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quarters, and the number of weeks in a month were all considered desirable for the purposes of simplifying calculations and business statistics. To read the calendar reform literature of the period is to learn that inequalities in the Gregorian calendar are the cause of illness and death, encourage stock exchange gambling, and are in general an unmitigated curse upon the human species. |
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Under the prodding of large commercial interests, the League of Nations approached member governments in 1927, and a first International Conference on Calendar Reform was convened in Geneva in October 1931, with 44 nations represented. About 200 plans were considered and most were rejected for various reasons. By that time, the field had narrowed to two contenders the International Fixed Calendar (IFC) and the World Calendar (WC). |
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A 13-month calendar, the IFC was largely elaborated by Moses B. Cotsworth. It was sponsored by several different organizations over the years, including the Fixed Calendar League and the International Almanak Reform League. American camera magnate George Eastman supported the IFC vigorously and was chairman of the National Committee on Calendar Simplification in the United States. Dr. Charles F. Marvin, head of the U.S. Weather Bureau, was an active supporter, as were many other business and intellectual leaders of the day. Cotsworth's work extended over several decades, starting about 1895. As a consequence of Eastman's support and the amount of work done by Cotsworth and other supporters, the IFC came to be perceived as the reform calendar by many, although there were many who felt that it was too radical. Thus, the calendar reform issue split into three basic camps supporters of the IFC, supporters of the general idea of reform who opposed the IFC, and those who opposed calendar reform in general. This situation, of course, made an alternative proposal inevitable. In 1930, as a kind of conservative reaction to the IFC, the World Calendar Association (WCA) was hastily assembled, and the World Calendar was proposed to head off a default IFC victory at the 1931 conference. The WC was a more conservative plan, which retained a 12-month calendar but resembled the IFC in many ways. After the introduction of the WC, it became apparent that a good deal of the support for the IFC was, in fact, support for the general idea of calendar reform, and much of the general opposition to calendar reform was specific opposition to the idea of a 13-month calendar. Support for the IFC eroded. The 1931 conference concluded with three major results: |
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The bulk of the reform plans were rejected, with focus placed on the IFC and WC. |
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There was a general agreement to stabilize the date of Easter. |
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There was a general agreement that the reform idea needed more thought. This delay at the 1931 conference probably saved the world from suffering the consequences of one of these two calendars. The WCA seems to have slowly gained the upper hand during the 1930s and hoped to have a definitive resolution at the League of Nations meeting in September 1939. The year itself was important to calendar reformers, because 1939 is a "type 1" year, in which 1 January falls on a |
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