendar League, in 1926 he ceded control of daily operations at the Eastman
Kodak Company so that he might devote more time to the issue. The whole idea
was known as the Eastman Plan in many quarters, so constant and compelling was
its new champion.
Two years later George Eastman did an obvious thing: he
stopped doing business by the capricious old Gregorian calendar and put the
whole of Eastman Kodak on the 13-month calendar. Others seemed ready to follow
suit. As of 1929 the League of Nations had scrapped 154 other calendar
proposals, leaving Eastman’s pet project one of two finalists in contention for
international adoption. The International Fixed Calendar was for a time poised
to be the new calendar of a modern new world.
Then, in 1932, Eastman declared in a suicide note addressed
to his friends, “My work is done. Why wait?” and killed himself. The International Fixed Calendar League
folded within five years. Three years later the League of Nations had forgotten
the 13-month calendar, and by time the United Nations was the governing body
convened to vote on international calendar reform, the Eastman Plan wasn’t
worth mentioning.
If anyone still complained that under the 13-month calendar
financial quarters don’t end when months do, if anyone minded that Friday the
thirteenth came every month, or thought anything had to be a better name for
the new 13th month than “Sol”; if anyone cared about one day a year
unaccounted for in God’s 7-day cycles of toil and Sabbath, it didn’t much
matter anymore. The debate was over. Except for the employees of the Eastman
Kodak Company, who may have watched their families grow up by the irregular
jostle and sway of old Gregorian months but still clocked in every day to a
calendar perfect in its repetition, elegant in its predictability, and divine
in its perpetuity. Thousands and thousands of people did this, waking up under
one calendar and going to work by another, for six decades, until the Eastman
Plan was finally forsaken in 1989.
And who now is left even to say that this year, this 2012,
with its January 1st square on a Sunday, is exactly the kind of year
Eastman was waiting for, a year to begin a new reckoning?
Kendra Greene is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.
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