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The Technocrats: Prophets of Automation

Technocracy exploded into public attention in the fall of 1932, when the Depression was near its most severe point. The Great Depression of 1929, as it steadily worsened, provided a crisis almost made to order for advocates of radical change. The “Crisis of the Old Order” was worldwide, reinforcing attitudes favorable to change; parliamentary democracy was clearly finished in Germany, the Soviet Five-Year Plan had caught the enthusiasm of many intellectuals. A peculiar feature of the national American electoral structure further enhanced the chances of a revolutionary movement in the winter of 1932/33, for this was the period of the “lame duck” interregnum, when the responsibility and the will to positive action were lacking in either political party. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., caught the mood of the times: “suspended between past and future, the nation drifted as on dark seas of unreality. It knew only a sense of premonition and of change; but the shape of the future was as baffling as the memory of the past.”

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