The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s

Summary

Anton Cebalo is a writer — you can follow his work at novum.Between 1921 and 1932, a strange man became a familiar face in Greenwich Village, New York City. Howard Scott lectured all who would listen on his vision for an anti-democratic state led by technicians and engineers. Businesspeople and politicians would be replaced, and a new society of abundance would be possible through science. He spread a gospel that preached “technology was the revolutionary agent of our period.”1 Scott believed liberal capitalism would eventually collapse and give way to a new system that he called “technocracy.”A mass gathering of Technocrats at the Hollywood Bowl, California (1930s)Scott would form a movement known as Technocracy Incorporated, which by 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, boasted hundreds of thousands of members. Its followers took an oddly fascist look. Dressed in gray and hailing with Roman salutes, they saw themselves as a revolutionary organization whose creed was efficiency. The movement wished to see the entire North American continent unified under a single, centralized state, which they called “The Technate.”2 It would be organized on a system of “energy accounting” to allocate resources, and each citizen would receive an “energy distribution card” for purchases.3 A new calendar was also proposed to allow for uninterrupted, 24-7 production. At the top would be an elite committee of technological experts, overseeing every facet of life.A group of technocrats with their signature gray cars and suitsTechnocracy found many admirers in its heyday, particularly among futuristic writers. Hugo Gernsback, who coined the term “science fiction,” published for the movement’s journal in 1933.4 Ray Bradbury similarly said that technocracy was “all the hopes and dreams of science fiction.”5 The public was introduced to this dream in Harold Loeb’s utopian novel Life in a Technocracy: What It Might Be Like (1933). Among scientists, prominent figures like Richard C. T...