North American Technate becomes a reality?

[Catsmate]

It's funny how many of these fringe-economic outfits with hard-science pretensions ended up devolving into religious nutiness. Major Douglas of Social Credit was an engineer, but of course, in Alberta, it went heavily into end-times fundamentalism, followed by Quebec, where it was embraced by the most reactionary elements of Catholicism.

The Salem Hypothesis in action.

 

[KuboCaskett]

Technocracy to me sounds too good to be true if you ask me.

 

[asnys]

I did a lot of reading about technocracy a while back for a TL that never materialized. Besides what's already been mentioned - that Scott was a totalitarian with occasionally genocidal inclinations - I thought I'd add a few more specific points.

Historically, the Technocrats wanted to keep the US out of World War II. They only changed tune on that when the war started and it became unpatriotic to be against the war, at which point they pivoted to "only technocracy can win the war!" However, as mentioned, acquiring Canada and a bunch of Latin America is a core part of their program, and I suspect that that would end up getting them into the war on the axis side, assuming butterflies don't prevent the European war.

After World War II, Howard Scott shifted focus to fulminating against the Vatican - he seems to have been at least a closet conspiracy theorist about them from the beginning. I have hypothesized that this might explain some of his issues with the Quebecois and the Latin Americans, though I can't say for sure. This sort of conspiratorial world view - which is one thing Scott shared with the Nazis - is likely to do the Technate no good in terms of foreign relations.

Interestingly, while the Technocrats didn't much care for communism, they weren't that worried about it, seeing Russia as basically none of the Technate's concern. They never really updated their ideology to take into account the advent of atomic energy - a big part of the nominal reasoning behind acquiring Canada et al and being vaguely isolationist towards the eastern hemisphere was that, they thought, no power in Eurasia could realistically threaten a united north America militarily. The advent of atomic energy and long-range aircraft meant that was no longer the case, but they never updated their theories, and so continued to regard Russia as basically irrelevant to North America. Whether that would have continued to be the case if they were actually in power is less clear.

 

[Whiteshore]

So, would the Technocrats go with annexing Canada/Latin America as envisioned or would they go for the "independent" puppet state approach or a mixture of both with more digestable areas (the "Anglo" bits of Canada/northern Mexico/random Caribbean islands) annexed outright and the rest (Quebec, rump!Mexico, and Central America) as puppet states?

 

[asnys]

So, would the Technocrats go with annexing Canada/Latin America as envisioned or would they go for the "independent" puppet state approach or a mixture of both with more digestable areas (the "Anglo" bits of Canada/northern Mexico/random Caribbean islands) annexed outright and the rest (Quebec, rump!Mexico, and Central America) as puppet states?

It's tough to say - people and ideas change on their way to power - but for Howard Scott as he was IOTL, unifying those countries into a single state was a core aim of the project. So I think direct annexation would be their objective.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

So the reason why I got alerted to this thread in the first place is because I've been relentlessly lobbying for technocracy to be added to the Kaiserreich mod for Paradox's WWII mapgames, which features a Second American Civil War. In the course of my research I found this old archived thread from /tg/ - Transistor Beat.

At the Democratic national convention in 1944, Eleanor Roosevelt would not drop the issue of a vice presidential candidate. No one in the know expected the President to live through this term and the party elders were uneasy with the idea of pinkbellied Henry A. Wallace as the leader of the Allies. The fight over just who should inherit the presidency and its great powers in a time of war broke out into all out factional in-fighting on the convention floor; with Eleanor pushing for Wallace or another member of the New Deal Brains Trust, the liberal mainline wanting someone a little less contentious, the party bosses wanting a moderate, the Dixiecrats wanting a conservative to balance the ticket, and so on and so on.

In the end, an effort led by no-name Democratic delegate from California Bob Heinlein led to a general consensus support of a apolitical compromise candidate, whom everyone who looked up to FDR could trust:

Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development.

Somehow from there to here we won the war before the end of 45, were stuck in Europe and Asia mediating disputes between factions until 48, ended up having the whole nation ran by a remarkable system of ENIAC computers with state of the art IBM card punch readers, and having Henry Wallace elected in '48 - unleashing the hordes of Times Square hooligans and other freaks that had been bubbling up during the continued rationing and civil service conscription for three years after the war's end.

Now Heinlein, no longer a nobody, is in charge thanks to the election in 52 - a contested result decided by the ENIACs, Times Square is THE place to buy black market punch readers to hack Commodore Bob's system, and a bunch of freaks in the faculty of San Francisco have begun publishing do-it-yourself manifestos about cracking the electro-mechanical systems that run almost every function in every day life; provoking a practical war on campuses everywhere by PrezBob.

But Bob is a fair man - if you don't like paying taxes, mandatory public service conscription, and military preparedness training you can always go to an Interzone and live without the protection or responsibility of laws.

Such is life in 1955.

Now, that thread is mostly about building a retro cyberpunk type setting ("modempunk"), but some of the developments are essentially the world that the Technocracy Inc. movement proposed, without the actual ideology or the exact economic theories. And done so using people who were much more relevant than Howard Scott (who was sort of a con artist if you think about it) ever was. I recommend all to check out the remainder of the thread, but here are some more highlights:

The basic image in my head is that, due to a prolonged period of extensive spending and rebuilding in Europe and Asia between 45 and 48 that the U.S. is, while not impoverished, less middle-class than it was in this time in real life. No big suburban boom, instead the technocrats in Washington maximized agricultural output in the country while instituting population control and urban planning in population centers. Higher education/training subsidies for everyone, not just GI's.

The arcologies and the farm belts are managed by ENIAC computer banks, which have card readers and readouts throughout the cities/towns/highways where they accept/relay data for various civil functions.

The implied setting of the use of more computerization of artillery tables, more investment in tech development, combining to result in the likely decapitation of Nazi high command with reverse-engineered and improved V missiles or computer-targeted supergun artillery or so forth or simply the use of nuclear weapons earlier in Germany and Japan both created the mentioned situation of a more complicated post-war situation.

I'm thinking the wonder weapons knocked out German high command, for instance, causing an internal civil war/coup of the army removing the party - resulting in a conditional surrender to the Allies as say Allied generals technically lead the country but German coupsters are running the day to day operations and continuing their fights against SS unit holdouts in various areas.

Similarly with warlords in China after the Japanese front collapses due to atomic bomb usage on the home islands. Things being more confusing because of surrenders and collaborators, requiring a longer and messier time of sorting things out by letting the end phases of the wars be fought by pro-Ally collaborators against the diehard hold outs.

This situation is almost stolen whole cloth from the alternate history dotcom timeline "The Ride of the Foxleys".

The idea of a young pro-tech VP in 44 assuming office when FDR dies on schedule and creating a post-war techno-age is stolen shamelessly from the Paul di Filippo story "Mairzy Doats". Seriously, check it out - it assumes Robert Heinlein took Truman's place.

I kind of combined and mixed things of these two sources and my own to create the timeline of technocrat Vannevar Bush setting up a nonpartisan status quo of massive research spending and computer-assisted bureaucratic management of society on a war-time style basis; with a subsequent Henry Wallace presidency serving to cause all the beats and freaks to come out of the woodwork, and the "current" Heinlein presidency creating social conflict as the pro-tech reactionaries fight the pro-tech freaks.

To think how these eccentrics could get elected, you can assume the political situation gets even more fragmented then it was in real life, which already pretty fragmented in 48, with Democrats, Republicans, States Rights, Socialist, Progressive, Christian National Crusade, and Prohibition candidates running for president.

The Foxleys timeline implies that a German surrender and thus a supervisory role like our modern day occupation/assistance of regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan would breathe new life into the semi-demi-hemi-fascist isolationist movement, giving Charles Lindbergh another shot at political office under America First - it taking on an anti-Marshall Plan type message.

And Foxley's also suggests that you could see an unlikely alliance of certain right, center, and left elements in an anti-fascist movement that is convinced of German conspiracies in the government; with the Teutonic Knights having been at the heart of the German General Staff who staged the anti-Nazi coup, as part of a long-term plan for foul German world supremacy.

But onto the Russians and the Cold War..

Coups in Japan and Germany resulting in mediation and an invited top-tier occupation rather than Ally boots on the ground type occupation, and an end to the war before years end 45, means less growth spurts for the Soviet Union but also plenty of opportunity building up communist parties in the reconstructing/neutralized countries.

The three post-war years of the Bush presidency would terrify them stiff with all of the technological advancements Vannevar's America would make; and then all those advancements would be handed over more or less due to the admirable but lax civil libertarian approach to national security, and handouts of technology to rebuilding countries without proper supervision, of the Wallace administration; allowing the Soviets to catch up and maybe even start to make some gains.

Which sets things up for a paranoid Heinlein administration.

And, of course, which led me to the posting history of @Major Major - which does not contain an updated Ride of the Foxleys timeline, sadly. But that 4chan thread was made in 2011. So- good timing. Almost as if an ENIAC had allowed it to happen.

 

[Whiteshore]

It's tough to say - people and ideas change on their way to power - but for Howard Scott as he was IOTL, unifying those countries into a single state was a core aim of the project. So I think direct annexation would be their objective.

But it would probably be a "step-by-step" process with the less "digestable" areas initially becoming "independent" puppet states to be annexed later?

 

[asnys]

But it would probably be a "step-by-step" process with the less "digestable" areas initially becoming "independent" puppet states to be annexed later?

Honestly, I think Howard Scott would start with heavy political and economic pressure on Canada and Mexico to request annexation, along with funding technocrat political parties. And then, when that doesn't work, just invade and annex, and shoot anybody who resists. He wasn't a subtle guy. That said, he may not be in control of the Technocrats by the time they get into power.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

Howard Scott is a funny guy and Pied Piper of soorts, but I'd assume that if Technocracy was to have a future, you'd have to get more credible people like the Technical Alliance folks, who have actual scholars like Veblen. I don't think Scott's weirder notions about aggressive war or genocide have any bearing on a successful Technocracy movement, unless you were to grant him a full-on Hitler ASB handwave, and allow him to succeed despite being bad at speechifying. Stalin was a mediocre speaker so, it could happen.

Now what the heck does everyone think of the Vannevar Bush and Heinlein setting. Could we get Tesla to be the Speer or Marshall of that America?

 

[Strategos' Risk]

"Mairzy Doats" by Paul Di Filippo can be found on pg 34 of the Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine here. It is a President Heinlein scenario set in 1948 that Transistor Beat is inspired by. Some ideas from it for utopian technocratic America:

• nuclear powered everything. DDT home appliances and cars with radar warning.
• Surgeon General Alfred Kinsey (and the sexual permissiveness that he and Heinlein bestow upon American culture, including public nudity)
• Civilian Service Corps doing stuff like building low-income housing
• legal weed
• Secretary of Housing W.E.B. DuBois
• capital relocated to Denver after D.C. destroyed by V-4 attack from Nazi submarines
• The Spruce Goose replaces the Air Force One (!!!)
• McCarthy tried for treason
  
• much of Europe and Asia destroyed by a-bombs
• Einstein in Palestine
• the moon is er... worth checking out in this story
• President Heinlein (makes it so only CSC and military vets can vote, has his own Amazonian personal honor guard with martial arts skills in tightly-fitted uniforms. Was elected to California state assembly in 1939, governor of the state in 1943, VP in 1944, president after FDR dies. Henry Wallace running against him in 1948.)
• U.S. Space Authority cadet Neal Cassidy
• Truman died in WWI, referenced in the clumsiest dialogue ever

I find attempts at a Technocratic America to be part of retrofuturism in general. Makes for fun world-building.

 

[Strategos' Risk]

I'm just using this thread as a dumping ground. Now, one of the few published AH (as opposed to online amateur work) featuring the Technocracy movement:

"You Could Go Home Again" by Howard Waldrop is an alternate history where FDR chokes on a chicken bone prior to the '32 DNC, paving the way for a Huey Long/Howard Scott ticket, the latter chosen not because he was a technocrat but because he was a Yankee. Long gets killed anyway, President Scott presides over the abolition of Prohibition, and unlike "Mairzy Doats", the focus is not on whiz-bang '50s retrofuturism but rather something more subtle and artsy. Waldrop's alternate history, from what I understand, is more literary-minded and nostalgic in a different way, and in his afterword after the story, he explains the many motives. Suffice to say the story is about early 20th century author Thomas Wolfe surviving tuberculosis and flying to Europe from the 1940 Summer Olympics in Tokyo on an airship of the U.S. Incorporated Airship Service. Tele-vision and a music-playing Electro-Man are a thing. Famed jazz musician Fats Waller is a key character in the story. WWII is averted (the Wehrmacht rebels against Hitler after Sudetenland turns out to be a Debacle), and Lawrence lives to get "posted to some Far Eastern part of the Empire with the R.A.F." It's worth checking out if you're looking for an AH story where the AH is more of a setting for characterization and contemplation. Waldrop's words from the afterword:

“Yeah, things are tough all over. Have you heard about Technocracy?” —Spanky McFarland to “Uncle George” in The Kid From Borneo, 1933

Most people remembered it looked like three choices in those depth-of-the-Depression, do-nothing late Hoover days of 1932: fascism, communism, anarchy. It takes a heap of depression to turn Democrats and Republicans into fascists or anarchists, but things seemed close to that point. Go read about the Bonus March.

But there weren’t just three choices; there were too many, in fact. (Like in Santa Fe; everybody had a theory.) Huey Long had his Share-the-Wealth Plan (“ Every Man A King”). There was the Townsend Plan; give all the old people in America a hundred dollars if they promised to spend every penny of it before the end of each month. There was a Single Tax movement: take away all taxes but one, and redistribute it— locally, statewide, nationally; everywhere that needs it. Upton Sinclair was running for Governor of California on what can only be described as the Home-Grown Hot-To-Trotsky Ticket; he even scared off support from FDR, the Democratic presidential candidate.

And if you were paying attention, even a three-year old like Spanky would know the word that kept coming up like a mantra: Technocracy.

It was the brainchild of a guy named Howard Scott. His idea was simple: build up a database of all the transportation, industrial, electrical, shipping and social engineers in America. Get them ready. When Things Went Blooey (sometime in early 1933, after Hoover was re-elected, it looked like from the summer of 1932), move them in. Get everything back on a supply-need basis; move goods and services from areas of surplus to scarcity; take over vital functions; put people to work on the what-we-would-now-call infrastructure— in some kind of credit arrangement— of all the things that the Depression had knocked the blocks out from under.

It took hold of the imaginations of all kinds of people, not just the poor. It seemed for the first time someone had pointed out that goods and food were still there, just like in 1929, but what was missing was the capital that moved them from one place to another. Replace the capital with brains; and somewhere in there get the exchange part on some other basis: either work credit, or some other funny-money. (One of their neat proposals was to divide the country into sectors by latitude and longitude, with major centers serving them. I used to write you from Austin, TX, Sector 9830.)

The Technocrats planned and waited. Scott was everywhere that fall and winter. Then something went terribly, terribly wrong for Technocracy. The wheels didn’t come off America. The election came and went. FDR took office. His brain trust did a suck-job on some of the best Technocrat proposals. By early 1933 their time had come, and gone.

There are some still around; they’re awfully old, but for a few minutes there they saw, like Wolfe, the shining, the golden opportunity.

There was a spate of real interest in Technocracy in 1932: books were published, magazines did feature stories on Scott (Dr. Seuss did a Technocracy cover for the old Judge magazine). There was an animated cartoon called Techno-crazy and a short called Techno-cracked.

I knew from the first time I read about it that I’d someday write a story set in Technocracy World (as surely as I’d known I’d write a story about the 1938 Westinghouse Time Capsule, when I first read about it as a kid: “Heirs of the Perisphere”). So, evidently, did Mack Reynolds, who wrote, as far as I know, the only other Technocracy story, called “Speakeasy”. I haven’t been able to find it to read it.

What I did was use some of Technocracy’s ideas, cross them with some of the half-baked other schemes, and recast the U.S. in the form of a corporation, with dividends (of some kind) for all the shareholder-citizen Technocrats.

"Speakeasy" is available on the Internet Archive from the sci-fi pulp it was published in 1963. (Asimov's also in this issue!) I haven't worked up the will to read and summarize that one, yet.

And here's the Seuss with his take of Technocracy:
https://www.hakes.com/Auction/ItemDetail/51344/DR-SEUSS-MAGAZINE-PAIR
https://www.etsy.com/no-en/listing/482291610/beautiful-amazing-dr-seuss-print