Life as it might be lived under technocracy
I looked at him, peeled off my sweater and showed him all the decorations and medals pinned on my chest
“We are not attempting to say, as some of our critics have said, that there is going to be chaos or there is going to be doom,” Howard Scott told an audience of 400 assembled at The Pierre. The assembled crowd Fifth Avenue hotel was a mere fraction of those listening, as the address was being broadcast to radio stations, nationwide.
Ignoring his own preamble, Scott launched into his own predictions of chaos and doom, a peculiar about-face that left the audience of tycoons baffled. The speech was met with “moderate applause.” But the long term reaction was far worse. Scott blamed his performance on a bout of the flu – others suggested that the movement’s leader had gone off-script and opted to wing it, in spite of little to no public speaking experience.
It was a dark and foreboding speech, given at both the depth of the Great Depression and the height of the Technocracy movement. It spelled the beginning of the end for the latter. Scott’s speech was, at best, confusing and, at worst, inept – not the manner of rallying cry from a leader required to take a movement to the next level. Instead, it splintered into dueling groups: the Continental Committee on Technocracy and Scott’s Technocracy Inc.
At its height, the appeal of a technological utopia was clear as the United States reeled from the worst economic disaster in its history. It would be a society that elbowed out politicians, in favor of engineers and scientists.
The financial system, too, would be replaced by a "production for use” model that assigned value to goods based on the energy resources required to produce them. But the movement also de-prioritized the democratic solutions Americans held dear, in favor of a model that required the country to rip things up and start again.
The model was sometimes quite literal in that respect. “If every structure on Manhattan Island were destroyed and the entire community rebuilt with the latest inventions,” according to the organization’s Energy Survey of North America, “the reconstruction would pay for itself in 20 years.”
But the movement’s promises were too grand to ignore, including the undeniable appeal of a universal retirement age of 45. At its height, Technocracy captured the North American imagination, proving a popular movement in the United States and Canada, alike. It boasted half a million devotees in California alone at its apex – quite an accomplishment for such an amorphous organization with stated by-laws like,
· The organization is not religious and not opposed to religion
· The organization is non political and active members of political parties are not allowed to belong to Technocracy
Its members drove gray cars and wore matching double-breasted suits. Refusing to acknowledge government-designated borders, states were referred to by geographical coordinates. Human names, too, sometimes fell by the wayside, in favor of more convenient numeric designations like 1x1809x56.
And Scott was the mysterious figure at its center – largely by design. In spite of his own suggestions to the contrary, he apparently received no formal education. Of his varsity athletics days, he recounted the following tale,
At Notre Dame the coach had a grudge against me, and kept me on the bench. Well, at the most important game of the year, during the last quarter, with exactly one minute to play, we were losing. The coach was tearing his hair. He finally turned to me and said, 'Go on, get in there.' I rushed into the game, carried the ball for ten rushes 80 yards down the field and made the touchdown that won the game. With the stands in an uproar, the coach rushed over to me and said 'My God, who . . . where . . . who are you, where did you learn to play such football?' I looked at him, peeled off my sweater and showed him all the decorations and medals pinned on my chest that I had won playing football in England, Turkey, Germany....
A self-styled “Bohemian engineer,” according to a later assessment, the closest Scott seemingly came to a degree in the sciences was managing the Duron Chemical Company, a paint and floor polish seller based in New Jersey. A job pouring concrete in Alabama made him a “chief technician,” by his own account. In spite of it all, the Greenwich Village-based mystery man ingratiated himself into the New York City’s scientific community, forming the nucleus of his Technocratic movement around Columbia University.
“He has thoroughly obfuscated his history prior to 1918,” Time wrote in late-1932. “At that time, according to testimony put in the Congressional Record, he was working in a cement pouring gang at Muscle Shoals. His superintendent accused him of wartime sabotage He continued to drift around the construction camps, persuaded the chief engineer of Air Nitrates Corp., a subsidiary of the American Cyanamid Corp. that he could build an efficient electric carbide furnace.”
A month after that thorough indictment of his self-professed bonafides, an article by The New York Times helped propel Scott and his movement.
“Life as it might be lived under technocracy, with most of New York's skyscrapers emptied by elimination of the need for the functions now performed in them,” the article opened, “with no servant labor available, but with every one involved in the industrial machine receiving an 'energy income' equivalent to $20,000 a year.”
A year later, the speech at The Pierre marked the beginning of the organization’s fall from grace.
Scott would continue to extoll the virtues of the movement until his death in 1970. Five decades later, the organization continues to exist – albeit in dramatically scaled down from the height of its powers.
“In 1933, after it was obvious that technology was going to replace manual labor in many areas Technocracy was formed to provide information on how to create a plan, a blueprint of sorts to have an economy based on the best utilization of the technology available to make decisions for the good of society and the environment,” the organization’s website notes. “We have that plan and it is viable.”
Sources:
Science: Technocrat http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,744852-1,00.html
Techies Have Been Trying to Replace Politicians for Decades https://www.wired.com/2015/06/technocracy-inc/
Historical Background And Development Of Social Security https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html
The History of Technocracy https://www.technocracyinc.org/history/
Finds No Servants in Technocracy https://www.nytimes.com/1933/01/11/archives/finds-no-servants-in-a-technocracy-writer-picturing-life-under.html