THE
ENGINEERED SOCIETY
Reform party movements can be pretty weird in the best of times;
imagine what they might have been like in the worst.
This
winter the ongoing battle for control of the Reform party began
to strain credulity, not to mention the adage that politics makes
strange bedfellows. In one corner was Donald Trump, who was supported
by a former professional wrestler turned governor and was trying
to become the first man to be elected President despite his reaching
for a Sani-Wipe after every handshake. His main opposition was
the onetime conservative speechwriter and commentator Pat Buchanan,
backed by a pair of leftist cult leaders from New York City.
The
technocracy movement had peaked but was by no means moribund when
the photographer Dorothea Lange spotted this sign offering its
wan blandishments beside an Oregon highway in 1939.
Neither
Buchanan nor Trump, of course, had a very good chance of becoming
our next President. But the fact that millions of Americans were
willing to consider voting for them underscored an unusual dissatisfaction
with mainstream politics in a time of general peace and prosperity.
Reform party voters seem to reflect a wide disgust with the whole
conduct of our politics and an unease over such specific issues
as our rush into the brave new global economy.
It
has been a long time since a major candidate in any party has
run a campaign challenging the nations underlying political consensus.
Probably the last one could really be said to be Barry Goldwater,
back in 1964, with the race that ended up launching the modern
conservative movement.
Yet
we have never seen so many challenges to our basic institutions
as we did during the Great Depression, our most sustained national
crisis. The 1930s witnessed no less than the advent of two New
Deals, one Liberty League, and innumerable socialists, communists,
agrarians, and home-grown Nazis.
Some
of their programs helped bring about valuable reforms. Others
were pure flimflam. None, however, produced such a great tumult
in such a short timeor appears quite so weird today as the technocracy
movement.
The
technocrats were as much a faith and a grudge as they ever were
a real political party. They worshiped “the myth of the engineer”
the new class of practical technicians and masters of the machines
and they believed that ever-more prodigious levels of productivity
could be attained if only business were reorganized “rationally”
and objectively by the engineers.
The
technocrats prophet was one Howard Scott, who might have been
created out of whole cloth by Ayn Rand. A large, rangy individual,
he liked, according to his biographer, William E. Akin, to affect
a “broad brimmed hat a big leather coat suitable to outdoor
engineering, soft shirts with crumpled collars, a red necktie,
and a red handkerchief.” But for all his bravado, Scott had
decidedly shaky credentials as an engineer.
As
documented by Akin in Technocracy and the American Dream, Scott
seems to have had little formal education, and his most notable
work as an engineer was at a Muscle Shoals nitrates project during
World War I. A postwar government investigation charged him with
“gross waste, inefficiency, and shoddy workmanship.”
This
experience notwithstanding, by the end of the war Scott had become
convinced that engineers should run the world. Many of his colleagues
seem to have felt the same way, but in the prosperous twenties
a fledgling organizing effort fizzled out. Scott moved to Greenwich
Village, where he lived in a studio apartment dominated by what
one visitor called “an appalling phallic water color”
and happily tinkered away at his theories. By 1932, with the United
States laboring through its third year of a devastating depression
and every bank in the country about to shut its doors, the country
was hungry for ideasany ideas. Scott by now was hobnobbing with
a first-rate promoter, the writer Harold Loeb, and also with Walter
Rautenstrauch, a professor at Columbia University's engineering
school who was suspicious of some of Scott's theories but shared
his general conviction that engineers ought to be running everything.
This
winter the ongoing battle for control of the Reform party began
to strain credulitynot to mention the adage that politics makes
strange bedfellows. In one corner was Donald Trump, who was supported
by a former professional wrestler turned governor and was trying
to become the first man to be elected President despite his reaching
for a Sani-Wipe after every handshake. His main opposition was
the onetime conservative speechwriter and commentator Pat Buchanan,
backed by a pair of leftist cult leaders from New York City.
Scott's
basic idea was that all human endeavor could effectively be measured
in terms of energy expended. Whatever it took to make anything
could be translated into pure ergs and joules. Therefore, the
first thing to do was to take a grand energy survey of all the
nations industries, a project to which Rautenstrauch actually
got Columbia's venerable president Nicholas Murray Butler to lend
his support. Once it was determined how much energy it took to
make everything, the nation's engineers could step in and eliminate
the irrational “social motives” in business. That is,
all the energy businessmen put into making luxury goodsor profits.
Scott
was always vague about just what would happen next. When pressed,
he and his associates finally theorized that some sort of scrip,
equivalent to the energy the nation used in a year, could be distributed
on a perfectly equal basis to all U.S. citizens. To keep everything
balanced and that pesky capital from accumulating, people would
have to use up their “energy certificates” during the
year or see them become worthless. The result, Loeb asserted in
a book he rushed into print by early 1933, would be such abundance
that no one would have to work more than four hours or so, four
days a week.
There
were, of course, many flaws with technocracy readily apparent
to anyone over the age of ten. How was the energy involved in
running service businesses —or, indeed, the production of
most anything besides heavy industry—to be measured? Even
if it could be, wasnt this just substituting another price system
for the one that had supposedly been the root of all the worlds
troubles? Moreover, why would engineers prove any more disinterested
than any other class of human beings, once handed complete and
supreme power? Scott had few answers for such practical questions,
but the concept struck a popular nerve nonetheless. Even after
the Great Engineer himself, Herbert Hoover, had failed to curb
the crisis, the idea of the engineer learned but practical mechanic,
with hands-on experiencestill resonated in a nation of born tinkerers.
During
the terrible winter of 1932 33, the nadir of the Depression, when
unemployment in the United States reached at least 25 percent,
technocracy clubs were formed all around the country. At their
height, in early 1933, their membership may have numbered as many
as a quarter-million Americans. The nations newspapers, skillfully
primed by Loeb, ran column after column speculating about the
new technocratic world to come. The clamor grew irresistible,
and finally Scott was persuaded to explain what technocracy was
all about with a speech at New Yorks Hotel Pierre, on January
13, 1933. This was a grave mistake. Speaking over a nationwide
radio hookup, and before a live audience of four hundred of New
Yorks leading “capitalists, bankers, industrialists, economists,
and artists,” Scott claimed: “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” and then went on
to do precisely that.
His
speech consisted of little more than asserting that things were
bad and would get worse unless a technocracy were established.
His only other prediction was that politicians opposed to technocracy
would portray it “as one of the propositions that will necessitate
a state politically that would be so grave that an institutional
fascism will be proposed under the guise of a dictatorial prerequisite
of the incoming President.” Language like that led technocrats
to charge later that Scott had been drugged. Within days his great
idea was being mocked in Congress as “the great Columbia
rackety-rax.” President Butler and Professor Rauten-strauch
hastened to dissociate the university from Scott. Technocracy
clubs continued to exist and even grow right up until the Second
World War, but the steam had gone out of the movement.
Scott
would later go on to sketch more details of what a technocratic
state would look like, but it proved to be a depressingly familiar
utopia. Any sort of culture or frivolity was derided, and an armed
dictatorship would be ready to enforce contentment. As Archibald
MacLeish put it, “Nothing is required of man but that he
should submit to the laws of physics, measure his life in ergs
and discard all interests which cannot be expressed in foot pounds
per second.”
What
the technocrats had failed to perceive was that politicians are
themselves engineers of a sort. They, too, tend to be craftspeople
with a good deal of practical experience. They must maneuver the
immensely complicated machine that is modern society, constantly
balancing present and future, principle and expediency, the needs
and wants of all the people they represent.
Certainly
by the early months of 1933 our politicians were doing little
to inspire confidence. The same could well be said today, and
the American people are right to look with disgust and alarm on
their endless personal scandals, our campaign-contribution system,
and treaties that blithely allow bureaucrats in Geneva to override
our national laws. Yet before we turn ourselves over to any aggregation
of neofascists, wrestlers, or moist-pawed magnates, we would do
well to remember that it was not the utopians but the politicians
who led us through the Depression and the awful war that followed.
Maybe all we need are better engineers.
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
