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After the peak of public interest in 1932, the technocracy movement began to decline, to split, and to self-destruct. One blow came from John H. Van Deventer, editor of Iron Age. He examined the Energy Survey and found it full of errors: for example, he showed that in the past fifty years, productivity per worker in the iron industry had increased twenty-three-fold. While that's an impressive increase, it's very different from the 650-fold increase that Scott had claimed. Similarly, Scott claimed workers in the flour industry produced 30,000 barrels of flour per person per day; the true figure was 500. These errors were particularly damning in a movement that based its legitimacy on technical competence.
Scott was an embarassment to the Committee in several other ways. One was his readiness to admit that technocracy was necesarily an undemocratic movement. A particularly bad moment was a nationwide radio address he delivered in January 1933; his presentation was clumsy and incoherent, and he lost his temper during the question-and-answer period that followed. Shortly afterwards, the American Engineering Council charged the technocrats with unprofessional activity, questionable data and drawing unwarranted conclusions. The Committee on Technocracy split on the question of whether to support Scott, Rautenstrauch withdrawing to return to academia.
Although this marked the end of technocracy's credibility in eastern America, splinter groups continued to develop and evolve in the western States and in western Canada. Robert Cromie, editor of the Vancouver Sun, used his paper to promote Scott's ideas in B.C.. Years later, these ideas, mixed with evangelical Christianity, formed the foundation of the Social Credit party.
Two wings developed: Technocracy, Inc., lead by Howard Scott, and the Continental Committee on Technocracy, led by a committee. The two wings initially tried to unite, but Scott's controversial public style remained a problem: addressing a convention in Chicago in 1933, he was asked how technocracy could be instituted if factory owners refused to go along with the program. Without hesitation, he replied, ``Stick a bayonet up their [expletive].'' There was silence, then a thin scattering of applause. That broke up the meeting. Years later, one member of the Continental Committee characterised the difference between the two wings:
``Technocracy Inc. recruited those individuals who favoured a conspiracy of picked men in key positions who would wait around to seize power by force when the economy collapsed. All the others, the dreamers, the Utopians, the anarchists and the left-wing liberals joined up with the Continental Committee.''
Scott's new organization, Techocracy Incorporated, adopted an official symbol -- the monad. Grey became the official Technocratic colour; their correspondence was printed on grey notepaper, they drove grey automobiles with the monad printed on the door, and dressed in gray gabardine double-breasted suits, worn over a grey shirt and blue neck-tie. Speaking in 1938, Scott gave a description of how the youth of America would usher in the new society: ``It will present an ultimatum for a clean, hard, bright design for living. Should any minority, racial, religious or economic, stand in its way, youth will concede nothing short of that minority's annihilation.''
Scott's organization still exists; a local branch publishes the B.C. edition of `Technocracy Digest'. The ideas in the Digest will be familiar to anyone who's read this far: they are the ideas that Scott set out in the 30's, unmodified by anything that has happened in the past sixty years.
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