TECHNOCRACY HOAX

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXIII, Issue 77, 13 March 1933, Page 7

TECHNOCRACY HOAX

U.S. DAZED BY DRAMATIC REVELATION. PROPHET DISMISSED. New York, Jan. 25. The sensational overnight collapse of America’s marvellous cure for all economic ills — “Technocracy”—was revealed to a dazed United States today. Thousands of those who welcomed this theory with the long name as a ■new industrial religion and Howard Scott as its Messiah are kicking themselves for having been hoaxed by the “Captain Koepenick” of the post-war world. Technicracy is dead. This Utopian “science”' that proclaimed man was the slave of the machine has been exposed as a 10-year-old doctrine dragged out of dusty bookshelves by an exseller of furniture polish. To-day he was dismissed by Columbia University, whore technocracy had made its home, and where a hundred engineers, under Scott’s direction, were supposed to be compiling an “energysurvey of North America”—fixing the units of energy which the men and women of the future were each to supply in the new Machine Age! Howard Scott had rushed in where scientists feared to tread. He addressed 400 of America’s best and brightest scientists in the ballroom of a New York hotel. He was supposed to bo going to tell them what technocracy was all about. But he began talking elepientary economics; the scientists coughed, fidgeted, blew their noses and scraped their chairs. The talk ended—so did technocracy. BAN BY CLUB WHERE HE WAS A GUEST. Engineers and scientists began to withdraw their names from lists published by Scott, who grandiloquently called himself “Surveyor of Energy.” Then last night came the coup de grace—Scott was virtually dismissed by a notice served by Columbia University. Professor Rautenstrauch, Columbia’s specialist on economics and one of the first backers of Scott’s technocracy, stated: 4 ‘As far as we are concerned, technocracy ceases to exist, and Scott will not work here any longer.” To-day the Engineers’ Club, where Scott has been an honoured guest scores of times in recent weeks, refused him the use of the premises to issue a public statement. So much for the economic miracle which was to transform the United States from a land of depression into one flowing with milk and honey. It is the fascination which the word “technocracy” had for the rest of the world 'that induced America to believe that it meant salvation. When English highbrow and Socialist reviews gravely discussed tho ;>-,l prole.'Sed to explain its in

ner mysteries, the Americans felt the whole world must bo behind technocracy. Now they find that it is a homegrown product, 10 years out of date under oue name, and dead again to-day under its new and more magnificent label. MEANINGLESS—BUT SCOTT REGARDED AS A GENIUS. In the last four weeks there has been a tremendous boom in technocracy, which was perfectly meaningless, but which thousands professed to unuerstand. New York bookshops were full of pamphlets, books and magazines all trying to explain the unexplainable. Scott, who formerly owned a small furniture polish business until it crashed, was regarded, open-mouthed, as a genius. He is living in a tiny flat on tho top floor of a building in New York, refusing to see newspaper representatives or to make any statement. Ilia wife, a former nurse, refers callers to another address. Scott, formerly an ardent courtier of publicity, has become suddenly adverse to interviews, and refuses to discuss his educational and engineering background: formerly he was boastful of his exploits as a footballer and engineer. In Greenwich Village, which is to New York what Chelsea is to London, he was well known, but always regarded as a crank. Scott’s background is exceedingly curious. While engaged as a member of a cement-pouring gang during tho war he was dismissed after a charge of sabotage. At another moment in his career, Scott was said to be connected with the Industrial Workers of the World—the famous I.W.W.

Prominent engineers withdrew their names from Scott’s support when they found out that they had been mistaken in believing him to be a graduate of tho technical high school at Charlttcnburg, Berlin.