Before Lyndon LaRouche there was the less-wild eyed Howard Scott (d. 1970) and his plan for creating an America run by engineers, Technocracy, Inc. Completely forgotten today, this group was known across America in the 1930s-1940s and heavily popular in California. They published a lot of material (magazines, books, pamphlets, and ephemera) that was never digitized, though a collection of Scott's interviews and press appearances over the decades is on the Internet Archive here.
Above: The "Monad", the symbol of Technocracy, Inc. The two swirls are supposed to represent the forces of production and consumption, and it resembles an upside-down Chinese Yin-Yang symbol, minus the two counterbalancing dots in the swirls.
The Technical Alliance
According to Kevin Coogan, Scott was involved with the Industrial Workers of the World in 1918-1919; IWW leader Ralph Chalpin was convinced by Scott to start a "research bureau." Scott fell out with the IWW, and formed the Technical Alliance, the first attempt at Technocracy, Inc. in 1920 with a modest office in a brownstone at 23 West 34th Street in New York City; it's now a multistory parking garage.
After a decade of self-promotion, Howard Scott pushed for an "Energy Survey", which was an energy-based, non-monetary survey of industrial development going back a century. He was able to get the backing of Columbia University's Engineering Department in 1931, and the survey itself was going to be in graphs. At the same time a "Continental Committee of Technocracy" was formed. By 1933 both the CCT and the survey were moot; Scott made odd comments to economists on how the Depression was the natural product of "technologically produced abundance" and "technologically created unemployment" crashing into a now-obsolete price system, or in other words, the 1920s in America was nearly a post-scarcity society to him. But then, Scott used such terms as "thermodynamically balanced load", "energy transversion", "steady state of doing work" in conversation. At any rate Columbia was done with Scott, partially over plagiarism - he was supposedly cribbing from Oxford professor Frederick Soddy's 1926 book Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt, also because he lacked an engineering degree. (Soddy won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; writer William O. Coleman discovered that the British-born Soddy had recommended to his readers The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic hoax, see Coleman's 2002 work Economics and its Enemies: Two Centuries of Anti-Economics.)
Technocracy, Inc.
Despite a New York Times article mocking Technocracy as "a new religion", Scott incorporated Technocracy the same year, kicking off the organization at a convention in Chicago. It was here that the Monad symbol was first used, and it quickly adorned everything used or created by Technocracy, Inc. - magazine covers, letterheads, sign advertising the group, lapel pins. Very quickly Technocracy groups sprouted across America, and chapters were in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Seattle, Spokane, and Portland.
Above: A 1933 issue of The Technocrats Magazine. The push for Howard Scott or a committee of Technocrats to save America from the Depression is palpable.
Below: Lists of the towns and cities that had Technocracy groups pop up from 1938 to 1941, which was the zenith of the movement. Taken from David Adair's 1970 thesis The Technocrats 1919-1967: A Case Study of Conflict and Change in a Social Movement.
(post under construction.)
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